Dealership MarketingOpinions & Advice

How Much Do You Trust Your SEO Provider?

Jeff Kershner
Posted onSep 8, 2012 at 4:51 PM
Take our SEO Trust Survey

I’m sure by now if you haven’t read it over on the DealerRefresh forums, you’ve read the full post on one of the other industry online outlets.

Tim Martell SLAMS Industry SEO Vendors

Tim is on a RANT and calling industry services OUT on their SEO ethics and reporting, going as far as calling them liars and criminals in his article The Shocking Truth Behind Reporting In The Automotive Community. 

You can read the complete article on this site (updated link since several industry sites have removed the full article).

After Tim’s rant, finger pointing and saying names he encourages dealers to ask for 3 criteria from their SEO company’s monthly reporting..

• Keyword Positioning
• Search Volume for each ranking keyword
• Link to every page of content, press release, slideshare, and link that was built, etc.

My question to you – dealers – How much do you trust your SEO providers and their reporting?

Click here to take the poll over on the forums. While you’re over there, if you have something to say – SPEAK UP!

Jeff Kershner
Founder of DealerRefresh - 20+ Years of dealership Sales, Management, Training, Marketing and Leadership.
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    Cliff
  • September 9, 2012
Which industry sites have removed the article? I've only seen it on ADM and DealerElite and the full article is still up on those sites. By the way, I think it speaks volumes about the integrity of your site when Martell brings up issues with a company that Alex and Joe work for and you guys don't alter it at all...
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    Clintonmi1arlh
  • September 10, 2012
@razasau88 http://t.co/FUqyG90M
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    VoltageFuel
  • September 10, 2012
Not a promo, but I've used the Google Analytic code with stellar success for determining what top keywords were used to arrive on our website - for free - and with incontrovertible accuracy! We found Google shows us what terminology 90%+ of our visitors are entering into the search box to find us. We also know through our website vendors back end tools that 87% of our total visitors are coming through Google. With that said, why would I need 800 more keywords, when I know exactly via Google what people are keying in to find us? So now that we know the keywords and terms people are searching to find us, we tag images, videos, and everything else with those search terms and keywords discovered through Google Analytic's. Add those terms to page titles, page meta tags, H1 and H2 - and you're getting better results better than any SEO expert can promise. 
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Quite an interesting read. As someone who's been in the industry for a while now, I've seen a lot of bad SEO simply because the clients don't know any better. Of course this allegation takes it to a whole new level if it's true. Dealer education on these issues (whether it's through DealerRefresh or some other industry site) won't stop it from happening, but it can stop it from happening on such a large scale. Kudos to Tim and those who have reposted the original article...
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    emiltsch
  • September 14, 2012
@Cliff - We removed the article from DrivingSales simply because it went against our TOS. Very simply - we don't allow ads, we encourage professionalism and we don't allow vendors to call out other vendors. This was an from our perspective, professionalism is a relative term - and that's our call and Tim is a vendor in this instance. 
 
If we allow all vendors to do this, the community would simply become a never ending circle of finger pointing. 
 
The dealers in our community have said they want info that helps - and in our view this doesn't necessarily help. That's why we have our vendor ratings section. 
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