Something so amazing happened to me this week that I had to share with you. As you all know I run a search engine optimization company known as SEO for dealers. I have since broadened my services to include e-mail marketing and pay per click marketing so I have renamed the company as

Indie Results

. That however is not why I'm writing today. I have many dealerships as clients most of them have different website providers and it is a constant struggle to have them see me as friend not foe.

There has never been a situation where I've taken on a client and ever tried to undermine their website provider. In fact one of the first things I always do is forge a relationship with someone I can trust in someone who can assist me in optimizing my client’s website. This all changed with a single client and a single provider we'll call "the site provider."

I have been working with this client since early October and he has seen steady improvement every single month. We have a very good relationship and he sends me referrals often. If not for this tight relationship between myself and the dealership I may not have ever known what "the site provider" secretly tried to do. After a rocky start between me and his current website manager things have been smooth for about 60 days.  If you've ever dealt with a website provider for dealership you know they control nearly everything. It is of course in my best interest to have a great working relationship with him because I need many things executed on the backend that I do not have access to. So basically to sum up the history of this account, all sides have been happy even though there have been times when "the site provider" and I bumped heads in a struggle for control. In my opinion, it is simply because they are charging dealers for search engine optimization but they are not providing any. With the hiring of an outside search engine optimization company there is a very real threat of their lies being exposed and this is exactly what happened in this case. I want to preface the rest of this article by saying I've never heard of this happening before and it very well could be an isolated incident the very nature of them trying to claim credit for my services is the sole reason behind this article. Up until this point I have had nothing but good experience dealing with "the site provider" as a vendor I have often found that one of the most helpful when I need changes made.

 Because I want to cause any friction between my client and "the site provider" I will of course leave their name out of this, if the situation occurs or someone needs to fact check this story I am sure they will be more than happy on a one-to-one basis to confirm what I'm saying. Obviously it is very dangerous for them to endorse this sort of article and I would never wish that on my clients. This dealership has seen consistent growth each and every month, roughly 20% since I have been on board as their search engine optimization company. In the months immediately before taking over this account they are dealership website had fewer than 50 organic search referrals. For the month of December they are on pace for nearly 300. Is this astronomical growth, no but I should say they are on our lowest package and have planned for more of a long-term sustained growth rather than huge numbers up front. Overall site traffic is moving this growth showing roughly a consistent increase in organic traffic each month I have had this account.

Here's where all went wrong:

I received a disturbing phone call from my client yesterday late afternoon informing me that his "site provider" representative had called him to complain about me. Sparing you the details the representative was basically upset because I had requested a large amount of work be done to the website and have been very demanding. This is simply how I operate. I find that providing clear deadlines and staying on website providers is the only way to ever get them to do anything in a timely manner. My client of course defended my actions by saying to the representative that's what he's paying me for and that he should do whatever I ask. The "site provider" representative then went on to tell my client he is making a mistake by paying me to do search engine optimization for his website because he is already paying "site provider" to do it. Now if you have done business with me or know anything about how I do business you know that I have a very close relationship with all my clients this is the exact reason why.

The "site provider" Rep then went on to say that his website was one of the best performing sites over the past several months and that was a result of the search engine optimization service "the site provider" have been providing. My client went on to ask why hasn't the site been improving for the last year if it was because of "them" since he had been paying for the package since the beginning. To this question a "site provider" representative of course had no answer. My client then asked what search engine optimization services they were doing for him. To this question the "site provider" representative replied that they had done the link building and keyword research. My client then asked the logical question what links have you built for me. Now here's where things started to fall apart for "the site provider" since the site was brand-new in October when I took over the account it had zero back links. My client knew this because I told him, he also knew exactly what links I have provided because I provide this information biweekly in my reports. Of course the "site provider"rep could not answer this question and said that he would have to talk to his SEO team. He also said that he will call my client back within five minutes the call never came. He was caught in lie and "site provider" SEO service is nothing but a drain on money and they know dealerships will pay it because they can co-op the cost.

 This is my plea to anyone who is paying for any SEO service whether it be from "the site provider" or any website provider. Start getting involved in asking what you're getting for your money it doesn't matter if you're paying $500 or $5000 a month there are too many snake oil salesman and it really is sad when it comes from the GM endorsed company. To top it all off I noticed there team had changed some of the title tags I had set up to include cities well over three hours away from his target market essentially undoing the work I'd done in the first month for this client. When I asked the"site provider" Rep, first and foremost why they were making changes to my work and also why they would target will cities the only response he had for me was that his team had changed the title tag to address some negative trending. This came as an obvious surprise to me because the website has been growing every single month when I asked him to ask his team what negative trend in might be referring to he said he would have to e-mail me back I of course never got an e-mail.

I realize this post they seem like a rant but it really isn't and I know this post might seem as a backdoor way to sell my service but it isn't. As somebody who has his roots in the car industry shameful business acts like this still affect take me on a personal level. It's bad enough "the site provider" tried to convince one of my clients not only that the work I'd done for him was work they had done but then to try and say that they should stop spending money with me was over the line.  They even went as far as to tell my client to remove the link on his homepage that said my company did his Internet Marketing. In my opinion "the site provider" doesn’t  want anyone to know that they weren't doing it they didn't want somebody else to figure out what my client did three months ago and that is to get real search engine results you need a real search engine optimization company.

If you have any questions about your current search engine optimization company and you want to know what you're getting for your money please feel free to e-mail me or call anytime this isn’t a plea for new clients although of course we will take them, this is me against those who give search engine optimization a bad name. If you've any question at all what you're getting for your search engine optimization I would be happy to diagnose and dissect any work your current provider may or may not have done.

Jeremy Hambly

Indie Results

support@indieresults.com

www.indieresults.com

Real Results With Internet Marketing Is What We Do!

I am going to make my best case for why PPC is a total waste of money in the automobile industry, and I invite you, the dealerships, or PPC salespeople to join the fun and make your case.  This should be some fun, let’s keep it clean, and professional.  In the interest of full disclosure I of course sell SEO, in many ways a direct competitor for PPC marketing dollars. (Even though we don’t agree with the logic)  We do feel dealerships should do some PPC, as well as SEO, the problem we see are so few dealerships invested in SEO because there isn’t immediate results.  So in the sprit of the holidays, let’s get this rumble going!

PPC Is a Total Waste of Money 

Yes that’s right I said it!  Spending money on pay per click advertising is a waste for so many reasons.  It has the staying power of a two year old newspaper ad.  Although we do concede that targeted PPC can be quite effective, why on earth would anyone invest in something that will continually cost you money?  Your cost per acquisition will always be there, and the second you stop paying for it, your customer will disappear.  The fact is, even when PPC is executed perfectly, high quality ad copy, great converting landing pages and great follow up, you are still paying for every single click.

If dealerships can see that buying third party leads is a dead end, why can they not see PPC as the same thing?  You get no long term marketing benefits for your investment, and depending on the market you may or may not even have a chance to close those leads you are paying upwards of $20.00 each for.  We really want someone to make a compelling argument against this logic!  In an era where dealerships are trying to cut costs and maximize their return on investment, how can paying for clicks possibly fit that business model?  The sad thing is it still does for many dealerships.

Keep this in mind, in most markets you are bidding against yourself, OEMs are pouring piles of cash into online advertising and at least the big three all spend on PPC, why would you bid against yourself?  It just doesn’t make sense, bidding against your local marketing group for the same customers?  If you pull back and really look at PPC, your bidding against yourself by bidding against OEM’s, bidding against lead generation companies who want to sell you your own leads, and your competition all in the same market!

PPC Offers No Real Long Term Solution

Yes, that’s right PPC is a band aid, a temporary fix for lack of traffic to your dealership website.  Google and other search engines are built to serve up the most relevant sites, so why isn’t your site coming up in the top position?  It isn’t relevant, we don’t mean to poke fun, and are apprehensive to make such a blanket statement, but the fact is its true.  It’s not really the dealerships fault, it’s the website providers and their misleading talk about how their sites will be great for SEO, dealerships believe it and even pay for “SEO” from their website providers. 

A perfect example of this is Cobalt, (not to pick on them, there are plenty of other offenders) charged one of my clients for “seo services” for months, and never even bothered to customize the Meta descriptions and title tags.  Within 3 months on our smallest package he had increased his organic traffic 300% and that hasn’t gone away.  He has since stopped PPC advertising and diverted the money to SEO seeing similar increases consistently each month.  The fact is, PPC is great for getting dealers all excited about “traffic” to their websites, but it doesn’t offer any real long term solution to the overall problem due to their lack of relevance.  The important thing to know here is that if our client fired us tomorrow, he would still continue to receive that extra traffic, each and every month, generating more leads, and ultimately more sales.  Let’s see PPC do that!

The ROI in PPC Pales in Comparison To SEO

The three letters driving any good dealership are ROI, we don’t disagree that PPC advertising can provide positive ROI.  What we are saying is that it pales in comparison to the ROI a dealership will see with a good SEO service.  Below we will explain.

Let’s say XYZ dealership is spending 2500 a month on PPC advertising, and generating maybe $5000 in positive revenue, now in our opinion that number is high, but we will, in the spirit of the holidays give PPC some credit.  At the end of the year the dealership has made $60,000. (doubling their investment not bad!)

Now let’s say XYZ spend the same $2500 on SEO.  For the first several months, the dealership wouldn’t see any results, and lets say perhaps they generate fewer leads, that said leads generated from SEO convert much better and maybe the dealership starts to make $2500 a month after month 3.  At the end of year one, they will have made $22,500.

But, now let’s assume after one year you stop spending, PPC’s year two profits will be 0, while SEO will remain and bring you another $30,000.  Year two the same and so on, you see a trend forming here?  Although these numbers are somewhat arbitrary the point remains the same SEO offers long term increased profitability while PPC only offers ROI today. Turn off your marketing dollars, and SEO continues to run on empty while PPC is out of gas! (Like our car reference?)  In the real world dealerships have limits on what they can spend and often times two solutions will have positive ROI’s but the key is looking long term.

OK PPC people bring it on!

Jeremy Hambly
SEO For Dealers
www.seofordealers.com

Links! Everyone wants them, yet not many know how to get them or what the heck they really mean. A link occurs when one website mentions another website. Essentially, they give their readers an option to click and view your website. Search engines see these more as votes, so to speak. For dealership websites, getting a large amount of links is easy. Getting a large quantity of quality links is very difficult. There is a lot that goes into what makes one link more powerful than another. As far as votes go, they are not all created equal and quantity doesn’t trump quality. We are going to tell you a little about links in general, why they matter, and how Google ranks the power of links to your dealership website.

What Are Links & Why Are They Important to Dealership Websites

As we alluded to above, a link is essentially when one website mentions another. Of course that is perhaps a oversimplification but honestly at its root, that’s what it is. As a dealership, there is one important thing you should learn about when it comes to links and that is anchor text. Anchor text is very important in linking and with many of your links, you will be able to request what it is. Anchor text is what the link actually says. Many we see say things like “click here” and then when you click on it, it takes you to a website. That’s anchor text.

The reason it is important is because what a link says helps determine what the vote is saying, and having it descriptive is much better than saying “click here”. In simplified terms it is like having an anonymous vote changed to a targeted registered one. Google and other search engines prefer this greatly. If you have a Chevy dealership in Chicago, great anchor text would be something like “Chicago Chevy Dealership.” That lets the search engine spiders know what is on the other side of the link and they always favor sites that make it easy on them.

Dealership Website Links: Quality Trumps Quantity

Now here is where things get a little tricky. Google and other search engines do not rate all links the same. The quantity is meaningless if they are all from terrible, spammy websites. The idea is that you get links from only high quality websites. (For the most part.) Think of it this way, the more quality people endorse your product, the more quality people assume it has. That’s the whole reason spokesmen make so much money. They are staking their reputation on a product, for better or worse. Website links work the same way. Having a high quality website linking to yours, or on other words endorsing it, has far more power than just any old website. A good spokesmen, or in this case a quality website linking or endorsing yours, is very powerful.

Google and other search engines are going to promote dealership websites higher that have higher quality sites linking to them. This is the whole premise behind “link juice,” the idea that high quality sites have a certain amount of equity to pass on to sites they link to. The more “link juice” your site can gather, the more of it’s own “link juice" it has. To get off the juice metaphor, having more authoritative websites voting for you increases your own site's authority. (Which also gets into Google Page Rank, but we will save that for another post.) The idea is when you are out there getting links for your website, make sure you are searching for only the highest quality websites to get links from.

How Can I Know if A Website is Quality or Not

Well there is a variety of things we look at, but one quick easy way is to download the Google toolbar and check out the websites page rank. Google assigns pages a rank and the higher your rank, the higher quality Google sees the site. It works on a 0-10 scale. In our opinion anything over a 3 is a pretty decent site, but there are exceptions to every rule. You want to avoid having you link buried on the site or on a page with 100 other outbound links, such as a “our sponsors” page. Links from these pages are better than nothing, but if you are able to get better placement ask for it.

Avoid sites with tons of ads, especially if you are paying for the link, and seek out high quality local directories as well as national ones. Finding quality links isn’t an easy task even for us, but the main takeaways should be to, when possible, get good anchor text and look for links from relevant sites. A link from a car site to a dealership website will hold more value than a link from a poker site. For the most part, as far as links to your dealership website go, quality will trump quantity and always seek out the best opportunities to get links. Remember if you are putting your dealership name anywhere online, make sure you ask for a link. Most people will be happy to do it, and over time you will accumulate a huge amount of links to your dealership website.

Jeremy Hambly
SEO For Dealers
www.seofordealers.com