Nine Dirty Little Secrets of Automotive SEO & SEM:
The Pitfalls of the ‘Set it and Forget it’ Approach to Dealer Search
There are more than a few Dirty Little Secrets when it comes to dealers and their use of search engines to drive quality traffic to their websites. Secrets, of course, kept from the dealers and their teams by their search “partners.”
If you’re like most dealers, you’ve got better things to do than monitor this spend. So, you likely take a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to your store’s search efforts. An approach, we’ve discovered, that can cost you tens of thousands of dollars in wasted spend and outright fraud each year. (Don’t believe me? Check out this recent example shared on the DealerRefresh Forums.)
Understanding the Dirty Little Secrets (DLS) your vendors don’t want you to know will help you and your team uncover the waste and fraud; and allow you to leverage search in ways that drive real results for your dealership:
DLS #1: Pay-Per-Click Transparency
The secret here is that there is no real transparency into what the average Search Engine Marketing (SEM) vendor provides their dealer-clients. Sure, there are reports with cool graphs and lots of talk about impressions, click-through rates and cost-per-click; but, the fact is that the average dealer has no idea if there are genuine returns from their SEM efforts.
While I could write an entire book on what you should be asking of your SEM vendor, the most important things you can do to start to gain some real transparency into your monthly spend are:
- Pay Google directly for your AdWords usage. (This way you’ll know exactly how much you’re paying the vendor for their management fee.); and
- Ask your vendor to tell you how many cars you sold last month from your SEM efforts and which keywords drove those sales. (When your PPC provider properly sets up Google Analytics tracking and your Google Search Console – and perhaps even adds some high-converting landing pages – they should be able to help you get much of this information.)
