Automotive SEO

In the past 60 days, OEM compliance inspections of dealer blogs, microsites, and press releases have significantly increased.  From the guideline documents that I have reviewed, it is clear that the OEM marketing teams have been poorly advised on how dealers should be leveraging all marketing opportunities on the Internet.

There is a double standard that OEM's have created in regards to automotive marketing.  Let's look at the Boston Massachusetts market, where many dealers serve this large city, but where only one dealer has an actual Boston address.  The other dealers are separated by 10-15 miles and physically located in a smaller suburb, with its own city name.

Dealers in the suburbs can take out print ads in the Boston Herald, which advertises their services to consumers well beyond their PMA.  These ads can use the words "Boston" in the printed text. and can even show driving directions from Boston to their suburbia location.

These same dealers can also take out radio ads or television spots that cross all PMA lines and saturate the greater Boston market. Both of these communication channels are available for co-op funds and can mention the Boston metro area in the ad script.

Dealers can also create Google Adwords campaigns that have advertising radiuses outside their PMA, and these campaigns are also available for co-op money.  These advertising campaigns can also use the word "Boston" as a keyword or any other city in a reasonable driving distance.

When Confused, Kick the SEO Dog

However, some dealers are now being restricted and penalized for implementing SEO strategies that use the same geo-targeting strategies that other approved channels can utilize.  If dealers can appear on radio, television, and print in towns outside a dealer’s official PMA, why not in organic search as well?

Specifically, dealers are being penalized if any of their organic marketing strategies include:

1. Including the name of ANY city outside of where their dealership is located in Title Tags, META descriptions, or in body text.  This applies to any website page with their name on it.
2. If dealers choose to use a city name outside of their physical location in a Title Tag or META Description, it has to be preceded by the word "Serving". 
3. Hyper-linking words in the body of any page that includes ANY city name outside of their physical location is prohibited.  This means you can't hyperlink Boston Toyota Service if your dealership is in Worcester.  You can't even hyperlink 'Serving Boston Toyota Owners" in a sentence.
4. Some OEM's have policies that prevent dealers from owning domains that have ANY city name in it that is not your city.  You can't own it even if there is NO competing dealer in that city.
5. Some OEM's have policies that prevent dealers from owning microsites that don't have your official business name as part of the domain name.

And the list goes on.  So, OEM's have created a virtual marketing wall for the Internet SEO strategies, which in fact only hurts their own franchise dealers.  Someone has an agenda against Automotive SEO strategies at the OEM level and it's only hurting their own dealer base.

Great News For 3rd Party Lead Collectors

This is great news for third party advertising sites and independent used car dealers.  Independents will so have unrestricted access to creating strong used car marketing platforms that are geo-targeted. 

OEM's are forcing dealers to transfer all domains that don't comply into their ownership.  The result of non-compliance is costly.

These OEM policies are GREAT news for third party lead collectors since they do not have any restrictions on domain names, content, or linking strategies.  Third party lead collection vendors must be jumping for joy, and it's even possible that they are the ones advising their OEM community!

These Internet content policies also increases dealer's dependence on inventory advertising sites like Autotrader.com, Cars.com, or Everycarlisted.com or PPC strategies.  These are all valid advertising strategies, but it looks like the OEM marketing teams are trying to limit competition, innovation, and free markets.

For many OEM's, dealers CAN NOT create a second used car inventory marketing site.  They can send their cars to 3rd parties but they CAN NOT do it themselves.  Interesting!  For many dealers, they are told that they can only have one website.  Period.

Since OEM's hold hundreds of thousands of dollars of dealers heads for compliance fines or bonus money, dealers have no choice but to comply. 

Time to crank up those PPC budgets!  Time to hire a few more inventory-advertising partners and increase your ad budgets.  Your days of SEO innovation must move to another area of marketing.

P.S.  SEO still works and dealers need an SEO strategy.  SEO is not dead. Dealers need to have a compliant SEO strategy while we wait for OEM marketing executives to reach out to industry experts on this topic. 

Bing has decided to update their sleepy Business Listing product with all the focus that the market has placed on Google Places. Bing has always had an equivalent to Google Places called Bing Local Listing Center but now they have made a major upgrade and renamed it to Bing Business Portal.

New Interface and Features

I'm commonly asked if Bing and Yahoo are relevant and the answer is yes.

Having an updated Business Profile on Bing is an easy and relevant task to complete today. If you have an existing login, like a hotmail account, when you created your Bing Local Listing profile it will work with this new system.

If you have an existing account, use the "Sign In Here" button shown above on the right.

We just moved our office so I had to update our business address but there are additional features with the new product that should be completed. Take time to upload up to 9 great photos of your business. I suggest that you load up happy customer photos, photos of your work in the community, and limit shots of your facility.

You can also add products that you sell and any special deals or promotions (see graphic on right). Keep in mind that you should keep promotions general unless you have a process to update the deals each month.

Make sure you phone number, address, and website are synchronized with the data on Google Places. This recommendation applies to all business listing websites. Use the same address and phone number to create multiple source that can be used to validate your primary address and phone number.

Bing Business Portal Tools

Once you have completed your profile, make sure you click on the Publish/RePublish Button. (See above) Once published, Bing Business Portal will allow you to print Window Stickers with your store hours, print QR Codes, and it also creates a simple mobile website with your business data.

The idea of a simple mobile website or window stickers may not excite car dealers but think about the thousands of small businesses that don't have website or tools to create POS marketing materials. If you haven't noticed lately, banks and credit car companies are pushing "instant" website products as a value add upsell.

Bing is a relevant search engine and you should take advantage of any free tools to help connect your business with consumers. So get started today and visit http://www.bing.com/businessportal.

Bing Business Portal also has a "review" feature so once your listing is completed, include this site into your managed IRM processes.  

Google recently announced changes to their search algorithm and included in those changes were efforts to lower the visibility of spammy websites. One of the secondary conversions was will Google lower the weighting of keyword rich domains like "www.buyviagra.com".

Matt Cutts addressed this specific question in a video below:

I want to thank Anirban Das for bringing this video to my attention.

All car dealers have their primary domains set and locked for most cases so buying extra domains would be used for marketing microsites for lead collection, brand awareness, or to capitalize on popular search phrases.

Matt Cutt's video and his examples are really misleading because car dealers would not be investing the millions of dollars needed to create large technology or marketing portals like Twitter, Tech Crunch, Zappos, etc. Branded websites do not become popular for non-match keyword searches magically, which is a large omission from Matt's video message.

Regardless if Google turns down the dial slightly for exact matching domain names, they are still the fastest way for a dealer to gain page one visibility in their local market for long tail keywords.

Domain Names That Are Not Exact Matches

Buying non-exact matching domains still works, like Matt said, but what he didn't disclose is that non-exact matching domains needs significantly more external links with anchor text on the targeted keywords.

Example, search Google for "Automotive Microsites" and you will see www.dealerbytes.com on Page One. It does not have either phrase in the domain name but it ranks on page one. Why? Because Paul Rushing, domain owner, has content on his website and links on the phrase "automotive microsites" directed to that domain.

Creating Exact Matching Microsites

For dealers, exact matching domains are the better match because dealers have smaller budgets for SEO projects. There are hundreds of automotive microsites that I have build that demonstrate that exact matching domains with great unique content are still the fastest way to hit Page One.

Need some examples, post Google update:

1. ToyotaRecall - ranks on page one for "Toyota Recall" over most major giant news sources
2. MiamiUsedCars.org - ranks well on Page One for "Miami Used Cars" in a very competitive market
3. ChevroletFortWorth.com - DFW is a very competitive market for Chevy dealers, Jerry's gets more awareness.
4. SeattleJeep.com - Seattle has a number of choices for Jeep dealers, Rairdon get more visibility.
5. BuffaloCars.net - A popular search phrase in Buffalo is "Buffalo Cars" and this site get the brand out there.

So, as many writers have said in the past, content is King and great content on a keyword rich domain can deliver an annuity of page one placements. Then the focus has to be switched to testing designs that increase calls, leads, and floor traffic. In the end, a poorly converting microsites is a waste of time.

Microsites are a great tool for car dealers and regardless of what Google may signal, the proof is that SEO marketing strategies on a small budget can benefit from exact matching, keyword rich domains.

Combined Strategies Produce Stellar Visibility

Dealers should not ignore adding targeted content pages on their website before jumping into microsites. When you combine good on-site content and good microsites and press releases, you can start to have strong visibility in your local markets like shown below:

The dealership website with a targeted page is in black.  The microsite pages are in red and the dealership press release is in green.  This shows that a combined on-site and off-site SEO strategy can result is multiple above the fold results.

Microsite Education

If you are looking for advice and strategies to build effective microsites, PCG is offering two classes at the upcoming Automotive Marketing Boot Camp that will show you everything you need to succeed. You can register for the April 16-18th event by visiting http://www.automotivemarketingbootcamp.com.

I will be conducting a workshop on Automotive SEO Strategies and two members of the PCG team will be conducting a workshop on WordPress microsites and optimization strategies. The combination of these two workshops will empower you to launch, test, and improve your microsite marketing campaigns.

Bring your laptop to these workshops since you will be jumping in and doing hands-on work for these sessions. If you have microsites that have not been doing well, bring your logins and passwords so you can optimize them during the boot camp with help from the experts.