Articles: Marketing & Sales

Search Engine Marketing Tools

Dave LaLonde is Senior Vice President and Search Engine Optimizer for Auto Credit Express. The ACE Group is a special finance total solutions firm offering their dealership partners entry level and advanced sub prime training, an easy to use online software, and an expert auto sales lead system.

Nowadays, most everyone uses a software application to perform a task related to their job. In most dealerships you will find two types of software, DMS software to manage sales, accounting, parts, and service and CRM software for tracking client and prospect data. For the eight years I was performing Sub Prime F & I, I found our special finance software priceless for desking deals, maintaining a booked-out inventory, and submitting deals electronically to lenders.

In my current position, I still consider the software products I use to manage online advertising campaigns and increase traffic to my websites, priceless. This month I would like to share with you some of the available tools and software applications used by top sites and Search Engine Marketing and Optimization firms.

Keyword Research Tools

What do people in your area search for when they go online to buy a car or seek help financing a vehicle? When setting up a keyword targeted search campaign you could guess or you could use one of the many keyword research tools available online. Each Pay Per Click marketing service offers a free version of this, however, the results are geared towards their search algorithm.

For instance, Yahoo Search Marketing uses keyword mapping for certain words and they ignore plurals most of the time. To them, the following words are identical: auto loan, car loan, auto loans, and car loans. If you were looking for suggested keywords related to the keyword auto loan Yahoo's suggestions would miss the top three related keywords. This may work fine when setting up a campaign for Yahoo but I would not suggest using their tool for your organic search campaigns, use an independent product instead.

PPC Management Software

Each month I see more dealers promoting their sites via Pay Per Click marketing services such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. The price per click for each individual ad should be monitored daily to ensure an appropriate ROI. PPC management software does just that. Most of these software applications allow the user to specify their max bid, optimal position, and the interval of time between checking the bids. It may take awhile to set-up the software, but after you're done your campaigns should require far less monitoring time and your ROI results should be better.

Search Engine Optimization Software

In many of my previous articles, I have compared search algorithms with cooking recipes. You can compare SEO optimization software to a cookbook. Within the software there is a multitude of recipes for top placement amongst the various engines. Most of the SEO software that I have used, contains web page analysis, submission, rank and back link checking modules.

Web Page Analysis

Web page analysis software will compare the key ingredients on your web page with the top placing sites for a targeted keyword. Armed with this information it is much easier to determine how you should change your web page element recipe for the search engine you are targeting.

Site Map Generator

According to sitemap.org, "sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site." Google, Yahoo, and MSN currently support or plan to support the XML sitemap protocol.

Since the average person does not write XML code, many of the SEO software products are adding this module to their programs.

Web Site Submission Software

Web site submission software automates the process of submitting your site and its pages to the various engines. I've never used these modules. If you build a search friendly site and use an XML site map, the spiders will find all of your pages.

Rank Checker

It takes a lot of time to determine the placement of your site by manually searching amongst the various search engines for your target keywords. Most of the optimization software I have seen will automate this task for you. Simply dump in your target keywords and the software will produce a report that displays your rank amongst the engines for your target keywords. Most of the engines frown on the heavy use of this software, as it bogs down their system.

Link Popularity Checker

Checking the amount of websites that link to your site is a simple enough task. Simply search for link:http://yourwebsite.com. Each of the search engines have a different algorithm they use to determine if the link meets their criteria so you will find the results vary by engine. Though this task is simple and not necessarily worthy of automation it is nice to have a historical record of your link popularity. This module is included with most optimization software products.

Link Management Software

Link management software is used to record links coming into your site from other websites, and links placed on your site that lead to other websites. The practice of sites trading links with each other is called Reciprocal Linking. The use of Reciprocal Linking has declined over the past year but it still can play a significant role in your optimization efforts.

In addition to recording reciprocal links, this software is used to verify the links are in place at some point in the future. More often than not, link management software is also used to gather lists of links leading to your competitors websites, and solicit those site owners to place a link from their website to yours. Some of the link management software products incorporate quality control issues such as the IP address and Page Rank of the site linking to your site.

If you have a third party design, develop, and host your website, you can still use most of the product above to promote your stores website. If you decide to develop your website in-house you will need web development and content management software in addition to the search engine marketing tools discussed.

Prior to purchasing software that helps automate some of the routine tasks involved with search engine marketing, I would suggest first attempting to tackle each task manually. If you do this you will be better able to determine which tasks you want to automate and which tasks that you want to do manually. Regardless of which tools you choose, if you use them as they are designed, on a consistent basis, the overall effectiveness of your online advertising campaigns and the traffic to your websites should increase.

Published in World of Special Finance Magazine
January Issue 2007