Auto Media Blog

If you read "Most Dealership Web Sites Need Work....", this is the 1st in a series of "required" fixes

Keywords-Avoiding WRONG & Poor Converting keywords.

Keyword Selection is....key.  What does that mean? It means find the keywords that most appropriately taret "the what" you are trying to sell, and "the where" you are trying to sell it.

The What

If you are a Porsche dealer should you care about the word "truck" as part of your keywords?  Will this word appear at all in your website?  How about "car"?  How about "used car"?  I would be willing to bet that not only are those words (along with dozens of other worthless keywords) are in your "keyword meta tags".  I am also willing to bet that when you are looking at your websites tracking/stats, that none of the visitors to your website have ever found your site based on any of those keywords!  Car dealers websites contain most, if not all the wrong keywords.   Keywords that dealers have been led to believe (by so called web experts) they should have.   In-fact most if not all of thse poorly selected keywords shouldn't be in your site or "keyword meta tags" and these broad words and phrases are most likely hurting your websites "findability".  Shocking...right, well not really.  The people dealers rely on "to know", often don't.  So what keywords should you use?  And, how should you go about selecting them?  We will get there in a minute.....But for now let's goto "the where".

The Where

The where is pretty simple...What areas is your dealerships trying to sell cars in?  In deciding what area, break it down by, State(s), County(s), City(s).  Some dealerships can focus on 1 state with multiple cities and counties.  Where as other Car Dealerships (like many in lower New York), have to focus on up to 3 States!  Dozens of counties and many cities. 

In case your curious as to why 3 states for many lower NY car dealerships - New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, better known as the Tri-state area.

So now that you have in mind generally what  broad areas you should focus on as  part of the keyword selection process, the next step is refining those broad areas down to specific select cities and counties to target. 

With so many cities and counties local to many dealerships and people willing to travel (thanks to viewing inventory on the internet) How do you find what areas to choose?  What would be the best keywords & the best converting keyword phrases?  Sounds TOUGH right?  It is not so difficult, we are going to get a little technical, but it will be pretty easy to follow. 

1. Go to this lnk: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-suggestions-overture/
2. Type in the State + Make of the car together i.e New York Porsche
3. You will receive the top 100 most searched results using that combination of words.
4. In that top 100 you will see what cities and car models compose what was most searched in that state.  Pretty cool right...
5. Now you have a basis for keyword selection, and can see what terms you should use.

There is a "BUT"

This technique is NOT the "end all" for keyword selection.  In fact, your dealerships state and car makes may not provide any meaningful results in the keyword selector tool, so here is the "nitty gritty" of what needs to be done in addition to the above tool.

1. Target your Dealerships State, your Dealerships County, and your Dealerships specific city.  For example; TOWN motors Porsche Located in Englewood, New Jersey.  The 1st series of phrases: Porsche Bergen (County), Porsche Englewood (City), Porsche New Jersey (State).
2. Target Surrounding State(s) if applicable, Surrounding Counties, and Surrounding MAJOR CITIES, (not small population towns that may or may not have prospective consumers.)  We are interested in the broad strokes here.
3. Continue combining car make + areas into keyword phrases.  I.e; Porsche New York, Porsche New Jersey, Porsche Connecticut.....etc
4. Then the focus on these next 3 factors are the same for every dealerships site whether your are Porsche or Hyundai:
1. "New" Porsche, Hyundai, Ford whatever...
2. "Used" Porsche, Hyundai, Ford whatever...most searchers do not use the words pre-owned
3. "Certified" Porsche, Hyundai, Ford whatever...
5. Start combining each of the "area" + "the car make" + new, used or certified.  For example; New Porsche New York, Used Porsche New York, and Certified Porsche New York.
6. Now add models to the mix.  For example; New Porsche 911 New York, Used Porsche 911 New York, Certified Porsche 911 New York....and so on by area and car model.
7. You will have 100's of keyword phrases & combinations, all relevant to your Dealerships Geographic Area + Make + Models.  Talk about "highly targeted"-

Now your keywords have gone from "Un-qualified" to "Super targeted"

This is allot of work, but the results will be un-matched.  The traffic you will get to your site will be people looking for your product, in your area.  Many SEO shops try and focus on very few keywords, BUT what makes keywords work in any site is the content, density and proximity.  3 Fancy terms that are very important, which we will talk about next. 

After all what good are keywords if they don't appear in your web site's content.  Coming up next, The single most important factor to getting your website indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN for MULTIPLE KEYWORDS! 

Content...Content and More Content.

Ahhh....Matching Keywords to Content = Getting found on Google for Multiple Keywords + Geographic Areas....That's the rub