seo

Location, Location, Location

If you were going to build a new physical location for your dealership, the “where” would be as, if not more, important than the “what.” After all if potential customers couldn’t find you, then buying a vehicle from you becomes all but impossible.

Not coincidentally, the same principle applies online. If your customers and prospects can’t find you, you don’t exist. Having a memorable and intuitive web address will help, but the number one thing you need to do is ensure that your site plays nice with the world’s biggest search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, MSN, etc.). It is those sites that determine your “location” online. Being near the top of the first page on Google is like having your dealership at the intersection of town’s two main drags — it’s so easy to find that your customers can’t help but come across it from time to time.

Search engines are the maps of the digital landscape. And products like Dealer Impact’s Rank King can use a variety of strategies and tactics to ensure that you grab a piece of prime digital real estate. That’s the “where” of the digital marketing game… and it’s at least as important as the “what.”

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

SEO lessons Nike and Tiffany’s didn’t learn

by Lisa Wehr

Published October 17, 2007 in iMedia Connection

A newly released Oneupweb study of retailers reveals some startling facts about the power of optimizing for search.

Quick, who’s the largest online retailer of shoes? Nike? Footlocker? Payless? Timberland? Not even close. The winner is Zappos.com, an eight-year-old company that, until recently, had little or no brand recognition. In 2006, Zappos.com sold more than the online sales of all the well-known brands listed above, combined.

Recently, Oneupweb looked at the top 100 online retailers, including some of the world’s most recognizable brands, to see how well they optimized their websites. What we found surprised even us.

Many of the world’s leading brands ignore SEO and maintain poorly optimized websites. In fact, 60 percent of the leading online retailers had little or no optimization on their websites. As the success of Zappos.com and other savvy internet marketers illustrates, extraordinary customer service combined with sound SEO can help a company overcome the obvious competitive advantage of branding alone.

Nike just didn’t

Nike and brand marketing are synonymous. So, we were surprised to discover little or no sign of optimization on the company website. Someone searching for “athletic shoes” will not find Nike.com in the first three pages of Google results. In fact, the site barely shows up on page one of Google for the branded search term “Nike Athletic Shoes.”

Nike has an online visibility strategy. The company supplements its well-known branding efforts with paid online advertising for important keywords. Research indicates PPC campaigns are much more effective when combined with natural search. They aren’t in Nike’s case, leading us to speculate about how much more effective Nike’s online and offline marketing efforts could be if they were integrated into a well-executed SEO program.

Size doesn’t matter online

The beautiful thing about online retail is the way the medium levels the playing field. Huge warehouses and 500 worldwide locations mean nothing. Visitors don’t have to drive to a brick-and-mortar location; they are driven online to the retailer’s website. Retailers need only attract enough interested visitors to their sites and provide an excellent shopping experience after their guests arrive.

Searchers look for brands they know. However, Oneupweb’s recent research showed repeated examples of a well-optimized, savvy marketer successfully competing with a better known brand. Well-optimized websites position the challenger higher on non-branded keyword searches. The higher the position on search engines, the more traffic, conversions and sales.

Online, web-only jeweler Blue Nile outsells its much larger and more-well known competitor, Tiffany & Company. The Tiffany brand has been around 170 years; Blue Nile, eight years. Both sites are optimized, although the clear edge goes to Blue Nile when it comes to the degree of optimization and overall online customer service experience.

Well-optimized for a changing landscape

Our study did not include the use of new media as a criterion for the degree of optimization on a website. Nevertheless, we found that top online retailers who have well-optimized websites are 60 percent more likely to have corporate blogs or podcasts. This reflects a growing sensitivity to Google’s new Universal Search model specifically, and the growing popularity and viral power of blogs and podcasts overall.

Amazon.com, the leading online retailer for all three studies Oneupweb has conducted since 2003, uses blogs and podcasts in addition to many other sound SEO and SEM practices. Furthermore, the company constantly solicits user feedback and reviews to generate loyalty, links and social support for its products and services. The results speak for themselves.

Consider the opportunities

Our study should be good news to most online retailers. For those who do optimize well, it means an existing competitive edge that will allow them to compete successfully with some larger, more established brands.

And for those large brands that do not optimize well, there is a great opportunity for growth in the best or worst of years. Either way, there is much work to be done; work that can result in greater traffic and revenue.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/17011.asp

Attention Car Dealerships: Google Doesn’t See, Google Reads.

Whether you’re creating a new car dealership website or maintaining an existing one, the chances are great that you’re doing so with the intention of your website being your ultimate marketing tool. You want it to be found by potential customers, who will peruse your “virtual dealership,” find what they are looking for, and eventually purchase a car from you.

But do you know how a website “gets found” by potential customers? Sure, you have your web address in your off-line advertising, but is that how the majority of people will find you?

Nope. Chances are, they will find you through a search engine like Google. If you show up on the first two pages, that is.

So how does that happen? How do you get Google to find your website, much less make your site “appear” on the first couple pages?

Well, it can be complicated, and no two search engines or websites are exactly the same. That’s why people like Dealer Impact Search Marketing exist: their full-time job is to be search engine experts, and to propel your site to the top of the rankings.

But there is one simple thing you can do to give your site a HUGE advantage: include content. Lots of content. Content on every, single page—including the home page.

Why content? Because Google doesn’t see, Google reads. The words on your page (and in tags like the alternate text for images) are what Google actually analyzes to figure out who you are and what you do. If your homepage (remember, your homepage is the most important page to have content on) states clearly that you are a Des Moines Car Dealer, you are increasing your chances that Google will rank you for “Des Moines Car Dealer.”

So, all those pictures of Fords you have on your homepage? Google doesn’t know they’re Fords. You have to tell Google they are Fords, just like you have to tell Google you’re in Des Moines. And not Des Moines, Washington, but Des Moines, Iowa.

Seem simple? It can be– it just takes a little bit of background into what Google really does, and how you can “optimize” your site according to Google’s strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, there’s much more to it than content. But it’s a great rule of thumb to have content on every page of your site, really outlining what that page is all about. It’s a step in the right direction for the do-it-yourself search engine marketer.

But if you notice your rankings falling, or your competition seems to have an edge, don’t be afraid to call in the pros that optimize web pages for a living. After all, the farther down you are in the rankings, the less of an opportunity you have to find that next big customer.

Jamie Wilson
Dealer Impact Search Marketing

Dealer Websites Built in Flash are Pretty… Invisible

When an auto dealership is considering a new website, one of their first considerations is typically the look and feel of the site. Dealerships pride themselves on the image they project to their customers, so it’s natural that they are drawn to great looking websites.

One trend in the auto web design industry is the “flash” website. You’ve seen these sites—they take a while to load, they move very fluidly and have great graphics and navigation, and usually they play some sort of movie upon loading.

But don’t be fooled: Flash sites will kill your search engine traffic.

Flash sites look good, and they’re an easy sell to dealers who don’t understand the downsides of using flash as the basis for an entire website. Flash has been the demise of many unsuspecting sites, so let me explain a few facts before you get fooled by flash.

Flash websites started out as an easy way to integrate video and animation onto a website, most commonly used for the introduction page of a site (you’ve probably seen this, unless you’re like most people and immediately click “skip intro”). Now that the use of flash is becoming more commonplace, entire websites are being built in flash.

So why is this bad? To put it simply, flash websites are essentially a huge movie file instead of a traditional website (that’s why when you visit a flash site, you first must install a plug-in to view Flash if you don’t already have one, and then kick back and wait for it to load). When a search engine robot arrives at your homepage, they just see a movie file, not a page full of good text and links to read and analyze.

This doesn’t work out very well for the friendly little search engine robot, because he can’t download flash movies. Even if he could, there’s no way for him to read anything in the movie to figure out what the page is all about and what it should rank for—it’s just images (even the text in a flash movie is really an image).

So what does he see? Just an empty page. Instead of your big, beautiful, flashy site, Google just sees an empty page. If Google can’t read and analyze the text on your site, Google is certainly never going to rank you for anything.

This leads us to another problem: the rest of your site.

If your whole site is built in flash, and the Google robot can’t even see flash, then he can’t see that you have any pages besides your homepage. This makes a lot more sense when you visit a flash site like http://www.automaxhyundaibrokenarrow.com/. Just click on a few of the pages up in the navigation bar, and look at your URL. It never changes because you’re not actually going to a different page, just a different part of a big movie file (like skipping to a scene on a DVD.) This website is just one page, and one page websites rarely get ranked.

Getting ranked by the search engines for your target terms is vitally important to online businesses—and it’s becoming increasingly important for offline businesses just because so many consumers begin their buying process online. If they find your dealership first, you are ahead right out of the gate. Flash websites are an immediate handicap—the search engines just can’t read them, so they generally ignore them altogether.

Flash can be a great technology, when it’s used like it should be: as a movie. A nice embedded flash movie within your html web page can be a great way to show off a new vehicle, advertise a special, or just get your customer’s attention. But when your whole website is created as one big flash movie you’re essentially invisible to Google, rendering you invisible to your potential online customers.

Don’t be fooled by flash. Do the research before buying a website, and be sure to make search engine visibility a priority. You wouldn’t build a new dealership in the middle of nowhere—you want to be where the traffic is. Internet traffic is on the search engines: if you’re not ranked, you might as well be invisible. Just like a website built in flash.

Jamie Wilson
Search Engine Marketing Specialist
DealerImpact.com

And, on a related note, check out this post from Blogpro Automotive:
http://blogproautomotive.com/2007/07/13/search-engine-basics-an-introductory-lesson-to-basic-internet-search-and-how-it-is-evolving/

End Searcher Optimization: the New SEO

Good article on Search Engine Optimization

Seems the world isn’t waiting for anyone to catch up.

In a recent ClickZ column, long-respected SEO (define) guru Mike Grehan suggested we search Ask.com for “Spider-Man 3.”

There we glimpse into the future of search engine results. Welcome to universal search.
Mike speculates: “With the three-column approach, I can’t imagine why I’d ever scroll down the page, let alone click through to a second (did people really click through to the second page in the Fred Flintstone SEO era?).”

How’s that for a punch between your peepers? Grehan continues:
End users are lazy and don’t have a clue what they expect to see when using search engines. I know. I’m an end user, and I’m as stupid as the next one when it comes to using search engines. But think of my delight when I throw in a vague two- to three-word query and find a page that answers even more of my potential questions before they’ve been asked.

What does it mean for SEO professionals moving forward? It means we’ve finally reached point where better marketing counts — and not H1 tags.

Yeesh, and you thought optimizing for those pesky text and link spiders was hard. How are you going to optimize now? (Do I even need to mention what’s happening to online traffic costs?)
It’s telling when search engine results answer more questions and give a superior visitor experience than the majority of so-called optimized pages. Search engines have been doing one thing most SEO efforts and marketers refuse to do: they’re aggressively focusing on end searchers. What a concept.

These new algorithms try to anticipate their wants, needs, and time, possibly even pique their imagination. Search engines are merely a reflection of what people want; complex algorithms and crawlers are only a means to that end. Search engines are bigger visitor advocates than most sites.
Sad.

So what’s the answer to the challenge ahead? In his column, Grehan asks my brother and me to come up with fresh descriptions to replace the tired SEO/SEM terms people love to churn out in decks and at seminar parties.

I don’t want to change things too much. So let’s keep it simple. Instead of SEO, let’s try ESO, for “end searcher optimization.”

Friday, Jun. 22, 2007 at 3:59 am
Grock.com
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/06/22/end-searcher-optimization-the-new-seo/