Your review should highlight at least 3 points in the paper that is attached, You find to be particularly thoughtful or interesting or sheds light on or offers a new perspective on an SEO topic

Running head: Dealer.com SEO

Dealer.com SEO

Table of Contents

Identifying SEO Benefits……………………………………………………………………….3

On-Page Optimization……………………………………………………………………….....4

Off-Page Optimization…………………………………………………………………………..7 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………11

Identifying SEO Benefits

Dealer.com is a marketing brand under Cox Automotive, and I’ve been an employee at Dealer.com for over 2 years. From my experience, the foundation of this company was to bring the automotive industry online. Rather going to a car dealership to view their inventory, Dealer.com has built thousands of websites allowing the customer to browse for vehicles in the comfort of their home. Over the years, Dealer.com has built a whole platform of services that improve the car buying experience.

Dealer.com is the premier digital marketing solution and partner for today’s top dealerships and dealer groups. From digital advertising that automatically connects inventory to likely buyers, to best-in-class websites, digital retailing, SEO and content solutions, we deliver the integrated products you need to win more deals in an ever-changing automotive retail environment. And it’s all backed by Cox Automotive and supported by a complete team of experts aligned to drive your unique strategy. (About Dealer.com)

While the business is called Dealer.com, this is also the domain name of their website. Their business is tailored towards car dealerships, and the dealers who work there. It only makes sense to have a business called Dealer.com. In addition, it makes it easy for clients to remember their site URL as it’s the name of the business.

There could be various users that come across Dealer.com, but those who’ll be searching for what they offer as a business are car dealerships. It could be the owner of the dealership, a salesman, a general manager, ect. Whomever it may be, they all would reside at the car dealership. They could be from a newly opened dealership or an existing dealership looking for website providers. If they come across Dealer.com they’re looking for a new website. Dealer.com needs to draw that person into purchasing a website from them.

Once someone navigates to Dealer.com, there needs to be a purpose. From visiting the site myself, I found their strategy to be informative. This site is made to show who they are as a business, and how they can support you. Their navigation consists of a products list to showcase each product offered, who they’ve partnered with, and there’s links to support for existing customers. This will help attract future business, and also keep existing business. However, a customer (car dealerships) must first come across Dealer.com’s website in some way, and it's most likely from a lookup with a search engine such a Google.

In order for Dealer.com to gain future business they’ll need to ensure someone learns about them through their site. While its a good start with their business name being their site domain, search engines don’t know that on all relevant searches used. “The primary players in SEO are the user, the search engine, and the website,” (Revell-Love). If a dealer is looking for a new website for their dealership and searches for “dealership websites”, the search engine needs a way to find Dealer.com as an option. Search engines look at what’s on the site, and also what references the site already. Dealer.com will need to ensure their SEO is optimized on-page as well as off-page.

I can help Dealer.com create a SEO strategy where they’ll appear in the top 3 search results when relevant search terms are used. However, SEO takes time and constant maintenance because the trends and best practices of SEO are constantly changing (Surfaced Media). For example, search engines used to look for the exact matches of keywords. Today, search engines look for the meaning of the search. With my efforts, Dealer.com will be able to continue their focus on creating websites for car dealerships, while I help maintain their SEO for future business.

On-Page Optimization

SEO has grown over the years trying to better the user experience. More specifically, how they search for the most relevant content based on keywords has changed. Keywords played a big role in the past where if a site had a high usage of the searched keyword, it would most likely show up in the search results. “Google interprets the data on your website, and begins to form its own conclusions about what your site and your business really deliver,” (Demers). Rather looking for the keyword/phrase the user queried as a search, Google looks for the meaning and/or the user’s intent. This means Dealer.com can’t simply add keywords throughout their site and expect Google to find their site. Dealer.com needs to understand their users, and their intent.

Since Dealer.com’s main product is to sell websites to car dealerships, it would be clear the user is an owner of a car dealership. An owner may search “dealership websites” when looking to have a website built for their dealership. Google will most likely interpret this search as “automotive website providers”. It’s clear the intent is to purchase a website, and who can provide that to them. Google is now searching for website providers specifically for the automotive industry. Dealer.com should use keywords such as “automotive website industry” and “car dealership website provider” to target this intent.

In addition to understanding user intent, Dealer.com will also need to be understanding of keyword placement. The frequency of the keyword is less important than the placement. “Google breaks your site down into key areas, with meta information and headers taking top priority, body copy taking secondary priority, and side bars and footers taking the last priority,” (Demers). This allows Google to easily find relevant websites, but then relevant content on specific pages.

Dealer.com would need to ensure to apply user intent keywords in their title tags and meta descriptions for each page of their site. The rest of the content should flow naturally, but still be relevant to purpose/intent of the user. It would hurt Dealer.com to have a repetition of keywords in the body of the site. This can be considered “keyword stuffing,” which is frowned upon by Google. “Not to minimize the art of keyword targeting, but chances are, if you deliver content that is relevant to user intent, optimized keyword usage should follow naturally,” (Revell-Love). As long as Dealer.com understands their purpose and the user intent, they won’t risk keyword stuffing.

Keeping keyword intent and placement in mind, I Navigated to Dealer.com’s products dropdown in the navigation, and decided to do an audit on the “Websites Overview” page. To my surprise this page actually does target the user’s intent. The title tag is “Car Dealership Website Provider | Digital Marketing Tools | Dealer.com”, and it was previously determined that “car dealership website provider” was user’s intent. Also, their meta description is “Automotive dealership websites provided by Dealer.com are designed for desktop, mobile, and tablet, and with integrated analytics configurability.” This page is to showcase the features a Dealer.com website can provide a car dealership. Looking at the description, Dealer.com is providing another variation of keywords based on user intent. “Automotive dealership websites” is another way someone would lookup a website provider, so both the title tags and meta descriptions are well done.

The content of the “Websites Overview” page is very well organized. The heading of the page says “DEALER.COM WEBSITES Your personalized, customized, and optimized digital storefront.” These are less important, but alternative keywords that could help bring more uses looking for specific features for their automotive website. Further down the page they summarize each feature their web platform provides including a link encouraging the user to read in more detail about that feature. This page is readable to the user, and after viewing the HTML structure it seems easily readable for crawlers, too.

Dealer.com has successfully found who their target user is, and fully understand their intent. From the structure of their pages and the use of keywords for intent, they have some strong SEO. However, outside of paid search results, they’re not the first search result when searching “dealership websites.” This means they could improve somewhere. While the title tag is good, I’d suggest changing it to “Car Dealership Website Provider | Fast, Secure & Flexible | Dealer.com.” While “Digital Marketing Tools” was relevant, I don’t believe the target user to be searching with those terms. Rather, they’d be searching for a website provider that can provide a fast, secure, and flexible service. Having that in the title would help draw the user in even if this wasn’t the first result since they’re attractive words for any web service. Besides this minor change, Dealer.com has a very strong presence in SEO.

Off-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is only the first step for Dealer.com, they will need to leverage off-page optimization. Search engines use the internal cues provided by a website, but it’s the credible and authoritative external sources linking to the content that help validate their relevance (Revell-Love). Dealer.com will need to have a strong external presence to attract user to their site, as well as optimizing their content. I’ll be assessing how Dealer.com ranks when it comes to external traffic, how they compare to their competitors, and if they maintain a good social presence.

Since Dealer.com is a website provider for car dealerships, I found some of their competitors to compare with. Those competitors are dealeron.com, cdkglobal.com, and dealersocket.com. Using Alexa.com I can did a live comparison between Dealer.com and their competitors for historical traffic trends. Here I can see how Alexa.com ranks each website’s traffic for the past four months. The lower the number, the better it is. Seen in Figure 1, Dealer.com’s ranking reaches almost 20,000 where most of the competition is at 180,000. This means Dealer.com is ranking much higher than most of their competition. However, it would appear that dealersocket.com is their close competitor when it comes to ranking because they’re beating Dealer.com by a few thousand. With that said, it's interesting to see that over time both Dealer.com and dealersocket.com followed a similar increase/decrease in ranking. Currently both Dealer.com and dealersocket.com are on the decline, so something can be improved to bring the ranking back up.

Figure 1. Alexa.com. (n.d.). Alexa Rank [Historical Traffic Trends: Alexa Traffic Rank]. Retrieved February 2, 2019.

Off-site optimization is what helps bring in additional site traffic based on a number of things. Dealer.com should have backlinks from relevant/trusted sites, newsworthy content, and have a strong presence on social media (Revell-Love). Dealer.com has an “Insights” page on their navigation which provides many articles search engines can consider newsworthy content to link users to. If someone were to search for an article about marketing in the automotive industry, a relevant article from Dealer.com could appear.

While having newsworthy content is good, it also helps to have backlinks. “In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content, (Moz). If there many credible websites linking back to Dealer.com, search engines will see that Dealer.com is worth linking user to. Going back to Alexa.com I did an analysis on the total sites linking to Dealer.com. Currently Dealer.com has 2,172 sites linking to them while their competitor dealersocket.com only has 185 sites providing backlinks. This is a very large number of backlinks. Dealer.com needs to keep in mind that quantity of backlinks doesn’t mean as much as the quality of the backlink. “The search algorithms assign more weight to links that come from trusted sites that are authoritative and relevant,” (Revell-Love). Dealersocket.com only has 185 backlinks, and has a higher traffic rank than Dealer.com. This goes to show quantity isn’t nearly as important as the quality of backlinks. Dealer.com will need to reduce the number of backlinks used, and pay closer attention to who’ll be credible sources to backlink for them.

The last important element to off-site optimization is leveraging social media. Even if not many people follow Dealer.com on their social platforms, it's a way to post additional newsworthy content and backlink to their main site. If a user happened to come across Dealer.com on social media, they have another avenue to gain additional traffic. Dealer.com has social media links at in the footer of their website to Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. Google Plus and YouTube seem to be the least used social platform, but they have a strong presence everywhere else. There was an automotive convention called “National Automobile Dealers Association” (NADA) where dealer.com leveraged social media to promote their presence at NADA. Also, they leverage instagram and Facebook to promote their presence in the community. Any photo you see where people are wearing green shirts, you know Dealer.com was volunteering to help the community. This reflects back on who Dealer.com is, and may cause users to navigate to Dealer.com to learn more about them.

Overall, Dealer.com is ranked much higher than most of their competitors, and has a strong presence on social media. While they do have a lot of backlinks, they may want to clean out who is backlinking to them. Search engines like quality over quantity, and dealersocket.com is demonstrating that you can have much less, and still have a better ranking. If Dealer.com can improve on backlinks, they may get a higher traffic rank because of it.

Conclusion

Dealer.com has many positives when it comes to SEO on-platform and off-platform. Their company name is their domain name, they actively utilize social media, they provide keywords/phrases tailored the user’s intent, and they have backlinks across many websites. Compared to their competitors they’re ranked very high in site traffic. It would seem Dealer.com is well off, however, each area has room for improvement especially when SEO is always changing.

On-site optimization can be adjusted for Dealer.com’s benefit. Dealer.com has a strong understanding of who their users are and what they intend to do, but their title tags didn’t always utilize the best keywords/phrases on each page. I can ensure each page on their website is kept up-to-date with the most natural and relevant keywords/phrases. Especially when Dealer.com continues to release new products, I’ll be able to provide the best SEO on all new content.

Off-site optimization can be improved, too. Dealer.com has an excessive amount of backlinks. It’s good to have a lot of backlinks, but of credible and authoritative external sources. Dealer.com has over ten times the amount of backlinks compared to their closest competitor in site traffic. The amount of backlinks found could be diluting many good backlinks they have. I can help reduce any irrelevant backlinks, so they’re only backlinking from quality sources.

One of the last areas I’d like to address is their social media. Similar to backlinking, social media is another way for various people to come across Dealer.com. That user can then navigate to Dealer.com if their social media intrigued them to learn more about their business. While they have an account on all the main social avenues, they don’t consistently post. They’re good about posing on Twitter and Facebook, but they lack posts in Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus, and LinkedIn. I can ensure that each social platform is used, and updated more regularly. If Dealer.com is posting relevant and newsworthy content in multiple areas, they’ll be more likely to appear in various search queries. It also is a way to connect with their local community that may not know who Dealer.com is.

Dealer.com is a digital marketing business, and their industry is always evolving. Keeping up with the changes in SEO is a challenge in itself. Dealer.com needs to know how to keep their content, keywords, and phrases relevant to their evolving business, but also how SEO looks at the information. If they utilize my services, they’ll be provided the best practices of SEO that is going to best fit their business.

References

About Dealer.com. (n.d.). Retrieved January 19, 2019, from

https://www.dealer.com/

Alexa.com. (n.d.). Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis, & Website Ranking | Alexa.

Retrieved February 2, 2019, from https://www.alexa.com/

Demers, J. (2018, November 15). Are keywords still relevant to SEO? Retrieved from

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2390744/are-keywords-relevant-to-seo-in-2015

Moz. (2019, January 22). Backlinks | Learn SEO. Retrieved from

https://moz.com/learn/seo/backlinks

Revell-Love, C. (n.d.). Week 1: Lecture: Introduction to SEO. Lecture. Retrieved

January 15, 2019, from

https://champlain.instructure.com/courses/1052839/pages/week-1-lecture-introduction-to-seo?module_item_id=24535993

Revell-Love, C. (n.d.). Week 2: Lecture: On-Page Optimization. Lecture. Retrieved

January 26, 2019, from https://champlain.instructure.com/courses/1052839/pages/week-2-lecture-on-page-optimization?module_item_id=24536001

Revell-Love, C. (n.d.). Week 3: Lecture: Off-Page Optimization. Lecture. Retrieved from

https://champlain.instructure.com/courses/1052839/pages/week-3-off-page-optimization?module_item_id=24536007

Surfaced Media. (2017, October 11). Here's Why Your Business Needs to Outsource

SEO. Retrieved from https://www.surfacedmedia.com/outsource-seo/