Call it human nature to mislead in order to promote a product. Call it deceitful selling. Call it ignorance. Call it whatever you want to call it, but the concept that has been being spread around the automotive industry that you don’t need content on your homepage is absolutely incorrect. In fact, the homepage is the most important page on your website from an…

Long tail keywords are becoming a very integral part of small business SEO. Essentially, long tail keywords are longer (duh!) and more specific keywords. These keywords are less common than short keywords individually, but when taken as a whole, they account for…

“How about a magic trick? I’m gonna make this keyword disappear.”

*SMASH*

“TA DAA! It’s…It’s gone.”

The famous scene from The Dark Knight applies very nicely to black hat search engine optimization tricks today. Those who are still trying to “beat the system”…

There was a time when the search engines rewarded content of all types. If a website syndicated content from elsewhere on the web and exposed it to their audience, it wasn’t as good as unique content but at least it didn’t hurt. Some of the content would be de-indexed as duplicate but the overall health of the domain itself was not harmed.

Today,…

One of the keys to being a true dealership partner amongst a sea of vendors is having the willingness to “share the playbook” with our clients and prospects. This is much more important today than ever before in the world of automotive internet marketing because the changes are happening too rapidly. Marketing professionals and companies must stay on top of…

The marketing adage “content is king” has been around for a long time. In 2013, it appears that both the search engines and social media sites are focusing on content as their driving forces, but in a different way than most understand. Things are changing in the world of internet marketing. Here’s what you need to know.

Content was never really “king”. Though it…

The other day I was in a meeting with a potential client. We were discussing automotive SEO best practices and the way that the search engines are changing the way they rank. We talked about the best ways a dealer can stay ahead of their competition for their current keywords while moving up in the competitive keywords in the area.…

There’s a plethora of articles, tips, and techniques about automotive SEO that fill blogs, webinars, and training courses. Everyone has opinions about what works best and how to help dealers rank better in search. The biggest mistake that dealers (and their vendors) often make isn’t in the SEO techniques themselves but rather in the underlying keyword principles. It doesn’t…

There’s a plethora of articles, tips, and techniques about automotive SEO that fill blogs, webinars, and training courses. Everyone has opinions about what works best and how to help dealers rank better in search. The biggest mistake that dealers (and their vendors) often make isn’t in the SEO techniques themselves but rather in the underlying keyword principles. It doesn’t…

There's really no way around it. The only technique to truly maximize the effectiveness of your content to be engaging on your website, relevant for SEO, and useful for social media is to think three-dimensionally.

This is Part II in the series…

Every few months, marketers around the blogosphere start the next batch of chants that search engine optimization is dying or dead. It's like clockwork; Google makes a change, their pages rank poorly, they declare that the party's over. I think I've written about the topic at least once a year since 2008.

The chants are starting…

For the past several years, content has been a component of search engine and social media marketing that fell far below the tricks and techniques that helped achieve business goals. It was possible to be successful with limited or low-quality content. In…

Despite the rise of social signals and the continued prominence of content as primary search engine optimization tools, high-quality inbound links remain one of the three big components in improving rankings. The automated processes have been devalued; low-quality posts, footer links, and sidebar links are a thing of the past…

Itʼs pretty much a universally known fact in the industry that blogging is a vital part of any search engine optimization strategy. Everyone understands you need a blog, the trouble comes from figuring out just who exactly is going to write it. Should you handle…

No matter how hard you try you can’t control who is going to link to your website. Every site out there is going to have a few unsavory links that they want to get rid of, it’s a reality of building a website. Since Google came out with their Penguin update people have been scrambling to try to clean up their link profiles and many are resorting to some pretty desperate measures. There are even stories of sites charging to remove their links in this link un-building panic. When combined with…

I’m often getting request from clients to take a look at specific area of their website, where for some reason they may not be getting as much traffic as they would like. There are many great search engine optimization strategies you can use for single pages or sections…

Most businesses understand the benefits of search engine optimization, but many miss out on easy opportunities. Building backlinks is common, but social link building is often overlooked. Social link building enables you to build links that will spread…

I was amazed to learn that, during the research phase, customers spend 17 to 19 hours, on the internet, before visiting a dealership.  Much of that involves vehicle comparisons but anyone is naive if they don't think that price is a chief consideration.  A recent Cobalt study stated that the average consumer visited eight dealership websites.  These customers tend to be at the bottom of the sales funnel.  At this point, they should have narrowed it down to a…