Have You Ever Tried To SEO A Service Department For A Car Dealer?

I asked this question last week at the NADA Convention in Orlando Florida to every marketing vendor I met. Every single company I asked cringed before answering. Have you ever helped a dealer market their service department on the internet?

Showroom Logic is in the process of doing just that for the Napleton Auto Group. They have over 60 rooftops nationwide, located in 4 or 5 different states. We’re starting with a group of close to 20 dealerships.

Our plans are simple. We’ll set-up a Google Adwords PPC campaign to get traffic while the website and blog is being built. This will enable us to find out what the hot keywords are and go after them.

We have many things to consider, and setting up the keyword phrases for the PPC campaign will be the toughest. We have to figure out how people search in all these different areas. But the question is, do people search for “Oil Changes” or “oil change coupons”? I know Google will suggest keywords to use, but the unique keyword phrases not on the list are the ones you can get cheap.

During the past 3 weeks we have been running a PPC campaign for a car dealer in Kissimmee Florida. We’ve been advertising cars for them with great success. When they saw our numbers compared to other marketing companies they asked us to help them with their service department.

Although this wasn’t part of our business model, we love to try new things so we went for it. We started doing some keyword research and worked on some custom landing pages to obtain a better quality score from Google. We want to get as many quality impressions as possible without spending too much per click.

When we launched the campaign we were surprised to see how many companies were doing PPC in the Orlando / Kissimmee Florida area for oil changes alone.

Jiffy Lube alone has a huge presence for organic and PPC searches. It appears they are paying over $4.00 per click, and their national website is so powerful and mature that it ranks first and third for the term “oil change orlando”. The first is their main website, and the third is a subdomain (orlando.jiffylube.com).

To obtain rankings like Jiffy Lube is possible, but it certainly won’t happen over night. Many people think SEO is all about keywords, but there is a lot more to it than that. You can have the most optimized website in the world but if you don’t have any quality links pointing to it from other relevant websites you won’t get much out of it.

So, where should these links come from? You can start with directories but that will be just a small piece. Directory links are weak, but it’s a good start.

You have to have a successful link building campaign going, and you cannot get links too quick. If the search engines see too many backlinks roll in you may get a penalty. If you get a Google Penalty, consider it the kiss of death.

Basically, it will take at least 4 – 5 months to get Jiffy Lube types of rankings. There is no magic switch an SEO company has to get a website ranked. It takes time and money.

The time comes in doing keywords research, writing 500+ word articles and publishing them to the right websites, hub pages, etc…

The money is needed to have premium listings in some powerful directories and to fund the person assigned to all of the above practices.

Performing SEO for a new website is like playing chess by mail, with the other player living on the North Pole and you’re using the pony express for delivery.

Besides the main website for Napleton, we will also be launching a service department blog to help juice it up. our first rooftop will be Ed Napleton Honda in Missouri.