Classic Chevrolet Website Project and SEO Results

Everyone is the best at SEO

So by now you have heard of SEO and the importance of being found in the Search Engines. Not only have you heard about it, but every vendor that walks in your door is probably telling you how they do it better than anyone else. I know this because that is exactly what we say when we talk to dealers and the response is alway “that’s what everyone says”.

So how do you seperate the quality SEO vendors from sales tactics?

Be careful of the Spin?

Vendors of SEO in general can very easily ’spin’ what looks like great results in their favor, here are just a couple examples;

Spin #1: Targeting one or two long tail keywords/phrases as proof of success. An example of this would be targeting a phrase like “The biggest truck dealership northeast texas” to have this specific phrase come up #1 in Google. This phrase could possibly generate one visit per year (probably the person who did it showing another potential client :-)), but no real relevant traffic.

Spin #2: Another good ’spin’ is to use “Independent studies” as proof that your sites are the best, in this case read the study there is usually a slant.

Spin #3: Using the site: function (e.g. site:http://websitenamehere.com) to show you how many pages are indexed in Google. This is actually a great tool and something that you want to know, but is your site indexed AND relevant . So in other words it is great that Google knows that your site has pages and the more they know about the better; however, if they aren’t relevant and get found for common searches it just doesn’t matter.

Test for Results

So as a car dealership how can test if a site is actually performing well or better in the Search Engines? My belief is that the results speak louder that words. Of course your site analytic tool should tell you things like; how many visitors are you getting from organic search, how many keywords are generating traffic to your site, the number of pages that are being landed on directly from organic search, and much more. But you can only see those stats on your own site. How can you compare your site with your competition or a prospective website vendor? Using the RankChecker tool as described in the video allows you to check your site, a competitors site, or prospective vendors websites comparing apples and apples. The main reason I like to test a list of keywords as described in this video is to determine if my sites are relevant for what a dealership sells where they sell so that the site is found when real buyers are looking. You can definately add as many keywords as you would like or test on things that you see relevant. As a matter of fact if you would like to add keywords that you would like us to get Classic Chevrolet ranked for please don’t hesitate to list them in the comments below. We will and at least add them to our ranking reports to show you the true power of a well built site.

CSV reports of the Ranking that I ran per location. Notice that the Southlake report shows completely blank for every keyword, this is because the previous web provider didn’t target it at all. For the purpose of this example and as we get the site up and running we are including it. If it proves to not generate any significant traffic we will change it to another location or remove the 4th city all together.