More Bad SEO Reports: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 5)

More Bad SEO Reports: How to Spot & Stop SEO & SEM Waste & Fraud (PART 5)

TRANSCRIPT: Now domain authority, that’s an important piece right? And I want to see my domain authority go up. Again, we’re not a Google analytics class let you’re SEO explain to you what domain authority is, but here’s what I want to know. Domain authority’s up, great. Why? Right, they need to be able to explain why your domain authority is up in words that you can understand. See with all of these metrics you need to ask your SEO this. What did you do? What did your company do specifically to improve this metric last month? Question number two, did it work? And they’re going to tell you, “Oh sure everything we did worked.” And you’re going to say, “Great, show me.” Show me the vendor journal that you keep for my dealership. Vendor journal, yeah. If someone is actually completing SEO work for you, they should be reporting back to you the work that they were able to complete. All of the things that they did in a journal, right?

Now, you’re going to be shocked at what they report. This didn’t happen in Austin, but I’m going to use Austin as an example. I was working with one of my clients and we wanted to know what they did last month to help the dealership rank higher in Google searches for relevant keywords. And they pointed into a blog that they wrote last month and the blog was How to Winterize your Car for Austin Winters. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Austin, Texas but nobody winterizes their cars okay, even though this year’s been a particularly bad winter for Austin. You still don’t need to winterize your car for Austin, Texas. Again this wasn’t Austin, Texas, but it was a market just like Austin. Is that fraud or laziness? I don’t know. But, I do know this, it did nothing to improve their search visibility.

Now here’s the bottom line on all these SEO reports. The information that you get from these SEO reports provided by your vendors is mostly worthless drivel that’s thrown into pretty charts. There’s generally nothing actionable in what is presented. For example, should we spend more or less on SEO? You can’t tell from these reports. Should we change our keyword focus? You cannot tell from these reports. And what are the current threats to our search visibility? You cannot tell from these vendor reports. So whether your Gene Steffy Ford or Fair Oaks Ford what can you do to protect yourself from this fraud and/or laziness?

First, think about this, consider not buying SEO from your website provider. They should be giving you their very best right out of the box, right? Isn’t that what they sold you? Second, review the reports and if there’s no actionable information, meaning I’m looking at their reports and I see that they’re showing great results but I don’t know what action to take. Spend more, spend less, do this, do that. If there’s no actionable information, which there won’t be on their reports, cancel your SEO spend immediately. And third, SEO vendors cannot serve two masters. All right?

Make sure your SEO provider grants you an automotive market exclusive. Yes. The great ones will, because they’re hands on, because they can’t take a thousand clients. They can only handle about 50 to a 100 clients. See it’s not enough, right, that they just give you a make exclusivity in your market. Since most dealers real needs for increased search visibility rests with used cars. Right, you’ve probably come up pretty good for Ford dealer near me when people are near your Ford dealership. But where you really struggle with is for used cars.

So again, this is Fair Oaks Ford in Naperville and just some of their Naperville competition. Now where would they rank if you searched used car dealer near me on a mobile device? That’s where they need the SEO help. And what if the same SEO vendor was providing SEO services to every little red dot that you see? They can’t serve two masters. They certainly can’t serve 20 masters. And by the way, if you want to know the distance from top to bottom on this chart, it’s about three miles. It’s about three miles top to bottom. So you can’t have an SEO provider that’s also providing Toyota of Naperville SEO services and Fair Oaks Ford SEO services. You just can’t do that, because something’s got to give. Somebody’s got to be better than the other. Somebody’s got to be number one.