Car Dealer Case Study

We compared our first full year (2013) of working with the example car dealership to 2015

From our first year working with the client to now:

  • Organic search visits increased 318.63% (from 17,036 visits in 2013 to 71,317 visits in 2015).
  • Direct traffic visits increased 328.77% (from 8,591 visits in 2013 to 36,836 visits in 2015).
  • Referral traffic visits (clicks from links on other sites) increased 167.41% (from 10,579 visits in 2013 to 28,289 visits in 2015).
  • Social media visits to the site increased 199.07% (from 216 visits in 2013 to 646 visits in 2015).
  • Paid search referrals to the site increased 399.66% (from 6,810 visits in 2013 to 30,775 visits in 2015).
  • Overall goal completions (people filling out contact forms, appointment requests, etc.) increased 84.62%(from 1,359 goal completions in 2013 to 2,509 goal completions in 2015.
  • Search Campaigns with Text Ads are appearing in top positions on Google Search. The advantage of top positioning allows the extra extensions to show on the ad: hours, phone number, locations, call-out extensions to highlight dealership accolades, sitelinks to promote car specials and finance deals.

The following are the general SEO tasks completed during the past several years in order to achieve these numbers:

  • Monthly link building and maintenance (removing harmful links, updating local listing information, etc.)
  • Monthly new content (blog posts, infographics, social media posts, etc.)
  • Keyword research and on-page optimization (every 3-4 months)
  • Event promotion and collaboration with related organizations (for example, 95.7 Ben FM in Philadelphia works with this dealership on many events throughout the year, so we frequently tag them in our social posts and photos related to the events. We also try to incorporate the dealership’s latest TV commercials in our promotion plans).
  • Technical maintenance (ensuring there are no broken links, duplicate content issues, canonical redirect issues, or other HTML errors on the site).
  • Creating monthly action plans based on the site’s individual performance against the most recent Google algorithm updates.

The following are the general PPC tasks completed during the past several years in order to achieve these numbers:

  • Display Remarketing Campaign to retarget to consumers who have already visited the site. Display Ads target: general dealership and specific models based on the audience we are remarketing to (see Figure 4).
  • Remarketing Lists for Search Campaigns are used to bid higher and show text ads on Google Search to capture consumers who are in-market.
  • Search Query Reports are run and reviewed on a regular basis to eliminate irrelevant impressions and clicks, thereby moving the budget to more productive keywords
  • Impression share is monitored and bids are adjusted to maintain top positioning and search share over competitors