Pound for pound, SXSW was a little disappointing this year, at least for search professionals. It’s not that there wasn’t plenty to do, plenty see, and plenty to hear. That’s always going to happen when you’re at a conference/festival with speakers the likes of former Vice President Al Gore and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk. The disappointing part was that there weren’t a whole lot of “holy crap” moments like there were in previous years.
The idea was simple. Show the shopper the discounts, rebates, and special prices in order to reduce negotiation of price and show value. It was speculated that if you don’t give the shopper something to compare the price to, then they will go to your competition to compare the price thus reducing your chances of getting the lead. (more…)
Automotive Service Mailer from 1928
As you can see from the image, direct mail hasn’t changed much in the past 90 years (except for the prices!). Why should it? It works to get good looking information in front of a lot of people very quickly, and consumers have a financial mindset when looking through their mail because that is how all their bills come. I’ve done a $4,000 minimum trade-in guarantee direct mail piece that had a higher ROI of any digital advertising all year long.
For the most part, most dealers understand the importance of having content on their websites. They know that search engines love unique content and if they have any hope of ranking well for keywords other than their own name, they need content to help expand their reach.
Automotive SEO is part of our DNA. It’s one of the core products that has allowed our internet marketing division to differentiate itself ahead of the competitors. We’ve been doing it for a decade – longer than anyone else in the automotive industry – and we’re constantly improving on our processes and strategies which yield improved results for our clients.
Vehicle Details Pages. They’re arguably the most important type of page on your website. They’re the source of many of your leads because they’re the virtual representation of your inventory. People can get just about every bit of information they need about a particular car through the vehicle detail pages other than the way the steering wheel feels in their hands.
Call it human nature to mislead in order to promote a product. Call it deceitful selling. Call it ignorance. Call it whatever you want to call it, but the concept that has been being spread around the automotive industry that you don’t need content on your homepage is absolutely incorrect. In fact, the homepage is the most important page on your website from an SEO perspective. Building a website with a homepage that has no HTML text or links is like making a hamburger without a beef patty (even though ground turkey is acceptable and ground bison is actually superior in my opinion, but I’ll save that discussion for my food blog).
Anyone who has been involved in automotive internet marketing for a while knows that despite all of the fancy new techniques and intriguing social platforms, search engines remain the most important source of relevant traffic to your website and physical dealership. It has replaced the phone book, augmented the map, and is the place that the majority of your customers go first when in the market to buy a vehicle.
Everyone has examples of their work. When it comes to SEO, it’s easy to find a couple of dealers who are ranking well in their metro area. At KPA, we don’t have to look far to find a “couple of examples.” In fact, we can look at just about any of our Elite SEO clients and find strong representations of the most powerful automotive SEO program in the industry. Here’s a sampling of our work. Please feel free to ask your Internet Marketing Account Executive if you would like more. (more…)
