PUREDEALER | Automotive Internet Marketing | SEO | PPC | Custom Dealer Websites

Dealer.com Search Marketing Challenge Article

Posted on 12. Dec, 2008 by admin.

I recently followed an article written on a blog site by a popular blogger and SEO consultant regarding the merits of dealer.com and search marketing versus pay per click and search optimization. Many automotive marketing experts do not realize how quickly a blog post or search content can be picked up on the Internet.

The lesson that this blogger was teaching was to try to prove that dealer.com search engine marketing did not spend enough focus on search optimization and spent more efforts on pay per click or SEM. Pure Dealer.com agrees that good SEO can beat PPC any day of the week, and sometimes it takes a long time and some dedicated marketing efforts to win the search engine battle.

Then again, did dealer.com speak too soon when they opened up a public challenge to test the power of search marketing? Dealer.com is a very well respected company that has experience huge growth and obviously is well versed on how to market themselves so I guess that Google will decide who wins this battle.

If you google “dealer.com search marketing” or “dealer.com search engine marketing” we will all know the answers to that question.

Here is the full repost of the article, with recognition to the author and full post here:

Search engine marketing is a great way to generate immediate traffic.  What is often overlooked by by car dealers is the real value of a well optimized site and an aggressive SEO campaign.  A recent post I did about dealership web traffic I referenced another post from Dealer.com on Drivingsales.com and feel that it was misconstrued based on the replies by Dealer.com.

Pay Per Click advertising has it’s place like for special promotions or a fresh site.  However at the end of the day there are so many studies out there that show that SEO provides better value than Seach Engine Marketing or PPC.  One of the best explanations was from Hubspot.com.

Their simple study showed that ranking number nine generates the same amout of leads and traffic as the number two paid listing.

From the post at Hubspot:

Here are the key takeaways from the data and the images above:

1) Organic results get 75%+ of the attention. People don’t click on the ads nearly as much as the organic results.

2) The first organic result gets over 25% of all clicks. Within the organic results, the first result gets the most clicks by far - more than double the second result.

3) Within the ads, the first ad also gets the most clicks. But, since you pay per click for the ads, you should care less about volume and more about if the traffic will actually convert and what your cost per lead and cost per sale will be.

4) There are a good number of clicks on all top 10 organic results. Even the last result gets about 3% of people to click on it - this is about the same rate as the second pay per click ad, and unlike the ad, its free!

SEO wins day in and day out.  Search engine marketing is an expensive way to drive traffic.  Contrary to popular belief SEO can be almost instant and that is the real purpose of this post to show how fast I can get it to rank for certain terms.  I bet it will be faster than the time it takes to set up a pay per click campaign.  Should see results in minutes not in ages, the term used to denigrate SEO.  I took it as a challenge from Dealer.com

I’ll report back with results.

• Published at : 12:45 pm Decemember 12, 2008
• Ranking #1 for : “Dealer.com Challenge - SEO vs Search Engine Marketing” 2:00 pm 12/12/08 < low value but indexed.
• Ranking Number #6 for “dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing” 3:45 pm 12/12/08
• Ranking #1 for “Dealer.com Search Engine Marketing” 7:00 pm 12/12/08

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Automotive Search Marketing or Advertising?

Posted on 25. Nov, 2008 by admin.

You will find many automotive dealers confuse marketing with advertising or vice versa. While both are important they are vastly different. If you do your homework, you can help your dealership grow through some great advertising and marketing strategies.

Here are the main differences when it pertains to the automotive sector:

Automotive Advertising: Paid announcements with a message or offer from an dealer; the presentation or promotion by an automotive dealership of its products to its existing and potential customers.

Automotive Marketing: The planning, implementation and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products.

Looking at the above definitions, with some slight modifications to fit the dealership market, you can quickly see where you fit. Some dealers are straight advertisers, but think they are marketers. Other’s take a more systematic approach that involve a semblance of some marketing plan and variety of activities. (Planning a weekend sale does not really fall into this category, although you want it to)

It is easy to see the confusion to the point that automotive dealers think of them as one-in-the same, so let’s drill it down.

Automotive Advertising is just one single part of the marketing process. It involves spreading the word about your special car sale, weekend event, clearance, or the services you are offering such as oil changes, extended warranties, and the like. This often includes strategies such as ad placement, medium, frequency, automotive budget, etc. Automotive Advertising also includes the ad placement whether through traditional means or through Automotive Internet advertsing methods.

Automotive marketing is a large painting, and within that painting you have a variety of images which may include advertising, research, planning, ePR, sales, pricing, distribution, support, strategy, service, development or production, website hosting, community involvement and much more.

Advertising is just one section of the overall painting. The entire picture should take the form of something that works as both individual images and towards the bigger goal of a work of art.

Dealership Marketing is often mistakenly identified as advertising, and often confused when you throw in additional terms like search engine marketing (sem) and search engine optimization (seo). Both are really forms of advertising since they are not necessarily part of an overlying strategy.

The best automotive strategies contain solid dealership marketing plans that address the needs of the entire dealership. If you only look at it as “advertising” then you are truly, missing the picture.

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