Automotive Search Marketing Architecture (ASMA)
For many car retailers, their inventory pages make up
over 85% of the total content pages on their website. Organic search
optimization and search ranking are heavily skewed to reward good content and
good SEO architecture. So with this in mind, every dealer should know the
strengths and weaknesses of their inventory listing module. This knowledge can
then direct your efforts to promote and sell cars in the Internet.
I created the ASMA Checklist to make it easy to compare different inventory
modules for their search engine optimization potential. Some dealer inventory
modules are optimized for search marketing and others are not. Use this grid to
score your site for important SEO architectural factors. This document will
guide you on how to collect the data for the ASMA checklist.
If all the items in the checklist are “Yes” then you have an outstanding
opportunity to market your cars for model specific searches in Google, Yahoo and
MSN.
Other factors, not included in the ASMA checklist, will determine the overall
ability of your inventory module to sell cars once a consumer lands on the page.
The ASMA checklist is only evaluating the search marketing strengths and not
design and interactive aspects of inventory modules.
On-Site Hosted Inventory – This is
the hardest one to determine unless you have asked your vendor about this in the
past. You want your inventory module hosted onsite and on your URL. The ideal
SEO friendly inventory module will produce unique pages for each car that is
displayed.
Offsite hosted inventory means that your inventory is sitting on an outside
website or web service and the pages are displayed in a “framed” page on your
site. Off-site hosted inventory does not help your SERP rankings because the
pages are not associated with your URL. An analogy is an electronic photo frame.
The wood frame is stationary (your website) but the photos are changing from a
memory card (offsite hosted inventory). The two are not hard connected and
Google will only reward your website in SERP rankings if your inventory is hard
connected.
If all your car detail pages are displayed on the same page like
“New_Inventory.aspx” and just the inside contents of the page change when you
click on a car, this is a framed off-site inventory system. To Google and Yahoo,
you have ONE index page regardless of you have 1,000 cars in stock.
To see if your inventory is hosted off site, click through a few cars in your
used car inventory and see if the URL name changes. If it stays the same, you
most likely have a framed off site inventory module. You can also do a “view
source” of the car detail page code and search for the word “iframe”.
If the URL name contains another website address, then the inventory module is
most likely being redirected to an offsite location.
Unique Page Titles & META Descriptions
– Google Webmaster Guidelines recommend that ever page on your website has a
unique page title and META description. Google’s webmaster tools even has a page
dedicated to point out duplicate tags for webmasters to correct so the knowledge
is ready available. To check to see if you site’s inventory module is producing
unique data, use the Google “site:” command.
Go into Google and type in this command:
site:www.yourwebsite.com
This will list all the pages indexed in Google. Since most dealer sites have
over 100 pages, you will have to click through a few pages of search results to
see all the pages in your site. If you see pages that have duplicate titles and
descriptions, the inventory module is not helping you market via organic search.
This also makes it very difficult for your site to appear for consumers search
that use year, make and model.
Unique META Keywords tag – It is
widely known that Google and Yahoo have ignored the META keyword tag and instead
have focused on other factors of web page architecture. I have included this in
the checklist so dealers to check and see if the keyword tag is being used
improperly for spamming.
A keyword tag should have 5-10 keywords that apply ONLY TO THAT PAGE. I have
visited dealer sites to find that they have 30-50 keywords jammed in the META
keywords tag. This should be corrected immediately because you do not want
Google to think you are trying to spam the index. If all your META keyword tags
are the same for every car in stock, don’t fret since that tag is basically a
neutral event now.
To view the keywords on any web page, right click your mouse on the outer edge
of the page and in Internet Explorer a choice will come up to “View Source”.
This will open up your text editor. The page will look like a foreign language
to many but it’s just the HTML code to create that page. Search for the word
“keywords” and you will find your META keywords tag.
Optimized URL Names – This is a
very important feature since if your inventory module has unique page titles and
unique META descriptions, this feature would put you ahead of the competition.
There are three common strategies for URL names, ranked from worst to bet.
-
Worst – One page name that has a replacing center section for each car. These pages could be named “new-inventory.apx” and “used-Inventory.aspx” so to Google you have two pages on your site for cars and NO unique tags.
-
Average – One page for each car but the URL string contains a data tag that no one will ever search. This is called a dynamic page and there are hundreds of articles on the web why dynamic pages are not helpful for organic search optimization. An example of a dynamic page is: /preowned/dsp_viewcar.cfm?vin=JNRAS08W58X205839
-
Best – One page for each car and the URL string has the year, make and model in the URL name. An example of this is: detail-2007-bmw-3_series-328xi_sedan-3452069.html
When you have completed your ASMA Checklist, you now have actionable data. If
you have discovered that your inventory module is not SEO friendly, then you can
look for ways to better promote your cars. There may also be an upgrade
available from your software provider so call them and ask. To be competitive in
today’s marketplace, you should have an ASMA compliant site.
You can also check your competitor’s websites to see how their inventory module
stacks up. I have tested about 20 dealer software platforms as part of this
research and the results vary across the board. If you would like examples of
any of these issues that are brought up in this article, I can send you links to
dealer sites that demonstrate the topic of interest.
Automotive SEO Specialists
Short Tail Search – A short phrase, used in Google that does not constrain the search to a small result set.
If a consumer is looking for an Infiniti car their first search is normally a short tail search phrase like “Infiniti” or “EX35”.
Long Tail Search terms – A longer phrase that limits the data set returned by Google.
Long tail searches are often the second search made by consumers if their broad search fails to deliver any meaningful localized data.
A long tail search would be “BMW X6 New Jersey” or even more specific “2009 BMW X6 NJ”.
URL Page Name – the unique physical page address for any page on a dealer website. The URL will start with http://
HTML Title Tag – This is the text that is in the upper most portion of the Internet Explorer browser and is formed by the <title> command in the actual HTML page coding.
META Description and Keywords – Two tags that can be added to every web page that can be used by search engines for indexing.
The META Description tag is often used in search engine result pages (SERP). Most SEO professionals believe that the keywords tag is no longer important for SEO in the major search engines.
