Forward: This is a long article but it is a very important topic.

The competition for Google page one placement in the automotive industry is hot! Car dealers are continually bombarded with offers from SEO companies to improve their Internet rankings and dealers have no way to really know how they are doing their work. As an SEO consultant, I urge all car dealers to be mindful that for every reputable SEO company there is an SEO company that will do anything to gain higher listings, even at your expense.

In the SEO community there are "White Hat SEO" and "Black Hat SEO" consultants. These may be new terms for car dealers but this article is should clarify the roles they play. The goal of black hat SEO experts is to manipulate the search engines to achieve higher rankings; the ends justify the means. Oddly enough, I have been noticing some "gray hat" and "black hat" SEO tactics being employed by car dealer platform companies and Automotive SEO companies.

I will outline two examples, which demonstrates a technique that I consider very dangerous. I say dangerous because if this technique causes a car dealer website to be banned from Google, a dealer could suffer from tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Imagine of you dealership website was blocked from organic search listings and your only venue for visibility was Google PPC? Is it the end of the world? No? Would it be expensive? Yes!

The technique I am referring to is creating a "More Information" link at the bottom of the home page of a dealer website that actually hides a codepage of keyword rich text. This text may also include Heading Tag spam designed to target high value keywords and search phrases. For some General Managers or Internet Sales Managers this may sound like a foreign language so I'll try to lay out my concerns to create a call for action.

Google Sets Guidelines for SEO Consultants

These footer hyperlinks in question, actually display a new section of text that was once hidden. In my opinion this text is not something that a car dealer intends a consumers to see. Read the text for yourselves and you will see that its not written to flow.

It's not that the text is bad, it is just hidden text with questionable intent. It is my contention that it is designed only for the search engine spiders. This extra text, in my opinion, is in direct violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines. You have to decide if you agree with me so I have outlined Google exact words on this matter.

Here are the specific sections of the Google Webmaster Guidelines that brings me to write an article to warn car dealers about these techniques:

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

When you click through to the examples I will show you, I would say that this technique violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Abuse of Website Heading Tags

Secondly, in the HTML programming language, you have Heading Tags known as <H1>, <H2> and <H3> tags which are supposed to mark "sub-headings" on a web page to tell Google and a Reader what is important.

Think of a "Table of Contents" outlining the major points on a page. In general the top of a web page would start with <H1> tags and then as the page goes on, you would use <H2>, <H3> and even <h4> tags.

Here is Google's exact guidelines from the Google SEO Starter Guide regarding Heading Tags:

• Imagine you're writing an outline - Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.

Avoid:

• placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page

• using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate

• erratically moving from one heading tag size to another

Use headings sparingly across the page - Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

Avoid:

• excessively using heading tags throughout the page
• putting all of the page's text into a heading tag
• using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure

If an SEO consultant builds a home page that stuffs H1 and H2 tags in a hidden section of home page code that only pops up when someone clicks on a link in the footer of the website, I would feel very confident that this violates the Google SEO guidelines. The fact is that very few, if any, consumers will even click this link at the bottom of a page.

Regardless of what the web designers may say, if this was meant to be seen, they would have included the text in the clear or added the page to the main navigation structure. In my opinion, if it was meant for consumers to see they would also have written the text very differently.

That is my concern. Car dealers may be blind to the fact that someone could be putting the primary domain name in jeopardy.

"Grey Hat" SEO? You Decide

Carmichael Honda

If you go to http://carmichaelhonda.com and go to the bottom left side of the home page you will see a link that say "More Information". When you click on this link, the text area expands to show a series of keywords and targeted search keywords in a list format that I think has no value to a consumer. In my opinion, it was designed for the web crawlers to improve organic search rankings.

This section of text has five <h1> tags and five <h2> tags. There is no reason to MULTI tag a hidden page of text unless you were trying to fool the search engines that this text was for reader use and important. In my opinion, this is not anything but keyword and HTML spam. There are no H1 and H2 tags in the normal readable text on the home page because there is no place for text.

To me, this looks like a work-around for a dealer who wanted a graphical home page Someone told them a way to fool the search engines by providing text that they need for indexing in another way. This is a dangerous choice in my opinion even though it is working now.

John Jones Automotive Group

Take a moment to click through to http://www.gmcity.com and go to the bottom of the home page. In a very similar technique, in the footer of the website, there is a "More Information" hyperlink that pops out a scrolling text window that is clearly designed for high value search phrases that are hyperlinked. Google likes good "anchor text" keywords but this implementation on off-page text smells funny.

In this example, the web developers did not abuse the Heading Tags. However, they created a page of text that is practically not intended to be clicked and designed to feed the search engine spiders. You will see that keyword phrases are hyperlinked. This page is well designed for SEO, but my question is that since it was stuffed in the footer and the text is really not anything a consumer would appreciate, would you agree that it smells of "Grey Hat" techniques.

Would you want to roll the dice with your primary domain name with Google?

The fact that the text has formatting errors is an even greater testimonial that no one ever reads this page or they would have told the dealer to correct the formatting errors.

SEO Cat Fighting?

The fact that I'm an SEO Consultant that is criticizing other SEO consultants is dangerous but this is not a cat fight. I like competition and often praise competing companies fine work; there is enough work to go around. What I don't like is that a dealer may be risking their Internet business on questionable techniques that they are unaware of.

The purpose of this article is to raise the awareness and to bring to the forefront that some questionable SEO techniques could be introduced to car dealer websites.

Buyer Beware.

For many car dealers their name and brand awareness is very strong in their local community and close surrounding towns. When I meet with Internet sales managers to discuss their Automotive SEO strategies the conversation always seem to turn to marketing outside their official PMA. They ask how SEO can be used to attract web traffic for consumers who search for "towns" in or near their major competitors. (translation: How do I surround the wagons? )

With car sales and net revenue sharply down, dealers are looking for ways to increase their marketing reach into and around their competitors PMA. This conversation has some gray areas because there are some brand rules about traditional marketing channels. There are emerging rules for Internet marketing but all are not very effective or smart.

In high density areas of the country it gets even sillier because in a 20 mile radius there can be three dealerships competing for the same local eyeballs. In California for example, Irvine BMW and Shelly BMW are just 20 miles apart. When consumers have many local choices for one brand, how do you control Automotive SEO to a PMA? You can't and that is why controlling localized SEO is practically impossible.

Car manufacturers are scrambling to set rules but for every rule they make, there are large dealerships that break the rule. Internet marketing rules are often unenforceable. So while Automotive SEO tactics are somewhat unregulated, here is a proven strategy, in this first article in the series, that can help expand your awareness in a larger marketing radius.

Leveraging Client Testimonials

In California, Glendale Infiniti and Infiniti of Santa Monica are close in proximity and rivals. Infiniti of Santa Monica has hundreds of customers over the years that live near Glendale but purchased in Santa Monica. There is not an Infiniti dealership in West Hollywood and this town sits in between these two competitors. The demographic is perfect for a foreign performance car like the Infiniti brand.

Knowing how Google organic indexing works, a clever dealer could create a page on their blog or dealer site with a customer testimonial (300-400 words) for towns near Glendale where they have customers. When they create the page, they could use an HTML structure like what is shown below. Keep in mind that the META keyword tag is not really used by Google.

Automotiove SEO - Web Page Design

Title: West Hollywood Infiniti Car Owners Rewarded

META Description: West Hollywood Infiniti car owners drive to Santa Monica for great car prices and excellent Infiniti service. West Hollywood Infiniti owners deserve the very best Infiniti car service in Los Angeles County.

META Keywords: West Hollywood Infiniti cars, West Hollywood California Infiniti prices, West Hollywood Infiniti car dealer, West Hollywood Infinity, West Hollywood Infiniti, West Hollywood Infiniti service, West Hollywood Infiniti parts

HTML page name: http://www.yourwebsite.com/west-hollywood-infiniti-cars.html

The page content should contain the testimonials of customers from West Hollywood and of course some other stock information about West Hollywood to complete the page.

It Works - See For Yourself

For examples that demonstrate this technique in action, you can search Google for:

• Inglewood Infiniti
• Sherman Oaks Infiniti
• Burbank Infiniti

which are other towns in the LA area and you will see that Infiniti of Santa Monica is #1 or #2 in organic search for these town names. This goes for many of the surrounding town in LA County.

For aggressive Internet marketing clients, we have created a software program to create static optimized web pages for every town in their surrounding communities. For non automotive clients, we have created a page for every town in their state. There are some design issues to avoid the pages from becoming too identical but we have found ways to make it easy for the pages to exist.

Learn From the Best

This web page architecture is the same that many major car lead collector websites use. They often create a page for every town in the USA and a page for every car brand. Here are example pages from www.cars.com and www.carsdirect.com that are in the Google Index when searching for a G37 in Massachusetts:

www.cars.com/go/buy-cars/kdcu/Infiniti/G37/Cambridge-MA/ -

https://www.carsdirect.com/used_cars/listings/Massachusetts/Marlborough/01752/Infiniti/G37

You can see how they have created a directory structures for brand, model and towns in the USA. If this model works for them it will also work for any car dealer; big or small. Employing localized web page push-outs we have clients that are on Google Page One for every town in a 100 mile radius.

Are You Ready to Dominate Local Search?

Food for thought....are you ready to dominate your PMA and beyond?

Social networking websites are growing in popularity and car dealers should start to make it easy for their visitors to mark their web content and photos for inclusion in Facebook and other popular websites.

The thought is that if a consumer was passionate about a car, an article on your website or just wanted to promote your dealership you should make it easy for them to add the page to their Facebook profile page.

I created a Facebook post link on the homepage: www.infinitig37convertible.com to allow people to mark the website and to share the hot photos on the upcoming G37 convertible. On the homepage you will see a Facebook icon that has this hyperlink:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.infinitig37convertible.com&t=Infiniti+G37+Convertible+Photos

When you hyperlink the Facebook icon with this command, Facebook will automatically read the page and upload summary of the page and pickup a photo on the page (if it exists) and post it in Facebook. You can see how it looks on my homepage of Facebook if you would like to join my Facebook community.

Creating Your Own Facebook Post Icon

The syntax of the command is broken out as follows:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http%3A%2F%2F + (website URL) + &t= + (Subject Title with the words separated with a "+" sign.)

If you follow this syntax you can add Facebook post tags on key pages. Eventually this should be on every car detail page just like the CARFAX logo is.

This is another example from my Automotive SEO blog:

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dealer-seo.com&t=Automotive+SEO

I would recommend that you add icons for other sites that have good SEO and traffic value like www.digg.com. A dig submission for the same page would look like this:

http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dealer-seo.com&title=Automotive%20SEO

Let me know if you have any questions.

In the past few months, I have been fielding calls from dealers who are looking for ways to increase revenue to offset declining car sales.

Car part sales and extended warranty sales seen to be the hot topic among the dealers that I communicate with. I've started a number of great projects to generate revenue from these two sources but part sales are so ripe, I just had to write about it.

For genuine manufacturer car part sales, it seems that only a few choices exist for car dealers who want to compete for online dollars. The car parts website platforms that are the most popular actually score very poorly from an SEO perspective.

When I compare these website platforms to what matters in Google they fail miserably in my opinion. This creates an amazing opportunity for dealers who create their own SEO compliant parts website pages or find a work around to these flawed databases.

One of the leading website platforms for car dealer parts websites is Trade Motion who creates "skins" for dealers and then drives parts searches to their own website database. I don't think dealers understand that buying into this model will always require them to use Google Adwords or SEM to drive traffic and sales. The offsite hosted inventory pages in Trade Motion will never generate natural search rankings for their own main parts website let alone allow them to compete nationally via organic search.

A case in point is a site called www.directhondaparts.com which uses the Trade Motion parts database. This site was chosen at random. As soon as you start searching for parts, you leave the site called www.directhondaparts.com and move to the Trade Motion website. For example, the page that lists 2005 Honda Accord Brake Pads is:

http://www.trademotion.com/partlocator/index.cfm?action=getLocator&siteid=214308&chapter=APG646&appSectionid=18&groupid=10006&subgroupid=62206&make=12&model=Accord&year=2005&catalogid=1

If you look at this long and convoluted URL it obviously is not associated with the sponsoring domain. It also does not comply with Google recommendations about simplifying dynamic URL strings or to utilize a clear set of sub-directory structures. You can read Google's recommendations in this PDF document:

http://www.paschconsulting.com/PDF/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

The reality is that all the page views associated with paying for a consumer via SEM to shop the parts database will never be associated with the car dealer's parts website domain. Only www.trademotion.com gets credit for the page views and time on site.

Better But Not Effective

Another example is www.infinitipartsonline.com which uses another version of Trade Motion's database platform, which is better but not ideal. The Infiniti 2007 FX35 brake pads come up as:

http://www.infinitipartsonline.com/partlocator/index.cfm?action=getJointLocator&siteid=214952&chapter=&sectionids=18,0&groupid=10006&subgroupid=62206&make=14&model=Fx35&year=2007&catalogid=1&displayCatalogid=0

In this example, the database pages are tied to the main URL but the length and composition of the URL is not designed to compete for organic search listings. In addition, the META description and HTML title for this page has nothing to do with 2007 FX35 brake parts. This is in violation of Google's SEO guidelines.

Here are the HTML tags that are on the page for 2007 Infiniti FX35 front brake pads, which are obviously just a generic tagging system:

<META name="description" content="A complete line of Infiniti parts & Infiniti Accessories. OEM Infiniti Parts and Aftermarket Performance Infiniti Parts">

<META name="KEYWORDS" content="NISMO, infiniti parts, infinity parts, Infiniti accessories, Infinity accessories, G35 coupe, G35 Sedan, G20 accessories, G20 performance, G35 performance, G35 parts, G20 parts, infiniti parts, infinity parts, nissan parts, nismo parts, G35 accessories ,performance parts, brake pros, stillen, stillen brakes, metal matrix, performance brakes, g35 brakes, g20 brakes, oem nissan parts, oem infiniti parts, oem infinity parts, wholesale nissan, wholesale infiniti, wholesale infinity, nissan, infiniti, infinity, g20, g35, fx35, fx45, g35, q45, i30, j30, qx4, 350z, 300zx, datsun, infiniti factory parts, infinity factory parts, m45, m35, m30, i35, infinity g35, infiniti g35, infiniti fx35, infiniti fx45, infinity fx35, infinity fx45">

Learning How to Compete

Dealers who want to compete nationally for parts sales need to create an SEO strategy that will build pages rankings and traffic that will not ONLY require SEM. Right now it seems like sites like www.parts.com have an inside track on what web architecture really drives organic sales results. The goods news for car dealers is that they will be having some competition very soon...the cat is out of the bag.

I've been studying parts websites for a while and have solutions to supplement the poor SEO design of many current automotive parts website platforms. If dealers are interested in building a better parts business on the Internet, they are encouraged to share best practices here. Dealers are also invited to give me a call to discuss how we can help better optimize their current efforts in selling parts online. I can be reached at 732-842-4720.

It is clear that search engine optimization (SEO), social networking, and organic search marketing are tools that car dealers need to understand and utilize to compete on the Internet.

There are a good number of articles available to car dealers that advocate automotive digital marketing as an important budgetary item however for some managers it can be difficult to quantify the actual ROI to their dealership in any given week or month.

Short Term Digital Marketing

The work to build consistent cars leads from an SEO campaign is spread over weeks, months and even years. So you can imagine my excitement when I had a chance to measure the short term impact of a proven set of Automotive SEO strategies on a single promotion event for an Infiniti dealer in Arizona.

The event was held December12-14th in Chandler Arizona at the Adesa Auction Grounds; a direct to public sale of used Infiniti and Nissan Cars coordinated by Nissan and a third party marketing company. Eight area Infiniti and Nissan dealers were invited to participate in co-op advertising costs for the event which presented about 650 cars for sale over a three day weekend.

The event was not an auction. It was a factory direct sale of lease end cars, repossessed cars, and demo cars which dealers could sell at the event on a first come basis. The advertising campaign from participant co-op dollars would go into radio, TV, and newspaper ads. The company who organized the event also had a website which included the basic details on the event: date, location, and time.

Automotive Event Marketing Tactics

The marketing strategy set by my client was to secure appointments in advance of the three day weekend event. I was given three weeks' notice to come up with an Internet marketing plan. We created an action plan to determine what the dealer's staff would be doing and what my company would be doing.

The dealer would be contacting all unsold prospects in their database as well as starting a small pay-per-click campaign that would send direct leads to a microsite that I was to create.

I was to create the automotive marketing microsite for the event which would load all of the 650 cars into an online searchable database, a concept which no other dealers participating in the event implemented. The event site was http://www.arizonausedinfiniti.com .

An ADF feed was created from an Excel Spreadsheet provided by the event organizers. This ADF feed was also loaded into Infiniti of Scottsdale's used inventory which in turn was distributed to a number of third party car marketing platforms. This allowed the Infiniti dealer to promote the cars in the event to a very wide audience in a very short period of time.

Since Infiniti of Scottsdale was the only dealer that displayed the event inventory in advance of the sale, they had a distinct advantage on capturing and confirming pre-event interest. The sales staff could walk people through the site on the phone to find cars that met their budget and then book an appointment to see the car.

As part our Internet Marketing strategy, we emailed their entire customer database with a simple text email designed to get in under the spam filters and direct people to the event website. We issued a series of Internet press releases that directed consumer traffic to the site organically. This helped to compliment the buzz that was being created on radio, TV, and newspapers.

The Power of Automotive Press Releases

Since we knew that the traditional marketing campaign would generate online interest, we made sure that our site would come up in Google searches for a few variations of the event name. If you go into Google and type "Chandler Surplus Sale" or "Arizona car surplus sale" you can see that we dominate the first page of Google which lead to over 300 visits per day in advance of the car event.

In the three week prior to the event, we unleashed the Internet marketing "hounds" at a very reasonable cost to the dealership. We utilized social networking platforms, Craigslist, Google Base, and a few proprietary marketing models. The event site was getting over 300 hits a day from interested parties which were not generated by any of the co-cop advertising dollars for this event.

The results? Infiniti of Scotstdale had the most appointments of all Infiniti dealers at the event and they sold more cars to consumers than any other Infiniti dealer . The bottom line is that the event was very profitable and the ROI on the Internet marketing costs was very high. When the event was over, the General Manager clearly understood that the success at the event was a great partnership between his outstanding sales team and aggressive internet marketing strategies.

The residual benefits are that the 150+ leadsthat came into our marketing microsite are still being pursued and matched up with used cars from their used car inventory. The event created a fresh list of leads of Arizona car shoppers looking for used car values. The ISM is confident that he can turn these unsold event leads into sales this month.

The event marketing website will be repurposed for selling Infiniti used cars in Arizona year round. It has already started to gain some organic ranking for Infiniti used car searches in Arizona. It's great to know that when the pressure is on, organic search marketing and Automotive digital marketing techniques can make a short term difference and return a fantastic ROI. The long term benefits of SEO have been discussed on this forum at great lengths. In this case, a short term Internet marketing campaign outside of Pay-Per-Click, resulted in outstanding results.

Nissan and Infiniti are the latest to announce that they are not going to participate in the North American International Auto Show in Detroit next January. This news increases the count to seven car companies that will skip the 2009 Detroit Auto Show.

Nissan and Infiniti, which normally have large displays at the show, will not have a public display of vehicles. Earlier this year, Mitsubishi, Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, Suzuki and Land Rover all said they would not attend the 2009 Detroit show. This seems like additional anecdotal evidence of how fear and panic have spread into the overall economy.

Where I live in New Jersey, local restaurants that were once thriving are now 25% full on weekends. I visited the Borgota Casino two weeks ago on a Friday night and at 6:00 PM, there were two people on line to check. On a Friday the line is normally 15-20 people deep.

Local car dealerships are very concerned and many are drastically cutting back on spending. This new announcement from Infiniti and Nissan sends another wave of panic to the markets. This decision begs the question; what comes next for the auto industry?

Pulling out of any major industry venue may be knee jerk reaction compared to just cutting down the budget with a smaller footprint. I don’t understand the politics of the show but it seems like the baby is being thrown out with the bath water.

If you would like more information on the show, use the website link below:

http://www.naias.com

January 17-25, 2009

Cabo Center, Detroit Michigan

Automotive advertising agencies – you are being called to task. It is very common for car dealers to have their ad agency create a sheet of monthly specials like the one shown for Audi cars. These ads are used in local newspapers but they are also being used for dealer websites.

Unfortunately, the ad agencies are not telling automotive sales managers that these graphical contribute practically NOTHING to attractive car shoppers via Google and Yahoo search.

Most traditional automotive advertising agencies don’t understand search engine optimization (SEO). They didn’t grow up with SEO. Their job is to produce auto ads every month, on schedule, and they are happy for the business.

Well, if I was the owner of a car dealership, I would not be happy how these ads are being used on the web. You see, these ads have text that Google cannot index. Google cannot read the text on a photo. They are in effect a blank page to the search engine spiders. If car dealers expect for consumers to find their monthly specials online, they have to take the time to type the details in plain text.

You may think this is a simple task and one that should be commonplace on dealer websites. But take a look at 20 car dealer websites by clicking on their “Specials” page and you’ll find that most are graphical ads with the pertinent information on an image.

What to Do?

So should dealers login into their website administrative panel and add their car specials in text? This is where things get interesting. Creating a good looking text page on most automotive website platforms is not easy. Yes, most platforms claim that they have easy to use HTML editors but in common practice, they are not easy to use.

I have worked with a number of HTML editors on car dealer websites and they all are tricky at best. The skills to create “tables” or aligned text requires skills that are beyond the average Internet sales manager. Copying preformatted text into these embedded editors can cause more trouble that it’s worth.

So, Sales Managers take the least path of resistance and drop in a graphic advertisement on their specials page so it’s not blank. Just keep in mind that these graphical ads do ZERO for drawing new customer via search. Even worse, pages that only contain one image will most likely never even get indexed by Google.

If car dealers take the time to create car specials and incentives, they should also take the time to publicize them on the web. In an ideal world, you would have a dedicated web page for each car you have on special that month. This way the HTML Title, META Description and content can be optimized for the offer.

In addition to their own websites, specials can be posted on free services like Craigslist, MerchantCircle and social networking sites. The dealers, who make the effort to give Google what they expect, will be rewarded with better search visibility.

Car Dealer keyword competition is on the rise and car dealers will be paying more for targeted keywords in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search marketing .

As the stock market fails to provide emotional support for a stunned consumer market, many car dealers are digging in their heels and fighting back. Recent data from our automotive clients indicates that car dealers are diverting monies from traditional advertising channels and increasing their spending on Google and Yahoo. From our customer surveys, monies once allocated to print, radio and cable TV are being reduced and moved to new internet advertising platforms.

The shift in car dealer spending has many implications. The cost per click (CPC) for popular automotive search phrases has been steadily rising in October and November of 2008. This is a clear indication that car dealers are embracing the fact that 85% of new car buyers are researching their cars on the Internet prior to a purchase. With cash flow tight and car sales dropping, Sales Managers are increasing their bids for the top positions in Google Adwords.

The increased keyword competition poses some interesting challenges for Automotive Marketing companies due to the risk of a bidding war erupting, and everyone involved being hurt. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is an important part of any car dealer’s digital marketing strategy. However, SEM alone can be very costly in the long term.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies can provide car dealers with sustainable, low-cost lead flow to supplement leads purchased through SEM. Automotive microsites are another tool which provide car dealers with a highly ranked website designed to capture local car buyer information. As PPC costs continue to rise, SEO strategies look increasingly attractive.

One SEO strategy example is a microsite designed for the release of the 2009 Infiniti G37 Convertible. We created a microsite on the domain www.infinitig37convertible.com for Infiniti of Santa Monica. It ranks #1 in the USA for the search phrase “Infiniti G37 Convertible” and is on Google page one for other search phrases like “2009 G37 convertible” or simply “g37 convertible”. The site had a low, on-time cost to create and has generated hundreds of consumer leads located in California who are interested in this new model. When the Infiniti G37 convertible finally is released in the spring of 2009, Infiniti of Santa Monica could end up being the West Coast sales leader for this car.

As car dealers look for effective marketing strategies, SEO and SEM will continue to rise to the top of a list of channels that produce the best ROI for local consumer car leads.

In time we'll also know more about using free services such as Craigslist and social networking platforms to attract qualified local car leads. The market is continually evolving and your automotive marketing strategies need to be evaluated on a monthly basis. Car dealers take the time to learn more about effective SEO and SEM strategies, by reading articles on DrivingSales.com, will be well rewarded in what looks like a very challenging year for car sales in 2009.

Google finally released a Search Engine Optimization primer that is easy to read. I would strongly recommend that readers download the PDF and pass it around your eMarketing team. The guide can be downloaded using the link below:

Google SEO Guide

The guide confirms many of the suggestions that have been made on this forum in the past. The booklet will be a review of the basics for some and eye-opening for others. If after reading the book, you compare what is on your website you will most likely find many opportunities for improvement.

Most car dealers who read the booklet will quickly find out that their website does not comply with all the guidelines in the book. Knowledge is powerful so the good news is you now have something from Google to discuss with your car dealer platform developers.

Many car dealer web developers will tell you that the booklet's suggestions are not important. This is because they can't fix their platform in any reasonable time to comply. If you want to rank in Google, my suggestion is to play by their rules. This is a good start to understand what Google expects to see on your website.

Car dealers across the country are seeing an increase in used car sales. I am now working on an SEO campaign for a Honda car dealer. One of the top priorities is to increase the sales of Certified Honda cars.

Since the Honda Certified project is just starting, I thought I would share with you how to use the ‘Google Keyword Tool’ to refine an initial dealer keyword strategy. Keyword strategies evolve over the course of a project, but the initial research into what consumers are tying into Google is extremely valuable.

You can use Google's free keyword research tool by using this link: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Keywords For Honda Certified Cars

A good keyword strategy will help direct the new written content that will be added to the dealer’s website. It will also serve as a guide for creating Certified Honda press releases and Certified Honda blog postings on social networking websites.

Google provides a free tool to query their database to see how popular certain search phrases are each month. Since we will be marketing Honda used cars on the Internet, we have to research the most popular phrases consumers use each month in Google. Here is a partial list of the data provided by Google:

• certified Honda - 18,100 per month
• certified Honda quote – no measurable traffic
• certified Honda NJ – no measurable traffic
• certified Honda PA – no measurable traffic
• certified Honda Philadelphia – no measurable traffic
• certified Honda phoenix – no measurable traffic
• used Honda quotes – no measurable traffic
• used Honda prices - 1,300 per month
• Used Honda - 368,000 per month
• Used Honda PA – 1,000 per month
• Used Honda NY – 1,000 per month
• Used Honda dealer - 2,900 per month
• Used Honda cars - 90,500 per month
• Honda used car - 12,100 per month
• Honda used cars – 90,500 per month
• Honda preowned – 5,400 per month
• Honda preowned cars – 390 per month

This research is important to determine which search phrases are the best to include in our targeted keyword list. When creating an automotive keyword strategy, it is important to let the data speak and avoid drinking your own Kool-Aid.

The data shows that consumers are more likely to type into Google “used Honda” as compared to “certified Honda”. Every month, 368,000 people type in “used Honda” as compared to 18,000 people a month typing in “certified Honda”. This knowledge is valuable in creating an effective Automotive SEO campaign.

Dealer’s love to use the word “certified” for their cars because they think the word “used” is not very sexy. That’s fine for internal printed documents and conversations with customers, but it’s not as powerful for Automotive Digital Marketing. I’m not suggesting ignoring the word “certified”, but it has to be placed in the proper priority for your keyword strategy.

If you were going to build a microsite for selling used Honda cars, this data would also help guide you to what domains to purchase. For example, based on this research I purchased www.honda-usedcars.com as a possible domain for this new project. I would not purchase www.certified-honda.com because the monthly traffic is too small.

Certified Honda Long Tail Searches

For example, if you are trying to capture consumers looking for a used Honda price quote, the phrase “Certified Honda Quote” would be a waste of time since no one is really typing in that phrase into Google. The more common phrase “Used Honda Quote” is also not a high volume phrase so that’s not a good choice either.

Slightly better, according to Google, is “Honda used car prices” which confirms that the word “quote” is not as popular as you would think. According to Google “Honda car prices” (1,600) or “Honda Prices” (33,100) would be a better choice to attract price shoppers.

An effective automotive digital marketing campaign has to include keyword research like what is shown above. This is only one part of a good Automotive SEO strategy but is a key part of the foundation for all work that follows.