Search engine optimization in the automotive industry isn’t hard, which is why it surprises me how often companies choose to use shortcuts rather than to apply proven and acceptable white-hat techniques. It’s a problem that has been on the rise more in the last year than ever before. The reason for it is simple: true search engine optimization requires manual effort.
The other day I was in a meeting with a potential client. We were discussing automotive SEO best practices and the way that the search engines are changing the way they rank. We talked about the best ways a dealer can stay ahead of their competition for their current keywords while moving up in the competitive keywords in the area.
There’s a plethora of articles, tips, and techniques about automotive SEO that fill blogs, webinars, and training courses. Everyone has opinions about what works best and how to help dealers rank better in search. The biggest mistake that dealers (and their vendors) often make isn’t in the SEO techniques themselves but rather in the underlying keyword principles. It doesn’t matter how good the SEO techniques are; if you don’t have the right keywords selected from the start and make adjustments to the targets on a regular basis, your optimization is not optimal.
There’s a difference between a vendor and a partner. A vendor offers products and services to help their customers improve a component of their business. A partner shares in the mentality and makes the goals of both companies unified. That’s what Cardinale Automotive Group found in KPA Internet Marketing: a true partner relationship.
There’s a certain challenge when it comes to SEO that makes it challenging for vendors to do it right. Normally, there’s a period of time required to achieve results, making it necessary for car dealers to be patient when judging the efforts of their search engine optimization partners. For this reason, KPA has always used contracts as a commitment by both our company and the dealership to see the efforts through to the end and make a real impact on traffic, leads, and sales.
Thousands of dealers around the country received notification yesterday through Webmaster Tools of “unnatural links” to their site. In the past, this would have been an awful thing, but as Google’s Matt Cutts explains, there’s no need to panic. If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear:
If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. In the past, these messages were sent when we took action on a site as a whole. Yesterday, we took another step towards more transparency and began sending messages when we distrust some individual links to a site. While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.
If we’ve taken more severe action on your site, you’ll likely notice a drop in search traffic, which you can see in the “Search queries” feature Webmaster Tools for example. As always, if you believe you have been affected by a manual spam action and your site no longer violates the Webmaster Guidelines, go ahead and file a reconsideration request. It’ll take some time for us to process the request, but you will receive a followup message confirming when we’ve processed it.
Having your business rank at the top of the SERPs for ‘Local Used Cars’ may prove to be more competitive than you may have realized in the beginning, and Penguin could have made it even more difficult for you. Paid search ads are the best way to stay at the top of the organic listings when Google rolls out a major algo change.
(Photo credit: Aray Chen)
We have been extremely pleased by the Google Penguin update so far. It has shown to be exceptionally productive for us, allowing our principles of quality over quantity to shine and helping our clients to rise to the top based as much on their competitors falling as with actions on our part in the last month.
There is, apparently, a negative that can be associated with the update. In this case study below, one site was tanked based upon the efforts of a negative SEO campaign. The results have not been independently confirmed, but they are in line with what we believe is the reality, that Google will penalize sites that appear to be over-optimizing even if it’s not them doing the work. Negative SEO may be a reality in the automotive industry as we are localized just like the case study.
Kudos to Tasty Placement for putting this together as well for having one of the best names we’ve seen in the search marketing arena.
If you have any concerns or believe that your site rankings have been attacked, please let us know. We’ll see if there is any remedy.
Car dealers are in a good position. The industry is one that, because of the localization of the searches, does not require a tremendous amount of SEO that other nationwide distribution industries need. It’s not that the SEO is easier; in many ways automotive is the most challenging form of SEO out there because of the competition level on a local scale. It’s just that nobody needed to be so aggressive that they were heavily penalized by the Google Penguin update.
That’s not to say that some weren’t hurt. Many were. I know because I saw many of our rankings go up as a result of the update, which means that some dealers were dropping. This graphic looks at the basic keys of dealing in the next generation of Google optimization. Don’t fear the penguin. Embrace it.
Click to enlarge.
