Time to prove a point.... Again

Not long ago a dealer.com executive made a comment about seo taking ages that looked like a back end way to market shoddy automotive search engine marketing software.  This was in an attempt to down play a comment I made about seo for him to look authoritative.

Within 4 hours I was ranking very well for dealer.com seo and many other derivatives of their name and product descriptions and still am.  When the article was first published another executive called me to "educate" me in automotive seo.  I will let you draw your on conclusions on who got schooled.

Now there is another automotive seo "expert" who makes plenty of automotive seo mistakes.  The biggest one is publishing content about very non competitive keywords and how well his clients are ranking for them.  Because he lays out his clients "game plan".

Now I am going to lay out my game plan to show how easy it will be to pwn these keywords in local and national markets by creating tons of affiliate lead sites.  The good thing is my clients will even benefit from these properties. 

To bad none are Infiniti dealers yet...

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, dealer.com

Using Supporting Properties to Make Some Jingle

I just set up a new "supporting property".  It will be for helping buyers find many dealers websites and providing valuable information on new domestic cars and trucks. While it will have some built in forms of monetization that is not the main purpose of the site.  My goal is to build an authority site about domestic vehicles.

This will give me an asset in my inventory that will help my clients and their clients.  This really has nothing to do with traffic arbitrage but it will be a valuable tool to use for automotive SEO.  I have a few other domains I will be using this strategy on as well. To exploit some automotive seo mistakes that other consultant in the niche make.

Chances are these sites will not cover the cost of the direct content or maintenance cost but that is ok for now.  Hopefully they will become good link bait which can be transfered to my customers who need it.  Mostly those needing search engine reputation management.

Utilizing Different Platforms for Traffic

If you want to leverage exisiting traffic to other websites you really need to take a close look at squidoo.  Squidoo is one of the top traffic sites on the web today and you can leverage this traffic by making lading pages for affiliate products or even brick and mortar business promotion.

Here is an example of or a page I made for a Cincinnati Ford dealer.  What is good about using squidoo is you can also find some great long tail terms that people are looking for online when searching for information about your business. 

So if you find a term that people use frequently then you can create other landing pages around those terms targeting in on those queries.  You landing pages should target the terms as close as possible as the traffic being delivered to them.

This is one thing that is missed in automotive marketing.  I have noticed increased conversions by tailoring landing pages in this fashion.  Automotive SEO has a lot of room to improve in this regards.



Technorati Tags: automotive seo, automotive marketing, cincinnati ford dealer

Making money twice

One thing that my craigslist service for car dealers does is give me access to tons of Cincinnati used car dealers inventory.  What is really cool about this service is that the listings also produce an rss feed.

So I can take those listings and repurpose then at places like squidoo, here is a lens I made for New Jersey used cars.  This gives the client an extra benefit.  They get an additional level of exposure and I get paid for the traffic the lens generates.  This is a huge win win.

Technorati Tags: cincinnati used cars, new jersey used cars, craigslist

Automotive Lead Arbitrage

As many of my readers know I do work in the Automotive Industry helping dealers in their online marketing efforts.  One of my new projects helping an Ohio Ford Dealer set up lead gen sites is actually been very rewarding in the sense it has inspired me to get back in the lead arbitrage game.

We made them a site to help them generate inquiries from people looking for a Ford F-150 in Cincinnati.  We used wordpress to create the site, but I see many more applications for this type of layout to generate automotive leads and sell them on lead exchanges.

Automotive SEO is fairly weak so it will be easy to to have site similar to the one above to capture local market traffic using search engine traffic  Fight now I have one site that is ranking nationally for the 2009 Shelby Mustang and is generating a lead a day.  This does not sound like much but consider this:

30 leads per month x $12.00 = $360 per month on a page I created over 3 months ago.  Now to just extrapolate that into thousands of pages.  :P

Playing with Squidoo Again

My business that provides Craigslist for Car Dealers is really taking off.  One thing this does is give me access to dealers used car inventory.  So now my VA is helping promote their inventory even more by using squidoo.com.

Here is an example of a lens she made for Brunswick Used Car Dealers, you will notice that it has an RSS feed of a dealers inventory and really is not designed for affiliate conversion other than a banner after the inventory.  That not the primary purpose of the lens in of itself.  It is designed to get people to call a dealer and view their inventory.

Chances are we will also create another property very similar to the one we found for a New Jersey used car dealer to help get more eyes on their inventory and increase phone calls to the dealership with some affiliate monetization in place as well.  This is what the big classified providers do such as Cox Auto Trader.  The difference is I do not charge thousands of dollars per month to distribute their inventory.

Eventually this type of Automotive SEO will help my customers get an even greater bank for thier buck.

Technorati Tags: automotive SEO, craigslist for car dealers, brunswick used car dealers, new jersey used car dealers

Technorati as a SEO tool?

Recently I have been helping a friend of mine on a couple of projects and have been optimizing some blogs in the different search aggregation services like Technorati.com and notice that my blog about Automotive SEO has lost all of its technorati authority.

This is really puzzling because it has has over 100 blog reactions, but I have noticed that the service seems to be going through some pains as of late.  It shows my last three post as being added three days ago and they finally have the right preview image up after over a year of waiting.

Hopefully it is an algorithm change they are going through and things will pick back up over time.  Technorati is almost wikipediaish but it just really puzzles me that this has happened.  I just hope that it does not hurt my site long term.