Where Are You Missing Web Traffic?

We do a fair amount of search engine optimization (SEO) for car dealers and I often use them as an example of how important it is to think like your customer. It’s fairly common to find the words “Pre-Owned Vehicles” on auto dealer websites, mainly because the manager or marketing department prefers that terminology over calling them “Used Cars”.

Unfortunately for these dealers, most people don’t set out to buy a pre-owned vehicle. That isn’t how people refer to a car that isn’t brand new, and it’s not the way they search either. Let me give you a quick example of how a car dealership might be missing traffic and sales this way.

Google’s keyword tool indicates that the phrase “used Mercedes” (or used Mercedes Benz) is searched globally about 1.2 million times each month while “pre-owned Mercedes” is searched only 165,000 times. People looking for a Mercedes that isn’t new are seven times more likely to call it used rather than preowned.

Try this. Search Google for a “used Mercedes in Chicago”. One dealer I don’t currently find in the top 100 organic results is Mercedes of Orland (a suburb of Chicago). Now search for “pre-owned Mercedes in Chicago” and you’ll see this same dealership in the top 5 natural results. That is a nice position, but they are essentially missing out on 80-90% of the available traffic for the more popular way people search, simply because they don’t want to label their Mercedes as used.

I was talking with a potential customer on the phone today when I realized that we’ve made the same mistake. While we mention the phrase “search engine marketing” on more than 20 of our web pages, not once do we refer to it as SEM. SEM can have a couple of different meanings as it relates to Internet Marketing. Some of our customers use the term SEM interchangeably with PPC (pay-per-click). We tend to consider SEM as the umbrella over all of the services we offer to improve our customer’s website visibility in search engines (SEO, PPC, and Social Media Marketing being the main components). In either case, it is a popular search for our services.

Just as some car dealers are missing out on traffic by avoiding the phrase “used car”, we’ve haven’t done a good job of optimizing our website for SEM. Now it’s time to fix that problem. The lesson here is to listen to your customers to learn how they talk about the products and services you provide, and make sure you’re including that terminology on your website or blog. Words, phrases, and in this case – abbreviations matter!