I continually debate different methods of automotive seo with a close friend of mine that I met online.  He is against automation in principal for seo purposes and for the most part I am too.  A completely organic presence from content and developing linking partners is really the best way to avoid any kind of penalties from the search engines.  However that is not how the web works.

Especially in automotive automation is the key.  Most of the true authority sites, as far as marketing dealers inventory, rely on automation.  Autotrader.com, Cars.com and AOL Autos would not exist in their current form if it were not for automation.  The very basic fact that they aggregate information that is already available online by pulling feeds of dealers inventory mixed with some basic unique content that is basically repurposed reviews.

Even big players such as Google and Commission Junction facilitate the ability to create automated content via their affiliate networks by providing product data feeds to affiliate marketers.  Which allows them to build out complete websites with little or no original content.

The automated web is here to stay, it will be around for as long as I am alive.  Blogging is replacing some of the automation that is so prevalent however it will never eclipse the amount of content that is produced daily in an automated fashion.

We have been working on ways to tie automation into blogging platforms to help dealers sell more cars, a good example of this is a site we built targeting Texas direct auto auctions.  We are pulling in feeds from ebay and interspersing original content to keep our content unique.  This is not the only type of automated content we are testing however we are not ready to share it at this point in time.  We will compile data through the end of the year and publish a case study outlining our successes and failures.

Part of what my company does as an automotive seo firm is help dealers drive traffic to their offers.  Because dealers can post inventory to a multitude of locations we have found ways to take non unique automotive content, make it unique to drive traffic back to their offers.  We do this in a variety of very different ways.

One of the the ways we do this is to pull listings for dealers that use our craigslist posting service to create dealer microsite listings of individual inventory items you can see an example of these listings on this microsite for a Cincinnati Ford dealer.  This brings in an incredible amount of long tail traffic and pushes traffic back directly to the dealers telephone and primary marketing site.

Another thing that we are working on is using the ebay api to generate listing sites promoting clients and non clients inventory in the search engines.  An example of what we have done for a client is this site which targets Greenville Chevy shoppers it has no other ads other than the dealers ebay inventory while another example is a site we created targeting traffic looking for Texas Direct Auto auctions it has external third party advertising which helps pay for it’s cost and upkeep.

These sites once they are properly indexed will also provide traffic back to external client properties, which will drive traffic and search relevance.  It is a win win for all.  The nice thing abut the ebay model sites is that they provide some income whether for a client or just to have additional external properties from ebay commissions.  Even for the clients who we help market their inventory using this model they see a serious increase in ebay traffic.

Recent comments on a post at my business blog caused me work all weekend developing a step by step plan to give to car dealers on how to protect their biggest online asset, their name.  There are a few sites that try to extract payment for car dealers to control listings of their business but the problem with these car dealer directories attempt to cannibalize traffic on dealers name search to push lead generation, adsense clicks and ebay affiliate sales.

Also have a few sites like this too, but they are basically ways for dealers to protect their names and to push links back to the dealers sites.  A good example of this is Automotive Nexus – You link to local car dealers.  We will use sites like this to improve the automotive seo of a dealers sites while monetizing traffic for other search terms.  However, we do not attempt to extort money from dealers to control their name there.  We just link back to their sites and give it to them.

Directories can be useful for getting a new site indexed and for some brand protection.  You just need to understand the purpose of these sites is not to help dealers or to provide a resource for online users, their individual monetization is their primary goal.  All websites have a purpose and most are for the money.  That is the only reason I have them to drive revenue.

Revenue in the automotive niche is ok for a website’s purpose but you need to understand where a dealership listing really falls into the equation.

We are starting to notice an increase from traffic from twitter.  The only thing we can attribute this to is the indexing of individual tweets.  So I am going to run an experiment to see if we can get tweets to index for chosen keywords.  The first target will be a fairly competitve long tail search for “Social Media Priorities” .

Because we cannot optimize an individual tweet other than the keywords we use in it we will have to d this via link building.  The only downfall to this strategy is that the twitter index could be rebuilt at anytime, however if this strategy works we see many ways to apply this for our clients.

The core of our business is Internet marketing for car dealers and we can see this helping to drive more traffic to our Cincinnati Ford dealer and NC Chevy dealer.  I see this as a way to give them another level in the search engines.  While I do not believe that search engine traffic from twitter will be very high volume every little layer will help.

Pasch Consulting Group has been performing Automotive SEO malpractice with their aggressive personal marketing style.  It looks like they think ranking for their clients name brings them value to their company.

The most basic marketing principals are being violated in this type search engine optimization. Consumers searching for a dealer by name do not want to see how some company worked to capture their click. Some consumers may go as far researching the company that the dealership has hired. Once they realize that they are the same people associated with Millennium Teleservices (more here) and Civic Development Group (more here) they may decide to look for another NJ Infiniti dealer.

When you are marketing for a client the last thing you want to do is steal traffic from them especailly for basic name searches.  When building links to a clients site it should be from an automotive centered website or directory style listing not your marketing site and if you do use their name in your marketing it should be done in such a way as to not optimize for the clients name just your services.

We are currently building up a blog farm with evergreen content to accentuate other link building activity for our clients.  Most of the content is about product updates and news from the manufacturers repurposed to show natural linking to the clients sites from the proper vertical.

I do Automotive SEO for a few select dealers direct and as a service provider for a couple of other firms I still enjoy affiliate marketing. I have already produced a few very profitable affiliate landing pages using squidoo but now I wish to step it up a notch.

Right now I am working on implementing a huge blog network and have hired content writers to help manage it. The network in of itself will be used as assets to help seo client’s websites but they will also pay their on weight as well. What this means is the content cost, hosting and domain cost will be covered by the onsite advertising and CPA offers.

The primary mechanisms for the income will be affiliate networks and adsense. Not a real novel idea but that is how it is done.

The network will cover 50 blogs to start with all pushing links to clients sites and affiliate landing pages for localized traffic in select markets and national traffic. The network in of itself can actually make zero dollars and I will be happy as long as the affiliate properties cover the weight.

One of the landing pages that was just created is actually quite ugly but the goal is for a high bounce rate with conversion on the ads or cpa offers. You can see the one I created targeting New Jersey G37 Infiniti.  Eventually this site will rank really well for all models of Infiniti cars targeting used car traffic and local Infiniti dealer terms in select markets.  This is just one example of 200 of these type properties in the works.

The roll out will be slow because the network needs to be in place first to help support this many properties where as the small network I have now really is used specifically for clients.  An example of these network sites will be like Domestic Auto Report.

Automotive SEO is not rocket science. It entails just three elements that if worked in conjunction with each other properly you can own your market area. I am a firm believer that the current dealer website model is flawed and dealers need to look beyond having just one piece of online real estate or have multiple mediums to attract buyers, but I digress…

One of the biggest mistakes I have seen is how Automotive SEOs market themselves. As so elegantly stated by Chip at www.dealerrater.com

“The best non-dealer SEO’s that I know of, don’t even have websites; referrals and results drive their business.” at Dealerrefresh.com

You do not use client success stories as part of your marketing pitch in an open setting especially if it identifies the keywords you are targeting for them. This does two things:

• Competing with the client for the click – Potentially the SEO’s marketing material can compete directly with the clients and siphon traffic from them. This could also potentially alienate the average consumer and cause them to look for a different company to spend their money with. Customers hate marketing for the most part and telling them how you captured their click because of an aggressive online marketing campaign is just bad form.
• Inviting Competition -  This can happen in many forms from other SEOs and/or affiliate marketers.  An aggressive SEO could create multiple affiliate properties around the keywords you flaunt and steal your clients traffic and increase their cost.  Because most automotive search terms are localized it is not a formidable task.  This will force the Automotive SEO practictioner to lose their effectivness in that market area and either seek out the other site owner for links or the client does that and has to spend even more money or change providers.

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

• # 3 for dealer.com search marketing 8:00 pm 12/12/08
• # 3 for dealer.com seo 8:00pm 12/12/08
• #1 & #2 for dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing 10 am 12/13/08
• #1 & #2 for dealer.com  search engine marketing vs seo 10 am 12/13/08
• #1 for dealer.com seo 12/14/08
• #1 for dealer.com search engine marketing 12/14/08
• #1 for dealer.com search marketing 12/14/08
• Going to stop tracking results now, and this page may fall out of favor, it was just a test to see how fast it would be to win search terms and show that it is not an ages long process.

images from Hubspot and MarketingSherpa

Recent post at www.drivingsales.com/blog

Pulling in localized traffic for car dealers or any business can be accomplished using wordpress as a CMS.  Currently I have a wordpress them being designed to use as an alternate dealer marketing site.  Not to be confused with auto dealer micro sites.  The philosophy behind micro sites as a search marketing tool with one or two page landers provides the smallest value to a dealer.

Using a CMS style mini site to push promotions or specific models and tying all of those levels of content together and having the ability to archive contnet will provide far greater value for long term SEO benefit and relevence.

Because most models and more specifically year models of vehicles come and go.  Where as a well optimized page on a domain with other layers of content can give your mini site a permanent shelf life.  For example I created a simple landing page targeting buyers in looking for a 2009 Mustang Shelby in Brunswick that has multiple calls to action and is tied in with other content about Brunswick car dealers.

The site itself is not designed specifically for a particular dealer.  It is geared towards affiliate conversions but once the traffic is monitored for a period of time it will show how well a multiple page mini site can benefit for local search traffic versus a simple one or two page automotive micro site.

Single landing page sites can be accomplished using other platforms or at very low cost.  Where as a multifaceted CMS system can be designed for set up for client management or direct marketing management at a cost that provides greater roi for the dealer.

Sorry for the lack of recent updates.  As you will notice there is a new look here.  It is because I am completely changing the direction of this blog.  In the past most of the post were exclusively on the Make Money Niche of online marketing.  For me I have succeeded there.  I just don’t engage that niche.  I am not a trainer per se.  I will still provide value added content here.  More so about Automotive SEO, Automotive vendors and things people can do to increase their online viability.

How you chose to apply these things to your business is entirely up to you.