Our subject is Rountree Moore Toyota, one of my clients, and their website, which can be found at www.RountreeToyota.com. When I first started working with Rountree Moore Toyota, they had so many things wrong with their website that it would take an entire post just to get through it. Suffice it to say, we were starting at square one. (Click here if you’re impatient and just want to see the numbers)

Our effort went through several major steps, and what’s amazing about the results I’m going to share with you a bit later is they were achieved on a site that was still a work in progress.  But here’s are some examples of the things we did:

The first step was to follow a lot of the guidelines I set forth in this post: Search Engine Marketing 1-2-3. I changed and updated meta tags, page headings and page titles. I submitted the dealership’s information to two dozen different search engines and directories.

That was just the first step. Then we undertook a significant redesign of the site, looking closely at what the then-current user behavior was on the site. We wanted to streamline a customer’s shopping process, making the site easier to navigate and highlighting key actions that customers would want to make. Consequently, we found a web site template from their provider that had some of the features we wanted, and went about modifying it.

We added a “Request for Quote” button to the top line. We stripped out extra links in the drop-down menus. We custom-built a new inventory page and landing pages for each particular model. We added descriptive free text to every page a customer might land on. We added content boxes at the bottom of the primary landing pages – the home page, new inventory and used inventory – to make them easier for search engines to spot. We added HTML links to the bottoms of several pages, both for ease of navigation and for optimization purposes.

We added a YouTube page, links to Facebook and Twitter pages; we tied their customer testimonials page into their DealerRater.com page, allowing them to embrace and manage their online reputation (as per one of my previous posts: “Online Reputation Management – The Future of Word-of-Mouth“).

As I said, there were lots of steps, lots of little details we addressed (far more than those I’ve mentioned), and it took a fair amount of time and thought. But in the end, the site is easier to navigate. More people come to it. They get more leads than they ever did before. But, to quote Reading Rainbow, “you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Here are the results from Rountree Moore Toyota’s web site for the month of May, as compared to their four-month average from January through April:

Without a doubt, those seem to be pretty impressive results. But there’s one question you have to ask: “I heard the auto industry was recovering; how do we know these results aren’t just happening everywhere?” I know I asked that question. Well, let me show you results from some other car dealers, during the same time period, using the same measures. This first dealership (”Dealership A”) is from a market of a similar size to Rountree Moore’s in Lake City.

OK, so you can see, over the same time period, Dealership A didn’t see any of the same sorts of growth that Rountree Moore Toyota’s site did. But then, I know there’s another question I asked. “Chris, these are small dealers. How did a dealership in a large market do?”

Well, me, I’m glad you asked. “Dealership B” is from a market almost ten times as large as Rountree Moore Toyota’s. They sell significantly more cars every month. Here’s what their results looked like:

So you can see, there was something that did change in May – there was an uptick in overall shopping. More people were looking for cars than did in the first four months of the year. Dealership B saw increases in traffic, leads, visitors, page views and search engine traffic. But what’s different between their results and Rountree Moore Toyota’s? They’re proportionate. Their site’s traffic rose with the tide, and not because they did anything to make their site more findable or more useful. The implication of this, to me, is that the results are scalable- if you can do it well in a small market and get increases, you can do it in a larger market and see proportionate benefits.

Rountree Moore Toyota’s site saw significant increases in what I call “usage statistics:” statistics that show how people used your site, instead of just whether or not they got there. Chief among these is, of course, form submissions (sales leads). Rountree Moore’s rose by 71% – far greater than the “rising tide.” Other “usage statistics” include page views and visit duration. For Dealerships A and B, there was no change in the amount of time people spent on the site – Rountree Moore’s went up by 25%. Page views for Dealerships A and B moved with the tide in their respective markets – Rountree Moore’s almost doubled (+80%).

What’s my point? It’s simple: this stuff works. If you performed this same analysis on a dozen other dealership web sites, you’d see the same things. Believe me, I’ve looked. Take a look at your business’ web site. Do you think you’ve done everything you can to make it findable, accessible, and useful? Do you think you get every sales lead you can out of it?

If you look at your business honestly and the answer to those questions is “no,” then maybe you should give me a call. I can help – the numbers don’t lie. All my contact information can be found here: Contact Us.

Folksonomy

Metadata

Social Bookmarking

Web 2.0

Wiki

World Wide Web

But on to other things. I read another great blog post from a few months back about “the changing face of search engine optimization.” It’s called, “The Face of SEO is Changing Are You?” and, bad grammar aside, it’s a good read.

You see, historically, the way that SEO companies did business was to pay for links and blog posts; they would pretend to be their client companies and post articles on various “fake” blogs. I say “fake” not because they were not actually created with blog software or anything, but because what makes a “blog” a “blog” is the human(s) behind it who actually have interest in creating community and having two-way conversation with their customer base. That’s an idealistic opinion, but you’ll see that sometimes idealism counts for something later on in this piece.

With regard to the paid links – you may recall that I wrote in an earlier piece that one of the key items that search engines look for in judging a site’s relevance is how many sites link to it. Well, an old-school SEO company will pay companies that create pages that are purely a collection of links. Have you ever accidentally mistyped a web address and ended up at a page that had a bunch of unrelated links on it? These pages are created by SEO companies to increase the number of incoming links to a site. Seems like a dirty trick, and it is.

Google serves almost 70% of all web searches.

But, because this is technology, it evolves. I mentioned idealism, and we’ve all been told at one time or another that idealism has no place in business. Well, maybe, but one exception to that rule is Google. Google is in a unique position in the business world – it is the 800 lb. gorilla in the most important kind of business of the next century: information management. Almost 70% of searching done on the Internet is done through Google outlets. So Google has the power to choose standards that all must follow. It’s a lot of power, and it can be abused, but Google does have certain ideals. Google’s corporate mission statement is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” And the truth is, “fake” blogs and “paid links” do nothing to add useful content to the Internet.

So Google is beginning to penalize companies that use these techniques to boost their sites’ relevance. Their goal, of course, is to reduce the number of pages out there that have worthless content on them, which will, naturally, make it easier to find the things people are actually looking for.

The author, Dave Freeman, put it well:

Well in times when businesses are struggling to stay profitable a website is a must for any business trying to attract new customers. If either your in-house SEO or your SEO agency is undertaking a link building strategy that includes buying blatant paid links then not only are they placing your website at risk of a penalty, they are also placing you business at huge risk of losing its biggest revenue generator and in these economic conditions that could spell the end for the business. What you have to ask is, is it worth the risk of using an SEO or a search agency that is stuck in the past?

Once again, poor grammar aside, the point he’s making is valid. Why waste your money on an old strategy that risks your site being banned by they #1 traffic driver on the Internet?

The key to SEO’s future is understanding how to embrace social media, build links based on legitimate content without resorting to “spamming,” and manage your site’s user experience so that when people come to your site, they’re landing on the page that is most relevant to them, and are able to find the information they want. It doesn’t take a lot to do these things, in terms of technical expertise, it just takes knowing how to look at a site critically and interpret the web site’s metrics to determine what people are doing on your site.

The bottom line is this: ask smart questions of the people managing your SEO business, and you will be in a better place to handle whatever the future holds.

Naturally, this is true for the rest of the universe of products and services. Cars and couches may have very little in common, but do you know what is common about them? If someone is considering buying them, they are probably going to search for them online, either to shop or to find a retail outlet to visit to do their shopping. Likewise business cards, bed linens, video game consoles, and almost everything else. We don’t even think about all the items we research on the Internet before we buy them anymore, but there’s a reason that “google” has become a verb.

We’re always searching, and our window to the world is the search engines of the world wide web. Search engines are that yellow brick road that leads to your door, if you let them.

I’ve talked about Search Engine Optimization and the basics of how to make your site more appetizing to search engines. The other half of the puzzle – the way to get more clicks to your site even if it isn’t completely optimized – is Search Engine Marketing.

And so we have the two things I can tell any car dealer (or almost any businessperson) without equivocation, that they should be spending money on. In this day and age, you absolutely must have an optimized and fully realized web site, and you absolutely must have a paid search campaign.  Because your web site is your front door, and the search engine is the street you’re located on.

Now, three quick reasons you should be spending on a paid search campaign:

1. Your site, even at its best, will not be served up for every relevant search term.  To get in front of as many of the right people as possible, you must pay to cover the “gaps” in your optimization strategy.
2. Search engine optimization feeds search engine marketing and vice versa.  The amount you pay for paid search clicks is dependent in part on how relevant the search engine determines your site is to the keywords entered.  Optimizing your site will increase your relevance, and if you “win” the click, your site’s relevance will increase, which will potentially decrease your cost on future clicks.  For more information on relevance, click here.
3. There are often third-party lead “aggregators” out there that collect lead information.  They then sell those leads back to the companies that sell the products that people were searching for.  A pay-per-click or other paid search campaign will typically supersede most third-party aggregators, if your web site is properly optimized.  Click on the screenshot at the right to get an example of just such a page.  In a future post we’ll talk more about why you’re better off developing leads through your own site than signing up for an aggregator service, and how to prove it for yourself.

So now we’ve answered most of the why’s of search engine marketing – it helps optimize your page, grabs searchers you might not otherwise reach based on your page’s relevance, and it gets you in front of competition that is using aggregator services.  So let’s talk a little about how much.

How much to spend on search engine marketing is a very difficult question.  On the one hand, search engine marketing is extremely powerful – it lets you reach people everywhere and anywhere based on what they’re searching for.  You can make your search ads appear globally or in the tiniest sliver of a single ZIP code.  You’ll appear in blogs, related websites and every other conceivable place through Google’s AdSense network and other similar systems.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed and think you can reach the entire world.  But if your site and your business are not equipped to service the entire world, it hardly seems worthwhile to try and do so.

Moreover, your site needs to be prepared to receive new visitors and offer up the things that they are looking for.  So you need appropriate landing pages within your site that address those items.  For instance, if you are a video game retailer, you might have a Wii page, a PlayStation 3 page, and an XBox 360 page that offer games, accessories, et. al., so that in your paid search campaign you might have three different sets of keywords to reach those people.  Because it hardly seems sensible to send someone who searched for “wii controllers” to your home page, where they have to wade through menus to get to the thing they were just searching for, right?

It’s obvious that there’s a lot to consider, and it’s easy to overspend and waste your money if you don’t have an educated eye to help you figure it all out.  I don’t offer pay-per-click management services, because it’s a huge time commitment on its own, and it’s just a part of the bigger picture.  But what I do offer is to help companies find the right partner for paid search marketing – one that knows their industry and concerns, as well as best practices.  I teach the questions you need to ask, the results you need to be asking for, how to interpret them, and how to get the best out of your provider by providing feedback that helps guide them and increase your success.

That’s what it’s all about, right?

"Billions and billions" of websites.

There are a lot of websites out there.  Like stars on a cloudless night, there are so many.  So many you may have flashbacks to Walter Cronkite narrating your trip through Spaceship Earth.  The truth is, there are too many to really know anything about most of them. 

So what do search engines do?  They use robots!  Robots that manually call up every website on the Internet and “read” it.  These “web spiders,” as they’re called, pick out items to categorize and classify websites in order to allow search engines to give you the results you want.  I google “Spaceship Earth,” and Google finds all the websites and images out there that fit that set of keywords.  The question we’re going to answer here is, “What are the basic items that search engines use to categorize your website?”

There are a lot of ways to answer that question.  First, let’s ask an even simpler question: “Why does a search engine care what results it returns to users?”  Of course the answer is elementary.  Search engines want to give you the best results so that you’ll come back and search with them again.  If you don’t come back, they can’t sell ads, and they quickly go out of business.

That’s what makes Google so special in the world of search engines.  Google has for a long time been regarded as the “best” search engine because they typically return the best results. 

So what are the “best” results?  Results that provide the user with a link to the page they were looking for, whether they knew it existed beforehand or not.  So, in other words, Google and other search engines want to determine how “useful” your page will be to their users, and for which searches.

So what makes a site “useful?”

1. Text that matches the search query.  So if someone searches for “yellow labrador puppies,” and you are a lab breeder, you might think about having those words on your site so that the search engine can pick it up.
2. Page headings that match the search query.  The title of every page on your site should represent what it actually is.  Many website providers and systems do not automatically do this for you.
3. Relevant metadata.  Meta tags are the information “underneath” your site that search engines read as part of the effort to classify your page.  They’re not used so much in the mainstream anymore (i.e. Google and Yahoo), but the “description” meta tag is still used to describe your site in search engine results.
4. Recency.  In other words, newer pages are better.  The example I always give my clients is this: if you’re searching for information because you just got diagnosed with cancer, which article are you going to read, the one dated 2004, or the one dated 2009?
5. Age of the page.  This may seem to be at odds with the previous item, but it’s not.  If your site is established and has a history of more clickthroughs, it will be served up more often in the future, especially if it has been updated frequently and/or recently.
6. Back links.  In other words, how many other sites link back to your site?  Because creating a link takes effort on the part of the website creator, it is assumed that if someone else links to your site, it’s because they found it useful.
7. Total clickthroughs.  This one is self-evident.  Search engines don’t care about fairness.  If your site is the most frequently clicked based on the search terms entered, it will be the first one displayed the next time someone enters them.

So how does one break through?  Be aggressive about the things you can control.  You can’t control the number of times your site gets clicked on directly – Google will catch on to that.  But you can offer your site up as many times and in as many places as possible.  You can create other pages that link back to your site (Facebook, MySpace, etc.).  You can update your page frequently, and make sure that all your page titles are appropriate.  You can spend on a pay-per-click advertising campaign to help improve your ranking on searches you’re not currently optimized for.

You can do all of these things on your own, if you have the time and the technical ability.  But a smart Internet marketer can not only help you check off all the items on the list, but help you make sure that you’re doing it all right.