The Most Disappointing Part of Our Dealer PPC Audits

There seems to be a “secret sauce” brewing at our company, not because we thought it was a secret but because we learned that it’s not getting done by others. We don’t believe in having a secret sauce so we’ll gladly share it with you. If you’re a savvy dealership, you may be as surprised as we were to learn that very few vendors are doing it today.

Before we start, it’s important to note that we found some pretty incredible PPC services out there in our journeys and we’re not trying to insult anyone who presented to us. After nearly 20 presentations, we saw some really good stuff and some mediocre stuff. One thing that was missing in all of the pitches seems like a nobrainer to us but it’s apparently more difficult than we would have thought.

There is no reason that we can think of that you wouldn’t want many of the landing pages built for PPC purposes to have great content and a permanent URL on the dealership’s website in order to optimize it for organic search as well. Part of the algorithm that affects Google PPC quality score relates to the way that pages maintain relevance. This holds very true for organic SEO as well, though there are additional factors to both sides of search. With that said, the core of both PPC and SEO landing pages is based upon quality and relevance. Why aren’t more companies double-dipping?

It befuddled me for quite a while until I was figuratively slapped in the face by a dealer. “Of course they don’t want those pages optimized. They only get paid to drive ad traffic, not SEO traffic.”

I felt silly. I’d love to say that it’s the productive mentality and aligned goals that we keep with our clients that made the answer so hard for me to get, but I think the reality is that I was just missing the obvious.

Keep in mind that there’s nothing wrong with not double-dipping, at least from a PPC company perspective. They are trying to do their job as best they can and that means focusing on paid search. However, it’s our opinion that if the goal goes beyond the static delivery of paid traffic and jumps into the realm of generally helping to sell more cars, the paradigm shifts. Suddenly, it makes sense to dealers and vendors alike just as it makes sense to us to bring the two together to build the perfect landing pages rather than automatically generated content on dynamic landing pages on and off the site.

We are continuing to expand our efforts looking at automotive PPC companies and we hope that others will step up. Building multi-purpose landing pages isn’t a requirement, but it would be nice to find someone who’s doing it.

Originally published at dealerbar.com on July 6, 2015.