Search Engine Optimization VS Paid Clicks For Car Dealers
I have always been a huge fan of Search Engine Optimization for any website. I’ve been involved in selling products on the internet like seafood, printing and cars since 1995.
The word Search Engine Optimization didn’t even exist back in 1995, but I practiced it on a daily basis selling business cards online when I was in my late 20’s.
I went strong for many years, and eventually I got out of it. It was my father in law who talked me into helping him sell live lobsters and clams online up in Boston.
He invested some money to develop a shopping cart website and he put me in charge. Having built many websites back in the 90’s, I knew the most important thing was traffic and marketing.
Back in those days people were under the impression that when a website went live, millions of people would find their website because “everybody was online”. You know how many launch parties I attended back in the day?
Just about every business failed to meet their expectations. I was lucky enough to have the experience to manage our expectations. I warned him to be suprised if we had any orders in the next 60 days.
When the website went live we didn’t have a launch party, but we did eat good that week. We cooked and photographed everything we sold, including live lobster, fried clams, scallops, haddock, shrimp and steamers. When we were done taking pictures, we had a buffet of freshly cooked seafood.
Knowing it would take a while for our website to be crawled and indexed in search engines like Google and Yahoo, we kick started it with a Google Pay Per Click Campaign.
Once you start a campaign you realize how much other are bidding. This is when we realized how costly it would be. Does it make sense to pay $3.00 a click for the term “live lobster” when at the time the conversion rate for a performing website was about 3 or 4%?
Not really, considering you need to ship out many lobsters on a daily basis to turn a profit. The secret to pay per clicks has always been to find “long tail keywords” that nobody else is bidding on. This is where you can get clicks for as little as a dime. Phrases like “live lobster shipped from New England” and such.
So, what’s this have to do with the car business?
To avoid going into details with my other credentials since then, I will skip right to selling cars. I took a job at a car dealership in Central Florida a couple of years ago. I ran 3 rooftops that were all on the verge of going out of business.
They had a zero budget for me, so all the weight was on my shoulders to get all traffic for free. I was able to talk the owner into giving me a few thousand dollars to get a nice clean organic website going.
That’s when Patrick and I developed our first car microsite. To make a long story short, within 60 days this website was getting more quality traffic and leads than their BZ Results and Cobalt websites combined.
After seeing some stats from previous vendors they had used and the money spent, I realized how beneficial this could be.
A few months ago Patrick developed a Google Adwords tool that was automated with a dealers actual new and used car inventory. After our first campaign for Park Automall in Tampa Florida I realized that maybe SEO isn’t the greatest thing for car dealers.
The problem is not enough people search for terms like “used Mustang GT in Tampa Florida”. That’s a long tailed keyword that can and will get ranked for car dealer. Most of the people are searching for simply keywords, like “Mustang” or “Mustang GT”.
Not to rain on your parade, but a car dealer will never rank on the first page of any search engine for a term like this. This is where pay per click (Google Adwords) comes in.
Over 80% of internet users used Google for searches. In 30 days alone, we achieved over 2 million impressions and over 1,800 hundred clicks. The average cost per click was only $1.11.
One of our dealers in Orlando showed us a report that a marketing company in Chicago used to lure them into a contract. When I saw it, I new we had the gig. They were paying $2.71 a click, and the campaign only resulted in a little over 60,000 impressions during the same 30 days period as hours. You can see a post about these numbers here.
Why the difference?
Two simple reasons.
- Our software creates multiple campaigns for every new and used vehicle a dealer has in stock resulting in thousands of different keyword phrases.
- We obtain a better quality score. All of the links from our campaign go directly to each vehicle. That means Google gives us a higher quality score, which results in more impressions, a higher position and a lower cost per click.
This is why I now say that a proper Google Pay Per Click Campaign is the most important thing a dealer should do. There are people all over your area looking for each and every vehicle you have in stock. It’s up to you as a dealer to meet them half way.
If you have a Ford Mustang on your lot you need to tell the people you have one!
I recommend you watch this video to see this live and in action:
