As a client or a potential client of Convertus, you may have questions about our SEO and SEM solutions.
You might be asking: What are Convertus’s SEO and SEM solutions actually doing to help you sell cars? Before we get to that, it’s important that we’re speaking the same language. So let’s begin with defining SEO and its often misunderstood cousin SEM.
The best way we can explain the difference between SEO and SEM is with baking.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is like baking a cake with a recipe for the first time. To the letter, you’re doing what the recipe says you should with the promise that at the end you’ll have a delicious pineapple upside down cake. Of course, you don’t know if it will work out when you start because you’ve never tried this recipe before, but you trust that following the instructions, putting in the work, and using a bit of your own baking expertise you can create a phenomenal cake.
SEO is like that.
SEO is all about organically raising your profile on Google through a number of specialized changes and tactics applied to your dealership sites so they better coincide with the rules and regulations set out by the Google algorithm. The better you follow the rules and provide what Google views as a quality user experience, the higher you rise — just like a cake.
SEM, or search engine marketing, is going out and buying a fancy cake you already know you’ll love at a bakery. It’s as effective at delivering a cake as baking it yourself, except it does have a larger cost, a lower risk of the unexpected, and a cardboard box in the recycling labeled “Bakery”.
SEM is all about using an intelligent application of a marketing budget to create targeted ads for the audience that you want most. It costs more, obviously, and it will say “ad” next to it, but it is on the front page and is therefore a perfectly valid route to take.
It’s all much more granular than this, as you might imagine, but hopefully you understand the differences pretty clearly. Next up we’re going to deep dive into our SEO offerings here at Convertus and how you will know we’re doing a good job once you have it.
Until then!
You’ve got the beginner course down, now let’s talk about Convertus’ SEO offerings.
The majority of our day-to-day work involves the implementation and maintenance of your SEO solutions, as well as the monitoring of a constantly evolving knowledge base of trends, changes in the algorithm, and industry-wide best practices. SEO is a long game that requires constant care and near endless dial adjustments of many elements of your website.
If you’re serious about earning a spot at the top, and ranking up is how we measure our success, then that vigilance and expertise is exactly what you are paying for.
The second question we get frequently is: “What am I paying for, exactly?” Which brings us nicely to a more detailed breakdown of our offerings and their value to your website’s performance.
We offer the following:
Initial and Technical Optimizations
Regardless of your package, when you first arrive at Convertus’s organic solutions, one thing we do is give your key pages, or the pages most visited by your customers, an SEO scrubdown. This sets them up for success on the Google algorithm and is really the baseline for everything that comes next.
This refresh includes the following changes and improvements:
SEO Title / Page Title: A unique title that is related to your website that essentially tells Google what your page is about and your company name. To see it for yourself, It appears on Google search results when hovering over the page tab in your web browser.
Meta Description: The paragraph description of what your page is about on the Google search results page – crucial, but often overlooked.
Schema: We toss in the Autodealer Schema for your entire website. This Schema is essentially extra code that helps Google understand what kind of business your site is about as well as fundamental information like address, telephone, hours, etc. This will help Google know that this information is useful to searchers, which makes it more useful to searchers, which raises it in the ranks.
Sitemap Submission: We send your sitemap to Google to crawl. In short, this is a map of your site that details which pages are accessible and where they can be found. By giving it to Google it ensures that your pages are visible to Google and therefore your searchers to cut off any unnecessary problems down the road.
H1: H1 is the visible header on your webpage. It’s usually some variation of the page title, and it gives insight into what the page is about. For example, if your page was titled ‘Ford Service in Made Up Town’ then your H1 could potentially be ‘Incredible Ford Service for Made Up Town Drivers’.
Copy: We go through and, in most cases, completely recreate your website copy to include the relevant keywords that will help it increase page performance.
GA Tracking
GA Tracking, or Google Analytics Tracking, is a unique and powerful bit of technology available to Convertus clients that can really bore down and understand the inner workings of your website’s performance on Google. With a skilled pilot at the helm, this tracker can give you extremely granular information about how and why you are meeting or coming up short on your goals.
Information about potential customer visits, how long they stayed on your site, what pages they went to after, and an impossible catalogue is all available and can be extremely valuable to any business with a mind to use it.
Creation and Optimization of Landing Pages:
A landing page is a specifically crafted page that uses keywords to make your site seem more relevant for specific searches. For example, if a potential customer is looking for ‘Wranglers in Made Up Town’ a specially crafted ‘landing page’ attached to your dealership’s site might be built with the key phrase “Wranglers from Made Up Town” embedded throughout. This would be seen as a value add by the Google search algorithm as it’s delivering exactly what the searcher is looking for.
A better user experience means you rise higher in the ranking.
Depending on the package you choose, signing up with us grants you between two and twenty custom-made landing pages with between one and ten additional pages added every six months!
Targeting New Keywords: Your keywords are essentially the digital arenas you want to battle other dealerships in. If your thing is Fords in Made Up Town, we are going to need to make you stand out against every other Ford dealership in this made up town. With creative and, depending on the package, varied use of these keywords we can pull you right through the ranks by offering several specific searches that make sense for your specialty and area. To put it simply, the more keywords your package allows for, the more arenas to contend in and the more audiences reached. This means a higher ranking for you, which means more people see what you’ve got and ultimately ends with them buying a car from you.
There is a science to how we implement both the landing pages and the keywords and it is referred to as ‘optimization’. We are about to get into it below, but the important thing to know is that we aren’t just setting up and forgetting your website. Including regular drips of changes, our team spends their days keeping our clients on the bleeding edge of the SEO best practices by subtly and frequently changing your site to better reflect them.
QA Google My Business Account: If you are a business owner in the year 2019 then you likely already know about Google My Business. As part of even our most basic package, we gladly take the reigns and remove some of the worries off your plate. We keep your information up to date and we monitor it to make sure irrelevant or distasteful comments and photos are quickly flagged and removed.
Google My Business Posts: As an additional service for our Advanced-Elite dealerships and auto groups we offer bi-weekly Google My Business post creation. If you’ve got a special, a promotion, or an event coming up, this is a great way to highlight it, and this comes complete in most of our packages!
Website Health Check-Up: No matter what type of package you go with, we maintain a constant vigil about the continued performance of your websites. This includes consistent monitoring of your Google Search Console to make sure it’s still being ‘crawled’ by Google and that there are no sudden and unexpected troubles that might affect your ranking. We keep an eye open so that you don’t have to.
Unlinked Mentions Monitoring and Pursuit: This one is often a surprise for our clients. Starting at the standard package we set up a series of Google Alerts to spot anyone who might be talking about your dealership online. At which point we encourage that person to add a link back to your website thereby increasing your Google credibility and ranking.
Every possible step we can take to boost you to page one of the search results – we take.
SEO Consulting: If you decide that you like the look of this whole digital marketing business and you want to strike out and try some exciting new stuff on your own, we are here for it. As a client of Convertus, we offer our expertise on any new digital marketing initiatives you come up with offering our views on its SEO implications or even how best to loop your current SEO solutions into the mix! We aren’t just your SEO provider, we’re your SEO resource.
Innovation: We are eternally seeking new ways to improve your ranking and that means we are constantly rolling out new initiatives, projects, and solutions that will get you out of the darkness of page three and into the vibrancy that only a page one result can bring. No matter what package you go with, you are the first to know about any of our new offerings and innovations!
With all of that in mind…
Let’s talk about our SEO packages, and highlight the leaps forward one might get between a Basic Package and an Elite Package.
Our SEO Packages
Basic Package
Beginning at the Basic level, you’re looking at a healthy offering of keywords which, as mentioned above, are the arenas in which you aim to contend with your competitors. This package also comes with a starter set of landing pages, which are the specialized sites that bring you up in specific searches. An additional landing page is added every six months for as long as you’re with us.
At this level, and indeed in every level after it, you are also provided with a fully-optimized refresh of your current Home, Inventory, Model Inventory, About Us, Service, Parts, and Finance pages.
Standard Package
At the Standard level, not only do we double the number of keywords and include a significant number of landing pages, we also include our Unlinked Mentions service in addition to the all the incidental services we offer at the Basic level. This is probably where you want to start if you’re dipping your toes into the world of SEO!
Advanced Package
When we arrive at the Advanced level, things kick into high gear. Another flush of keywords, along with doubling your landing pages, including a handful of complimentary extras to keep you top-of-mind in the world of Google. We are also at the stage where we add in monthly Google Posts along with Google My Business monitoring and an annual refresh of your website’s key content. If you’re looking for the package we recommend the most, it’s this one right here.
Premium Package
The Premium level is like a gas station in Dubai – full service. All of the above, plus more keywords and more landing pages. If you’re serious about SEO this is the package that will get you up those ranks the fastest.
Elite Package
Finally, we have the Elite level. It goes without saying that the number of keywords, landing pages (and complementary landing pages) is, frankly, staggering. At this level, we also offer the elusive Annual Model Review Page where we take a collection of your new vehicles and give them an all-star write-up. Not only does this boost you further up the ranks in a unique way, but we also go in deep and do the hard sale to a potential client about several of your new vehicles long before they arrive at your showroom. It’s a nice little bonus for people who are serious about their SEO.
Our SEO solutions are among the things we are most proud of here at Convertus, so don’t be afraid to book an appointment to chat with us about what we can do to get your dealership the digital recognition it deserves!