Knowing where to spend when it comes to your dealership’s marketing budget can be a real challenge. As a general rule of thumb, though, when you’re mapping out your budget, thinking about adding more funds to the budget or considering making cuts, it’s essential to look at both paid (SEM) and organic (SEO) marketing and to never put all your eggs in one basket or the other. When it comes to automotive, SEO and SEM are both pieces of the puzzle you can’t live without; when done correctly, they work together to help you achieve success in search.
Defining Paid & Organic Marketing
Paid search and organic search are exactly what they sound like; you pay for one and earn the other. Managing paid search consists of bidding on keywords and purchasing landscape on the SERP (search engine results page). But you don’t just pay once; you pay for every click-through to your site. Managing organic search takes a bit more grinding; you must write high-quality content and optimize your site for the keywords you wish to rank for. Clicks to your organically ranking pages are free, though. So, paid search is quick-to-get rented space, and organic search is part of a longer game to earn and own space.
How to Make the Most Out of Each
When mapping out your paid and organic search strategies, your goal should be to have landscape on SERPs for all of the keywords that matter to you without spending money on every click. What this means is that you should be working toward building your site’s authority for all of the important keywords and filling in the gaps with paid advertisement as needed. Now, it’s important to note that this will take a ton of monitoring and hands-on work.
You’ll first need to understand your current SEO standings. What do you rank for already? What don’t you rank for that you want to? If you already rank well organically for a keyword, there’s no reason to bid on it and pay for clicks; you already own landscape on this SERP. If you don’t rank well for something, this may be a good paid search target, at least while you work on earning one of those organic positions.
In many cases, paying for a position on the SERP is good in-between while you build your dealership’s SEO strategy to earn a spot. Again, this will require paying attention to your organic rankings because you’ll want to shut off the paid campaign once you do earn an organic spot. Otherwise, you’ll be paying for something you already have.
You also might want to bid on keywords in far-away geographic areas, ones that you don’t see your SEO strategy working toward just yet. Having the option to pay for positions where you can’t or aren’t yet earning them is the perfect way to balance both methods and strategies without overlapping or wasting spend.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
We commonly find that dealers spend money in their paid search strategy where they simply do not need to. There are two specific scenarios we frequently catch: bidding on branded keywords and bidding on keywords for which they are ranking well organically. Now, we already touched on the latter; you don’t want to pay for a position you have already earned. But what’s this about branded keywords?
It’s simple. We see so many dealerships spending money on ads for their own name. But why? If someone’s looking up your name, they’re looking for you! This means that you’ve already won the customer over in some way or another and there’s no reason to pay for their click to your website. Plus, in many cases, you’re already ranking well organically for your own name, so this is just a double foul.
Don’t bid on keywords your SEO strategy has conquered, and don’t bid on your own name!
Don’t Waste Spend: Contact Wikimotive
Finding the right balance between paid and organic search marketing means monitoring your organic rankings and bidding accordingly. It means working on your SEO strategy and tweaking your SEM strategy behind it. This is no simple task, though, which is why we at Wikimotive are always here to help.
Whether you’re looking for someone to take a look at where there are holes or overlapping in your strategies or need a full site and strategy audit, we have your back. So, contact us today to schedule a free audit. We’re ready to help you dominate your market.