SEO & PPC are both incredibly powerful tools in the automotive industry. They’re more often than not seen as competing sources of traffic and revenue for OEMs and retailers alike, but in actual fact, when looking into the most efficient marketing strategies possible, the two can actually work together in harmony with massively impactful effects.
What is even better still when using both of these channels synergistically is that they can be used for a range of different marketing goals. From awareness and brand building to sales and even eCommerce, using the two together is an ideal way to maximise marketing budgets and ensure your journeys are streamlined.
To understand just how this works, exactly, it’s best to first outline the process that OEM’s or retailers may take in order to begin the harmonising process.
Keyword research
At the core of both PPC and SEO in automotive, keyword research is the first step to success. Understanding what your users will be searching for and what they are looking to find is the fuel you need to ensure you are targeting them with the right pages, ads or content.
PPC Campaigns
Once you have an understanding of these searches and your users, you can then format this into a usable guide that can be the basis of your PPC campaigns. Whether it’s looking at content marketing for a new product launch or location or promoting sales for new or used products at any specificity or scale, this can help you do it.
PPC Reporting
After your campaigns have had ample running time, reporting can then take place to look at what kind of results you’ve been seeing. This might mean looking into your most used search terms, the landing pages of dynamic search ads or simply what aspects of your business have seen the best success. Once you know this information, you can make reports about what is working and what isn’t, what your users want to see, what they are finding, and what you can be doing next.
SEO Strategising
After your reporting is complete (although that in itself is an impossible task), you may begin to see some areas in which SEO can start to take the reigns. SEO for example can begin to take new keywords you are not already ranking for and make them into organic areas of your site, optimised for the same if not better result. you may realise you need more specific landing pages for product variations, or you may see a golden content marketing opportunity that isn’t being met. In any case, you can begin to make a strategy of keywords that can stop being paid for and start being caught on a larger scale for a lower budget. That’s even better for high CPC keywords.
SEO Application
Once you have this strategy in place, the next step in the process is of course the application of the SEO strategy. Again, that might look like making landing pages, outsourcing to a web dev team, looking at automation or implementation of things on new pages… the list is endless. What should happen however is that you begin to roll out the resources for this SEO work using the information that you have available about the results on offer if you succeed. That helps calculate ROI, and generally proves that the project is worthwhile.
SEO Reporting
Once your SEO efforts are underway, ideally, you’ll begin to see your site ranking for the keywords you have been paying for. As a result, you’ll then be able to take spend away from these keywords you have now captured organically, and as a direct result of that, begin to target new areas of keywords entirely.
In essence, this starts the whole process back from the beginning, with the end result being a balance of PPC and SEO both helping to make sure that you are always at the forefront of your consumers’ search journeys and ultimately giving you the best results you could ask for, all at efficient costs,
