Matt Cutts talks about Web SPAM,. Some great information if you’re looking to trick Google.

SPAM will soon become more dangerous.

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Nothing like some geek SEO Rap! Keep’n the standards in the hizzel.

Enjoy!

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We all know about search engine marketing and most of you have already given it a try for your dealerships. Some of you have seen great success with Pay-Per-Click advertising and some of you have really just wasted a lot of money. Everyone knows where they fall. There are tons and tons of vendors out there targeting the automotive industry and selling search engine marketing like a snake oil salesman sells oil.

I lead a team that conducts search engine marketing campaigns for our in house agency clients. I would like to share with you an experience I had this week.

Before starting any search engine marketing campaign either I or one of our team members researches the current climate surrounding the keywords our client will be using. As we all know, certain areas and franchises have much more competition then others. In my keyword and competitive research I typed in the keyword "newburgh cadillac" and in the top sponsored links I saw the result for a dealership named Tunstin Cadillac. Here is a screenshot:

I thought this was interesting since I am quite well versed in the local dealerships and had never heard of this one. I continued my search by searching on the general term "Cadillac." Tunstin Cadillac once again appeared:

My initial reaction was that whoever is doing their search marketing is at least covering all the bases.  I was interested in finding out more about the dealership so I typed in www.tustincadillac.com (I didn’t click the sponsored link because I didn’t want the dealer to get charged). Upon further research I found out that this dealership is located in Tustin, CA a whopping 2,799 miles away.

I have no knowledge of what vendor is running their search campaign. Maybe its even the internet manager at the dealership. Either way my point boils down to this. Make sure that your SEM vendor is acting in your best interest. Audit their results and check your site logs to make sure that you aren’t receiving traffic from regions outside of your general market area.  Google Analytics is also a great and free tool to help you audit your search marketing results. Many SEM vendors work on percentage of spend. If they get you to spend more by running your campaign almost 3,000 miles away from your dealership It won’t matter how much you spend, your search engine marketing campaign will always be a failure.

Guest posting by Brandon Hoffman
Director Of Internet Marketing at KEA Advertising, Inc
www.keaadvertising.com

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Car dealers are usually a year or two behind the internet trends. Some companies are taking advantage of that fact.

Doing search engine optimization for auto dealers is difficult, as the market is extremely competitive. Selling search engine optimization to car dealers makes doing the SEO seem like childsplay.

Since the beginning of the world wide web, the automotive industry, car dealers in particular, have been a year or two behind the trends. Whether it is their reluctance to let go of the “glory days” in the 80′s and early 90′s or simply a lack of time to devote to understanding the technology, car dealers seem to be the last to know when it comes to the internet.

This creates problems for those selling SEO services. There are so many companies out there who are selling services that are not adequate to use against the highly-competitive world of automotive marketing. Here are some “smoke and mirrors” tactics that are currently being used to get dealers to sign on the dotted line for “snake-oil SEO”:

Myth #1: Thousand of Indexed Pages are Necessary

It has become a catch-phrase for website providers who create separate pages for each individual car.

The Pitch: “Search engines read web pages like we read books. They give more weight to websites with thousands of pages than they give to websites with dozens of pages.”

The Truth: In many industries, having thousands of pages available for “long tail searches” (covered later) for individual items is a good thing. People look for “round blue widgets in ireland” and having a page for that is good. People do not search for individual cars, which leads to the next myth…

Myth #2: People search for individual cars or by VIN

The Pitch: “Pick a car from one of our dealers. If you type in the VIN (vehicle identification number) you will see a ton of listings to the website. Competitors don’t list their vehicles like this.”

The Truth: In the automotive industry, people wanting a new or used car will search for “minneapolis toyota” or “used cars oklahoma city”. They do not search for “used toyota camry in minneapolis”. According to Overture, here are the searches from January:

“used toyota camry minneapolis” – 28
“toyota minneapolis” – 32,430

Real humans search for dealers. They do not search for individual cars. They do not search by VIN. They do not search by model year unless they are looking for reviews. The search for dealers when they are ready to buy a car.

Myth #3: SEM Certification Means Better SEO

When I first heard of this, I was appalled. Some providers use their Google Certified Reseller and their Yahoo! Ambassador badges as indications of their search engine optimization prowess. This couldn’t be seen as anything other than a lie.

These certifications are nice, as they mean that someone at the company took the time to learn what Google and Yahoo! wanted to teach about their Pay-Per-Click, sponsored results programs. They have no SEO benefits. There was a company that promoted their “inside track” to search engine optimization using these badges in a press release.

Yahoo! certification costs $50. Google requires a certain spend on Adwords. They both have eBooks and tests that are required. They have NOTHING to do with search engine optimization for natural listings. Sadly, most dealers do not research what the programs are really about.

Myth #4: Flash Websites cannot be optimized

The Pitch: “Our templates are completely HTML. They don’t look as good, but the search engines prefer no flash.”

The Truth: There are ways to allow the search engines to read flash. Even more importantly, most automotive websites that are built with flash technology are built with enough HTML content to give the search engines all that they need.

* * *

There are so many more tactics used on car dealers, but this is a good start. In today’s ultra-competitive automotive marketplace, it is so important for dealers to look at examples and to check more websites than the few that the SEO companies provide.

A company with 5,000 websites is bound to have a few that were optimized. It’s in checking some of the other 4,995 that car dealers can keep from falling for the smoke and mirrors.

Guest Posting by J.D. Rucker
J.D. is an automotive search engine optimization specialist
Original Post on PromotionWorld

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Last week, Google added a few new features to its Local Business Center. This is the place where any business with a physical location can go to essentially plant themselves on Google Maps. If you have not already done so, get your dealer listed in Google Local. This has clear SEO benefits for local search.

1. Sign up for a Google account www.google.com
2. Go to Google maps  http://maps.google.com/maps
3. To the left of the map you will see link for Add/Edit Your Business. This will take your to the admin portion of google local. Use the link for “Add a new business”.
4. Enter your dealers name and continue.
5. You  should then see your dealer name from a list of possibilities, if
   not, use the option “  My business doesn’t appear here”.
6. From here you can fill out or edit your dealer information.

After you have edited your information, you now need to confirm your dealer for Google to authenticate. Google provides 2 ways of doing this (I recommend the phone call – it’s faster).

• Receive a phone call at the number provided
• Receive a postcard at the address provided

Once you have authenticated your dealer, it usually takes about 3 weeks or more for Google to go live with your new or edited local business listing. Google even allows you to add coupons to your listing; I usually rotate a service department special coupon.

If you’re paying big bucks to a vendor for your dealership website SEO and they have not already done this or informed you about this, ask them why.

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