The bad part about search engine optimization in the automotive industry is that there are so many companies that report on what they do for SEO rather than what they're accomplishing with their efforts. We've seen this hundreds of times when bringing on new clients and it's time to set the record straight.

It isn't hard to track the key performance metrics…

In our modern world of technology and instant information, consumers are increasingly seeking answers to their questions online rather than asking a business for it. One way that consumers are doing this is through video content they find online. Video content provides many benefits for consumers as well as businesses. In the automotive industry, there are many companies…

Blogging to Drive Sales

Automotive marketers are shifting their budgets away from “interruption” advertising.  Because 1/3 of the world’s population is on the internet, it is critical that auto, boat, motorcycle and boat dealers go inbound vs outbound to rev up revenue and sales.  It goes without saying, dealers need to be where their buyers are in order to…

Optimizing your website for search takes intense research, competitive analysis, deep marketing experience, skillful writing and then patient iteration to improve performance over time. There’s a reason most companies need an outside vendor: the expertise that comes from experience.…

In order to efficiently optimize your brand new website for search engines, from ground up, you have to execute a strong SEO campaign. The experts of a reliable SEO company can help with managing key factors that mount an effective SEO campaign; allowing you to primarily focus on operating your business. A complete SEO campaign should be conversion focused to widely…

 TIMOTHY MARTELL recently wrote a somewhat scathing assessment of an overlooked SEO problem. Those familiar with SEO know that duplicate content can be the "anchor around your kneck" when it comes to trying to keep a first page position on GOOGLE.  His entire article can be found here.…

If you've participated in automotive internet marketing for long enough, you've very likely heard the concept that "content is King." It was in play back in the days when I started researching search engine optimization all those years ago and it never really stopped. There was a dirty little secret that few of us in the SEO community ever mentioned, but it's been…

RCS

We’re all familiar the use of directories, and they can be fine for link building. But using them over and over again isn’t real company sh*t. Real marketing value comes from listening to what the target consumer is searching for and building content around those queries. Essentially, we should strive to become the go-to resource for clients in the industry. Strategies that create content which have customers coming back for more…

The excitement has been building for a little while now and we're finally here. 2013 was awesome for many of us on all three sides of the ball - dealers, vendors, and OEMs - and 2014 is trending towards being even better for many. On the other hand, the dangers popping up in many marketing disciplines are also casting some doubts on the future of a good chunk of the…

An SEO, one of the most common questions from potential clients goes something like this: “If we target keywords X, Y and Z, what kind of return can we expect on our investment? We need to know the potential ROI before we invest.”

Did you catch that? The keys to that question are the…

To paraphrase the immortal movie icon, Ferris Bueller, "The Internet moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

That seems to be the case with many digital marketing practices, particularly in the realm of advertising versus marketing. Oddly enough, it wasn't too long ago that I was preaching the reverse;…

SEO for Car Dealers: Why You Should be Using It

“I have no idea what you are talking about.” That was the response of the dealer who currently signs my paycheck. This was in a board meeting of approximately…

I’m not a big fan of redundancy, especially on social media. Under normal circumstances, if you have good plugins and widgets properly placed on your blog, there’s no reason to have others. If you want to annoy me with a blog post, put an inline plugin, a floating plugin, and another one at the bottom. Oh, and throw in a “Share It” widget just in case three ways to…

Most Of What You Write Won’t Be Read (Well… Almost)

I’d recommend you read the post, but statistically speaking half of you won’t give a s*** about…

There are those who have been spreading (indefinitely, it seems) the thought that SEO is dead. It never ends, the thought (hope?) that search engine optimization has reached its conclusion. The main reason for these calls is, of course, when “experts” in search marketing start to find that their…

Many of us who have been doing the hybrid search/social game for long enough remember what it was like to discover Tumblr. I got in pretty early and was able to get Social News as one of my Tumblogs, a pretty decent subdomain that is…

Having tracked data for the last seven years in the automotive marketing arena, I can tell you a few things that I've learned that have brought us to where the content marketing world is today. It's all about process and answering the questions that consumers are asking and it's something that, as I've said time and time again in the past, needs to be viewed…

If there's one thing that bugs me more than anything professionally, it's when bad marketing people give good marketing people a bad name by continuing to use spam and automated techniques when they simply do not work anymore. It's a plague in many industries, but seems to find its happiest home in the realm of search marketing.

There's a reason for this, of…

For the last 7 years, I've been watching Google very closely. Sure, they are in the news all the time so it's not something that's exactly hard. What has been more challenging is keeping up with their long-standing obsession with social media and understanding why it's so.

They have some big wins (YouTube, Google+) as well as dozens of…

Content has been the big play for over a year now in the world of marketing. It’s the glue that holds social media marketing and search engine marketing together and it’s becoming so prevalent that the old ways (the ones everyone started using this year) are already starting to become obsolete.

Don’t get me…