Many aren’t sure how to answer that question. It’s no surprise considering there isn’t one correct way to measure SEO strategy success. It’s going to vary from industry to industry and dealership to dealership. And it can even vary from one webpage to another.

Search engine optimisation is the technique by which you can ensure that your website comes on the first page of the search results. This is an internet marketing technique with the ultimate aim of increasing the traffic to your website. However, a lot of planning and strategising needs to be carried out before any effective results to be achieved. For this reason itself, it is recommended that companies or businesses should avail the services of outside SEO companies that specialise in internet marketing.

Spending money on SEO companies should be an investment

Spending money on SEO companies should be seen as an investment rather than expenditure. Some of the specialised services that SEO companies provide include online marketing services, pay per click services, online reputation management, search engine promotion, web designing and development services and content writing services. All of these services are designed to maximise your exposure to clients and potential customers. The first thing a good SEO company does is to analyse and evaluate your website. They try to identify the areas that need to be improved to help your business get better visibility online. After this analysis stage, they develop web marketing models designed to achieve good rankings on search engines such as Google. The best SEO service providers create targeted marketing plans to help websites gain popularity among the viewers.  For example, these services recommend content for each page of your website to increase search engine visibility for your website.

Investing in a good SEO service provider has a lot of advantages. The biggest one is the non-stop promotion that these SEO companies carry out on behalf on your business online. Wether it be a product or a service, good promotion is the only way that consumers get to know about it. Another advantage is targeting the appropriate audience. Since the main aim of any website is to increase views, SEO companies help direct the people who are searching for a product or service that you are providing to your website. This, in turn, means that there is a higher return on investment (ROI) for your company.

What Makes a Blog Successful?

While landing pages that focus on inventory or sales are an important part of your digital strategy, website SEO, from a content marketing perspective, begins with a blog. The content posted on a blog usually isn’t as sales oriented as it is on other web pages, but it plays a critical part in gaining and maintaining long-term SEO success.

Because blogs are so versatile, there are many types of content you can create for them. Generally speaking, the primary goals behind your website blog are to generate a consistent traffic flow and build brand awareness, helping to increase your domain authority over time (in other words, your standing in the eyes of Google).

Though a basic metric, consistent traffic to your blog, is a good indicator that the blog is doing its job. Because of the topics covered in your blog, many of the pageviews will be from areas across the country, and that is fine for this form of content marketing. Even when a blog post is targeted to your local audience and gets significant local traffic from posts highlighting community events or dealership sponsorships, etc., significant traffic coming through that blog post is still a sign of success. Again, the purpose behind your blog isn’t necessarily to sell a vehicle—it’s to generate a healthy flow of consistent traffic for building your domain authority and increasing brand awareness, so getting this content visible and clicked on both nationally and locally is your focus.

What Makes a Landing Page Successful?

Since your website blog is focused on building your domain authority and brand awareness, your custom landing pages can focus on attracting current car buyers to the site and guiding them along the buying process. This content should still get locally targeted, but you’ll have less concern about how much traffic is coming through these pages and more concern on the quality of that traffic.

When users land on this page, are they leaving the website, or are they clicking to view the inventory? If we want users to fill out a contact form on this page, are they doing so? Is this page attracting new website visitors through organic search, or are these returning users continually coming back to this page?

These are all questions worth asking when determining if your custom landing page content is successful, and some of these questions may be more important than others based on the page. For example, research-based landing pages are key aspects of our clients’ content strategy. This helps keep customers on the website by providing them with the information they need to complete their research on vehicles and compare models side-by-side. Because of this, overall page views aren’t the best way to measure success. Sure, you want these pages to get traffic, but most importantly, you want that traffic to convert. The term “conversion” can have many different definitions, all depending on what page you’re talking about. In some cases, it means a form completion. In other cases, it can simply mean clicking over to view the inventory. On our model research and comparison pages, for example, we include a scrolling vehicle carousel relevant to the model highlighted on that web page. This page module allows users to see specific models in the inventory and click to view them in more detail. So, naturally, we measure the success of these pages by determining how many of the visiting users click over to view the online inventory. Since form completions are much less common than they once were across the Internet, this goal of transferring potential customers from the research stage of the buying process to showing intent to buy a specific car is crucial to measuring the custom landing page’s success.

How Important Are Website Conversions?

Though much of the buying process can happen through the website, ultimately, the sale of a vehicle or service is happening at the physical dealership location. Because the digital and physical processes can become intertwined, the buying process for car dealerships can be quite fluid. This makes it difficult to pinpoint whether your SEO efforts have played a role in any one specific vehicle sale.

This doesn’t mean conversions such as contact form completions or click-to-call buttons are not important, but it does mean they aren’t always telling the whole story. Take, for example, a customer who searches for $0 down lease specials in their area via Google. They see a link to a page on your website advertising $0 down lease specials available during this month’s sales event. Rather than completing the contact form on that page, they click over to the inventory, where they view some of the models available to lease. After completing their research, they leave the website. The next day, they conduct another Google search for the dealership’s phone number and call the dealership directly through Google to ask questions and schedule a time to visit. Organic search optimization clearly played a role in obtaining that customer, but there aren’t any form completions or call tracking triggers to show for it. In a case like this, seeing that traffic is coming to the page and that the traffic is local with a low bounce rate, is likely a good enough indication of that page’s success.

Assisted Conversions Through Organic Search

You may also want to analyze assisted conversions in Google Analytics. A page or channel can play multiple roles in the conversion process, from being responsible for the first interaction a user has with a website to the last interaction. Assisted conversions show you pathways that contribute to a conversion, but don’t result in the final conversion. Since much of your SEO efforts focus on attracting the right traffic to the site and then leading them along the buying path, whether that is to inventory or a service scheduler. This is important to analyze if you want a true sense of the impact content marketing and PPC is having on your SEO strategy.

What Results Should You Expect?

The results you desire from your SEO investment won’t always be there from day one. An SEO investment is just that… an “investment.” It’s not the same as spending a specific amount of money and receiving a product, such as when buying a car. A better analogy is investing in a business, where success is measured over a longer period, and that’s essentially what you’re doing.

Just as with starting a new business, SEO strategies take time to develop and mature. They require a clear plan but must also remain fluid to confront potential challenges and changes in the market. When it comes to the content marketing side of your SEO strategy, it can take months to see the desired ROI through organic search visibility. That domain authority we talked about isn’t built overnight.

Moreover, a successful digital strategy requires communication between your dealership and those implementing your SEO efforts. Understanding your dealership’s goals and working out the best way to accomplish those goals takes time as that relationship develops, and as those goals evolve and change new strategies must continually be worked out.

How much should you be paying?

The answer to this question is that how much you pay for SEO services depends on several factors. First of all, how big is your website and how do you think SEO can help? Secondly, how much money can you afford to spend on SEO? Thirdly, have you thought about what kind of SEO service your site needs? The top-notch SEO services charge top dollar because they employ all level of staffs to help make their clients happy and their project a success. Such companies employ staffs ranging from receptionist, to cleaners, SEO specialists, Google adWord specialist, website designer with usability skills etc.

They will have an office suite to maintain and pay for, these basic running costs will be passed on to clients in their fee structure. Their services are expensive because they want to limit their client-based to large, high-profile companies with which they can work on a continuous basis. The bigger the company, the greater the need for SEO services, especially when new products and services are launched. They will also employ staff to work on online reputation management, although this is a separate issue.

Such SEO companies will charge in the region of $2,000 an hour for consultation only, however, if you approach Dgreat Solutions, you will expect to pay a fraction of that per month, even though they are reputable SEO company with highly skilled all in-house Australian based professionals.

Cost of SEO services as per payment models

Monthly package: When you choose to pay every month for SEO service to your service provider, the cost falls somewhere between $1000 and $5000 on a monthly basis. Majority of SEO companies offer their services on a monthly basis as search engine optimisation is a continued effort, and needs consistent performance to provide the desired results.

Hourly Consultation: You can also choose hourly consultation and pay the service provider on per hour basis. The cost in this category varies from $50 to $300 per hour. There are many companies who pay their service provider on an hourly basis as they can keep track of the work and performance delivered.

Project-based cost: Service providers also charge project based. New businesses that are simply testing the online variant can hire companies for one particular project. These service providers charge $500 to $2,000 for social media site setup, $500 to $7,500 for link profile audit, and $500 to $5,000 for website content audit.

Things to consider:

1. Immediate results – This is one of the most important things to be taken into account. No SEO service provider can guarantee immediate results. Millions of websites are working hard to come in the top results of search engines. With so much competition and fluctuation in the search engine algorithms, it is not possible to achieve desired results within a month or two.
2. Cheap SEO services – There is no such thing as a cheap SEO services. Service providers charge for their job and usually offer different packages to different clients based on requirement brought forth by the company.
3. Google number 1 spot – No SEO service provider can guarantee you a # 1 position on google within a short period of time. Be it an expensive SEO service or an affordable service provider. If they claim they are capable of getting you the number 1 spot within a short period of time, you might want to ask how they intend on achieving that and what strategy they will deploy. No SEO company can provide guarantee simple because of the constant rise and fall in the industry.