Every dealership wants to increase website traffic, that’s why they spend thousands of dollars per month on advertising agencies to run email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and social media campaigns. Typically, agencies include search engine optimization in service packages to snag organic search traffic. Yet, organic search often feels like the red-headed stepchild. It doesn’t get the attention it deserves. This is a mistake.

Organic search traffic should and can be the dominating traffic source for your website. This traffic is more relevant, and the leads are high-quality. Think about it: traffic that flows from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, delivers visitors who are specifically searching for what you offer. They are essentially using these search engines as a phonebook to find your business (whether because of location, vehicles in inventory, service specials, etc.).

In my experience, dealers know SEO is important, but they sometimes forget why or lose sight of its impact. So, they go ahead and earmark marketing funds to optimize their websites. The problem is that too few agencies and dealers effectively monitor and measure what they’re getting for that ad spend. If you can’t measure it, how do you know if it’s working?

Ensure you’re getting the most out of your SEO investment with the following three strategies.

Know What You’re Buying

Consistently hitting the top of search engine results requires a constant stream of fresh content. This can include blog posts, relevant keywords, or changes to existing webpages. Many agencies offer packages to optimize your top five pages, for example. Before you enter into a contract, get a grasp on what kinds of changes the agency will be implementing.

Will it be minor changes to vehicle pages? Adding pages? Posting blog articles? Is the agency staying up to date with search engine best practices? Will they include an expiration so you can see what pages are relevant? You can only hold your agency accountable if you know what you're buying. 

Monitor and Measure Traffic

You need to be able to directly attribute phone calls, appointments, and sales to your SEO spend. These are the metrics that matter. Reporting on cost-per-click, bounce rate, and pages per session don't tell you what actions are actually working to convert customers.

The best way to track performance is to tie Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) technology into your Google Analytics. DNI assigns every individual consumer accessing your web pages a unique number, so you know precisely the online route they followed to land on your site.

A good SEO strategy should increase your organic traffic and conversions. After all, this traffic is already looking for your dealership in the first place. If DNI analysis reveals that organic behavior is not increasing over time, your money is not being well spent. 

Participate in the Process

You can't put the blame for lackluster organic search results solely on the shoulders of your agency. Too many dealers set-up an SEO strategy and then forget about it. The agency may reach out for help narrowing down keywords or brainstorming relevant and timely blog topics but never get a response. This leads to the agency merely doing the bare minimum to keep campaigns running. To get better results, you need to participate in the process. Remember, organic search delivers your highest-quality, lowest-funnel leads. It pays to put the time in to make sure customers can find you online.

Organic SEO is the clear champion of website traffic because visitors are deliberately looking for your dealership. Don’t make the mistake of setting and forgetting your SEO strategy. Put the processes and tools in place to review your strategy, measure results, and participate in planning to increase your organic web traffic year-over-year.

The shift from traditional advertising to digital advertising continues to grow. Today, it’s common for 90 percent of a dealer’s budget to be spent on digital channels. Yet, it’s very difficult for most dealers to directly attribute phone calls, appointments, and sales to that ad spend. Instead, you get metrics that don’t directly correlate to customer action like cost-per-click, bounce rate, and pages per session. As a result, you don’t know which campaigns and keywords are actually working to convert customers, and which are simply sucking money like a black hole.

It’s time to think about implementing Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) so you can attribute every phone call, appointment, and sale to its original lead source. Only this level of transparency will separate the high-performing campaigns from the weak, and ensure you’re maximizing your ad spend.

DNI is not a new solution. It’s been around for a while as a way to track phone calls from online referral sources and keywords. What is new are advanced capabilities that make DNI even more powerful. Today’s solutions assign every individual consumer accessing your webpage a unique number, so you know exactly the online route they took to find you. This information is funneled through Google Analytics for easy review and follow-up action. The phone tracking capabilities even record calls and capture how a call was handled for training opportunities.

This complete campaign visibility cuts through those metrics that don’t directly correlate to customer action so you can understand what’s truly going on and spend your money where it matters most. For example, I know of a dealership that was spending $10,000 per month on Google campaigns. Over that entire ad spend, Google Analytics showed the dealership received over 5,000 clicks, three pages per session, and a total cost-per-click of under $2. Sounds pretty good, right?

A deeper analysis using DNI unveiled that the metrics that really matter. It turned out that over 86 percent of all conversions happened in the Google Ads Campaign, centered around dealership general terms, like its name and location. This tells us that consumers were already planning to contact the dealership and essentially using Google as a phonebook. Spending on the campaign represented less than 14 percent of that $10,000 total ad spend.

The remaining $8,400 was spent on Google campaigns that ended up returning one phone call, 10 chats, and three completed lead forms. That’s over $600 per conversion! And that doesn’t even include agency fees. With this insight, the dealer shifted its ad spend away from campaigns that were eating money with little return and toward what was working.

Adopting new advertising processes can help you do the same. First, set up goals for all the different ways consumers can convert on your website. Second, set up tracking tools such as DNI through Google Analytics. Finally, regularly review and refine your plan.

I recommend reviewing campaigns at a minimum on a weekly basis. With DNI tied into your Google Analytics, its relatively simple to attribute the numbers that matter – phone calls, appointments, and sales – to specific keywords and campaigns. Then you can drop the campaigns and keywords that aren’t working and re-allocate that money to your top performers. Continual review also opens up opportunities to expand your reach with new keywords that can put your dealership in front of a whole new target market.

In our digital world it makes sense to funnel the majority of advertising dollars to digital channels. But don’t get caught up in the cost-per-click and bounce rate metrics that don’t directly correlate to customer action. Set a goal of attributing every phone call, appointment, and sale to its original lead source, because if you don’t, you may be throwing money away every day.