Entries from November 2008 ↓

Selling Online #31 : Local SEO – It’s Not Just for E-commerce Any More!

November 1st, 2008 — Business, DealerNews, E-Commerce, Motorcycle Advertising, Resources, Search Engine Optimization

Every once and a while I’ll get someone saying to me, “Todd, you’re nuts to be giving away some of these ideas for free!”

Well, this month is another great example. As this is my last column of the year, consider it my early Festivus present to you. I guarantee that if you follow my advice in this column your dealership will absolutely, positively make significantly more money next year even if you don’t have anything to do with e-commerce.

I’m going to tell you about one of the hottest areas of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) right now: Local Results!

At the Search Engine Strategies show that I just attended in San Jose I heard several experts mention that as much as 40% of all web searches that have to do with commerce (i.e. person does a search for widget with the intent of buying widget) have an intent to transact locally if at all possible. Obviously for things like services, that number is more like 100%. Oil changes and brake jobs are not going to get killed off by e-commerce any time soon!

The secret is based on the fact that pretty much the only people that use things like a phone book to find a business are typically sitting in a cave and/or not all that interested in internal combustion engines anyhow (much to the chagrin of your pushy Yellow Pages sales rep of course).

What do people use instead? Why the interwebs of course! They open up their browser and type in things like “motorcycle oil change Las Vegas”, or “atv tires”, or just about any combination of powersports related keywords and a location. Even if they don’t type in an explicit location, most of the major search engines use a technology called IP address geolocation to figure out where they are to add it to what you’re looking for to offer up more relevant search results.

So when someone in your locale types “motorcycle oil change ZIPCODE” into Google (or Yahoo!, or Microsoft’s Bing) does your shop show up in the Local business results for motorcycle oil change near Your Town? Does your competition? How much more business would you be getting if you did?

How do you get in those results? Well, it’s a combination of having a website that is properly optimized for the kind of content you’re hoping to attract people for (for organic search engine results) as well as making sure that you have a business profile created on all of the major search engines out there (and any and all local resource sites that cover your neck of the woods).

If that sounds like a lot of work, you’re right, it can be. And there are tons of sites, firms and consultants that can help you out. Just Google terms like “local search engine marketing” to see how many. Sure, you can hire an internet advertising firm to help you out, but I’ll do you one better. Instead of paying some marketing firm to manage and place your ads and to do the required SEO activity, hire someone internally to not only manage all of these locally focused activities, but to also become your local community relationship manager.

I go into this idea of a Community Relationship Manager from an events standpoint in some detail on my site (http://tinyurl.com/perpetual-events), but it really becomes valuable when you have this same local expert manage all of your local-centric SEO/SEM activity as well. And unlike general SEO/SEM activity that really is a hard-to-master specialty when you are trying to rank for highly competitive keywords across the entire internet, local SEO/SEM is much easier to get your arms around internally (especially if you are not in a technologically savvy/astute area of the country and your competition has not caught on to the potential yet).

I can almost guarantee that the price you pay for the right person to manage your local presence will provide an ROI at least 3X what you would get if you spent the same money you are going to spend on salary on traditional advertising (YP, radio, TV, print, etc.). AND you have the additional benefit of being able to closely track how well the work/money spent on this person is converting to new sales. Try that with a TV ad or an increasingly expensive newspaper buy.

You of course need to hire the “right” someone to make this work out to its full potential. If you need help figuring out who the right someone should be, drop me an email and I’ll help you out with the job description as well as where to look.

There’s almost no limit to what your community relationship manager/local internet marketing person can be doing. Promote your business events using tools like Zvents (www.zvents.com) or MeetUp (www.meetup.com). Zvents is way cool because when you enter in a new event on their site in your profile, Zvents sends that event out to all the partners that are buying their event feeds that are pushed out. So just by posting your event on Zvents, local print and online (newspapers, yellowpages.com,etc.) and local search engines (i.e. MSN’s Live) will also have your company and event information thus dramatically magnifying the reach you have to get more customers into your shop (to see that reach, go here: corporate.zvents.com/company/media.html).

Finally, while there are currently very real benefits to getting your dealership’s local-centric online presence spruced up, in the future it’s going to become even more important. Pretty much all current and planned cell phones have some kind of GPS capability as well as internet access. Stand alone GPS units are going to begin adding real-time data that goes way beyond just traffic.

When a couple is out on their cross-country trip and need service immediately, they are going to whip out their Google Android-based phone (why do you think Google wants to play in the cell phone market? ADS!!!) type in “motorcycle service” or something similar. If your shop doesn’t show up and your competition (that read my column and did something about it) does, well my friend, you just lost money.

Happy Festivus!

Here’s a brief list of the major search engines and other local information providers to help get your dealership’s local presence up to speed (a side benefit is that search engines like Google will actually look at your listings in other places and use that information to help you rank in Google’s results).