As car dealers develop their SEO strategies with their vendors, they should be well-aware of how the companies they work with are handling Google Penguin. The update from April, 2012, has quite a few SEOs in other industries scrambling to regain their search rankings. It hasn’t been as devastating in the automotive industry but we have seen some companies whose dealers have dropped.
For the first 3 weeks of April, 2012, KPA had the pleasure of working with Dealers United in their first group buy offering: search engine optimization. It was a tremendous success with hundreds of dealers responding and an infusion of clients that has strengthened our SEO team through new hires and new resources.
One of the biggest takeaways for my team was learning just how much dealers enjoyed receiving our “Automotive SEO Snapshots”. We wanted to give dealers a way to see how their SEO was currently performing on their websites, but I’ve always hesitated in using automated grading tools or processed markup analyses that always give a basic and often inaccurate representation of how a website is performing on search.
We came up with the snapshots to personalize the evaluation. By looking at the health of a website, its rankings for relevant keywords, and the overall situation (location, competition, inventory, brands, etc), we were able to personalize the evaluations and give dealers a snapshot that went well-beyond a number and a promise. It’s usable information regardless of whether they select KPA as the search engine optimization partner or not.
In the automotive SEO world, there is a player amongst search ranking factors that has been making moves up the ladder for two years now. Since mid- to late-2010, Google (and Bing, to some extent) has been looking at “social signals” as a way of determining the relevance of sites in their search algorithm. The effects continue to broaden to the point that today, there are measurable results from getting people to share your stuff through social media.
There’s not a whole lot that needs to be said about this. Bottom line, if you’re not utilizing the amazing benefits of rich snippets on your website, you’re not doing the right things that Google wants you to do.
Google is content, link, and socially conscious when it comes to determining search rankings. Rich snippets are some of the only search components that the search giant has openly endorsed as a way to improve rankings (or at least improve the way the listings are displayed). This graphic should help you to understand what it all means. Click to enlarge.
Visual Guide to Rich Snippets on SEOmoz created by BlueGlass Interactive.
There are always reasons that dealers don’t blog. It’s time consuming. It requires a long-term (indefinite) commitment. It takes a little tech-savvy to work the various content management systems. Despite all of the excuses, there are many, many reasons to do it the right way.
As many know, most of as at Automotive SEO love infographics. They are the easiest way to get information out to the masses in a sharable way that doesn’t bore a society with such a short attention-span (meaning anyone on the internet today). There is plenty of room for long articles and well-researched blog posts, but the simplicity in which infographics push out a message is astounding.
This one from Submit Infographics breaks down the history of SEO, discusses 101 terms that people may want to know, and offers tidbits about the processes and people that made the industry great. Click to enlarge.
Women have been the target of marketing campaigns for decades when it comes to household items and merchandise, but recently the trend has continued to favor females as the primary decision maker on purchases, even on some of the traditionally male-dominated purchased like cars and electronics, a recent study by GPlus reveals.
Every year, there are big companies that go public. 2011 was no exception with major IPOs that included LinkedIn, Zipcar, and HomeAway. Who won and who lost? Perhaps more importantly, who’s going to go public in 2012?
There’s no bigger faux pas in social media than being boring. Unfortunately, many businesses and car dealers in particular have yet to find the right ways to be engaging and clever with their Tweets.
In the classic case of putting the cart before the horse, Google has just announced that its +1 button for websites finally works with Google+. That means that any webpage you give a “plus” to will be shared in your Google+ profile.
In July, the +1 button crossed 2 billion daily views, prompting Google to make the button capable of sharing content with Google+ circles. Additionally, Google has made the button even faster. [click to continue…]
