Is the Long Tail Important in Automotive SEO?
One thing is for sure not everyone in the Automotive Online Marketing Niche will ever agree on all things. I have actually become good friends with an individual a little over a year ago debating the power of the “Long Tail” keywords.
For those that do not know what the term Long Tail refers to I suggest you go visit Cris Anderson’s page with his description. One of the best ways to describe it here is in the universe of available keywords for your site long tail keywords will bring in more traffic than ranking exclusively for the tighter keyword combinations.
As an example:
If you rank on the front page of Google for the term “Chevy Dealer” the amount of traffic that it will generate for you would be less than the the sum of the traffic for such terms as Chevy Dealer Kansas, Chevy Dealer Kansas City, Chevy Dealer near Springfield, et al. Those list and combinations of words will provide more traffic than the “hot” keywords.
Unfortunately most vendor driven sites do not give us the ability to do the internal onsite optimization needed to rank for these long tail searches. Some people in the services side of the industry will claim this is the reason Dealer Micro Sites are needed as part of your portfolio, others will say having multiple layers of content for your dealership in many locations will confuse the purpose of your online marketing campaigns and the customers searching for your product.
I tend to believe both statements! It all boils down to the message you are trying to deliver!!
While many in the industry taut huge successes using microsites in driving leads through the door and into their CRM and others are some what disappointed in the ROI that they experience. I personally use various platforms for personal branding and to push surfers to our main site to search inventory.
I use various platforms such as blogs, hubpages and squidoo. Without a doubt squidoo performs the best in the amount of traffic it generates. Here are some stats from my squidoo dash board.
You will notice the number of hits versus the number of pages equates to an average of only 25 page views per week per page but in total that is an additional 227 additional hits a day to these multiple landing pages. Which on the whole rank for more keywords than I would even attempt to list here, around 500.
None of them rank well for an extremely targeted keyword but they do capture searches for competitors names, competing market areas and specific model location searches and they all push back to or feature specific inventory items.
Is it a lot of work? You betcha. Is it worth it? Absolutely!!
Not only does it send traffic to our main sight it also generates many phone calls and emails directly from those individual pages. Unfortunately I am not using a tracking number to measure those individual results but I can see one being added to them mix soon.
Are you doing anything out of the ordinary to increase the number of ways shoppers can find your offers?
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2 Comments
Matthew on July 6th, 2008
The best dealership website for SEO (and website in general) that I have ever seen is http://www.mccombssuperiorhyundai.com. One of the distinguishing features of their is the amazing search results you can get with the platform they are using. I believe they are using ClickMotive’s Fusion website solution.
(McCombsSuperiorHyundai Search Results) http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:mccombssuperiorhyundai.com&start=0&sa=N
Compare that to your dealership website by typing site:yourwebsiteaddress.com into the google search box.
If you’re using a good vendor, you’ll have a few hundred completely unique pages indexed. Most likely you will see less than 100 pages and most of them will appear nearly identical in Google. I’ve yet to find any other dealer website that can compete.
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