It goes without saying that the auto industry is very competitive with huge marketing budgets and huge revenues monthly. Given that, you would expect auto dealers would have a blueprint for success when it comes to their internet marketing strategies. Surprisingly NO! Most of the dealers are clueless when it comes to Car Dealer SEO or Dealer Search Engine Optimization.
Ensuring paid search engine page rankings through PPC
As with all businesses, auto dealer websites have two ways to get top SERP (Search Engine Results Page), SEO and PPC. I recommend starting your business out with PPC because that is where most dealers put their online marketing budgets and where you get the most immediate results. Note I mention immediately. With PPC, a dealer is running a short term paid strategy to get to page one. The risk any business faces is that another competitor can outbid them for their most important keyword terms. This is why SEO is so vital to any online business.
Advantages of SEO
SEO is organic growth which cannot be bought through PPC type advertising. SEO is what you call organic growth and will not produce immediate results like PPC. It is a long-term strategy that takes a lot of time and patience. SEO consists of blogs and link building with which you are creating hundreds if not thousands of relevant links outside of your site, pointing back to your site. The search engines love this and consequently reward dealer sites that do this by increasing your online ranking. The ranking is very important as the goals are to be on page number one always & for FREE! SEO is important, and often an overlooked component of a successful digital marketing campaign. SEO doesn’t have an immediate effect, and a solid SEO plan could take months to build your site’s authority within search engines.
So, which is better PPC or SEO? The answer is neither as both are equally as important. PPC relies on paid advertising which easily brings your online business to #1 on search engines but you run the risk of potentially being outbid on your keyword. SEO is a slow and somewhat tedious process but pays off in the end when your automotive website ranks on page one.