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Every dealership wants to perform well on search engines, especially Google, since it controls 70 percent of the U.S. search market. It’s like the old Willie Sutton line about why he robbed banks: You work with Google because that’s where the customers are.

Google has just made its biggest change ever to its search engine, a change which could hurt dealerships’ websites’ search ranking. Let’s start with the world before Google’s announcement.

When it comes to search results, there are two ways to perform well on Google:

  1. Organic search results. When a customer types a keyword into a search engine, your dealership shows up on the first page. Most dealers pay a search-engine optimization vendor to help them win
  2. Search-engine marketing. This refers to paid search services such as Google AdWords, which I’ll cover in a later post.

For dealerships, winning the SEO battle was already difficult for several reasons:

  • Automotive search is competitive. Automotive is a huge industry that includes dealerships, manufacturers, and third-party services all competing for the same handful of top results slots on page one.
     
  • Being one of the top results is crucial. According to Search Engine Watch, the first link on a search results page accounts for 53 percent of all organic search clicks, while the second link accounts for only 15 percent of clicks. Results one through five account for 87 percent of organic search clicks. In other words, if your site isn’t immediately visible, consumers are unlikely to find you on Google.

Google fundamentally changed its engine last month. Automotive SEO vendors historically focused on keywords to win on Google. This has become more difficult because SEO has changed considerably over the last couple of years, as Google has introduced a series of updates to its search algorithms that have caused a large number of automotive SEO tactics to be rendered less effective.

Google recently celebrated its 15th anniversary by announcing the biggest change ever to its search engine algorithm, called “Hummingbird” (Google says the name is based on the algorithm being precise and fast). The new algorithm moves Google away from its roots in keywords and more toward what is known as “Conversational Search.” Hummingbird also preserves but de-emphasizes Google’s original PageRank algorithm.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, put it best: “When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.”

Big changes for dealer websites on Google?

The strategies and tactics that many SEO vendors use were not designed for this new world of search. When car engines began to include more electronic and computer components, service technicians had to develop new skill sets or be left behind. The same holds true for your SEO vendors.

How do you know if your SEO vendor has been able to make the transition to the new SEO paradigm? Apply the same pay-for-performance model that I discussed earlier by measuring and testing.

Since every major website vendor supports Google Analytics, simply go to your Google Analytics dashboard (or a Digital Performance Management Dashboard like MAX). Once you click on the sources of your website traffic, you can find your Google organic search results.

The headlines here are interesting but can be highly misleading. You have to get behind those numbers to truly understand where your traffic is coming from.

Don’t assume that your SEO vendor delivered all of your organic search traffic. Looking at your organic search traffic is a good place to start, but it doesn’t actually show you what value your SEO vendor added.

For example, if a significant number of people already know your dealership name and are using Google just to find your website address, that’s categorized as organic search, even though your SEO vendor had little to do with those results.

So how do you know who delivered your search traffic?

  • Look at your keywords and disregard the ones with your store’s name in them. You’ve already earned these results through other means, such as traditional advertising.
  • What remains is what your SEO vendor has potentially delivered.
  • From there, decide if the actual traffic from SEO justifies your spend with that SEO vendor.

If you’re happy with the results, you know your vendor is winning in Google’s new world. Unfortunately, many dealers are finding that their vendor isn’t winning for them in this new world. If that’s the case, sit down with your vendor and use this data to discuss what they can do to deliver better results. Give them a month or two to improve, and then re-evaluate. (Crunching these numbers may be too time consuming in Google Analytics. If that’s the case, a tool like the MAX Dashboard can simplify the process.)

The bottom line is this: if your current SEO strategy doesn’t justify what you are spending, either find another SEO vendor who has adapted to the new world of SEO, or consider other spend options altogether. I’ll cover these options in a future post.

Pat Ryan Jr. is the founder of FirstLook and MAX Systems. His blog can be found at www.getrelevantordie.com.
 

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