The use of title tags in SEO strategy has been around for a quite some time. Many people acknowledge that they are a very important aspect of on page optimization. Once their level of importance is understood people usually want to “optimize” them with “keywords”.  Most end up increasing the length of their title tags to encompass multiple locations and phrases assuming this will send more traffic to their website. This is their first mistake because they haven’t done any research or even analyzed their current title tags.

Title Tag Research

This is one of the most important parts of re-writing your title tags. In fact, it is probably the most important part of any updates to meta information. Just like many other situations in life it is always important to get a feel for what you are getting yourself into. Searching around for title tag best practices is a great start. One of the first things you will find is that there is a lot of concern about title tags being too long and irrelevant. Read different blog posts and read what people have tried in the past. You will quickly find out that many suggest to keep your title tags under 70 characters. This includes spaces as well as dashes and pipes. If you happened to come across a more recent post you will see Google cut most of them off between 60 and 64 characters.

Analyzing Your Current Title Tags

Go through a large majority of your title tags. You can do this by going to Google and putting in “site:autodealershipmarketing.com” (replacing autodealershipmarketing.com with the website you would like to test). This allows you to see how your title tags and meta descriptions will show when returned in the SERPs. Now that you can actually see what is being represented in the search engines you realize how much wasted space there is. Go through several pages in the search results and make note of different sections involved in the title tag. You will see that many of them tend to be quite similar (even exact duplicates are likely on an un-tamed website or blog).

Rewrite Your Title Tags

After you have analyzed your current title tags we can finally start getting our hands dirty. You’ll want to open up the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This will help you compare keywords that you are using to see how much traffic they receive. Try different combinations of words in different orders to see how they compare. You can then determine which of them are the most important. Now you will want to pull up the place were you edit your title tag(s). Read over it multiple times so you know every word that is being used. Go through and remove all filler words such as “a” “and” as well as commas. Your next step should be to remove all other keywords that ranked lower when doing your keyword research and put in your top keyword phrase. By following these steps your title tags should be much shorter.

Second Thoughts

If you are having second thoughts on removing keywords from your title tags you should not worry. Through your keyword research you discover some words are searched more than others. Maybe you ran into two keywords or keyword phrases that were really close. This is where some don’t want to think of an alternative and just include both which makes for a less targeted title tag. A solution to this would be to use the second keyword or phrase on its own page. If you are planning on going through every single title tag on your website you probably want to make a list of the keywords you have removed as well as new ones you found while using the keyword research tool. This will allow you to create new content on your website/blog.

Why Shortening Title Tags is Important

Throughout time search engine scientists have discovered that having longer title tags reduces their effectiveness. The longer the title tag is the less powerful and relevant it becomes. Having a short title tag that gets to the point usually makes them less confusing to a potential customer that comes across them as well.

Everybody and their mother is an SEO expert in today’s digital world and everyone seems to think that they know THE BEST new thing out there. Well, today I am going to tell you about it…. Because obviously, I know what it is, right?

While I may not know everything and I can’t read the future, one simple thing that will help your SEO is video. Video is a great tool that many people are not using right now and Google takes video into account when it ranks websites.

Optimizing video for your car dealership is relatively simple and can be done rather efficiently. All you need is a simple video camera, a YouTube account (or other video service provider) and someone to film and talk. You can talk about anything in the video related to your car dealership, a specific vehicle in your lot, or life in general (kidding, probably no one cares).

One example that I am going to throw out there for you is the title for a video Mazda6 in Chicago. If you have a video that you have optimized for this then you stand a pretty good chance of ranking for that term when it is searched on Google. Now, keyword research is still an important thing to do for Video SEO but you get the idea.

So, now that you have come up with a great SEO optimized title and have uploaded your video to YouTube you will want to put in keywords for your video. These keywords are important since the people that will be searching for your videos will used these to help find it. Use relevant words and keep it simple, you don’t want to overthink something that most people just type “Car” into.

Everyone knows that content is important on your site because the search engines “crawl” it and see the keywords that are used in it. Well, video is different because a search engine can’t “read” the video content. This is where YOU come in. Not everyone wants to write a transcript of the entire video and post it under the blog, understandably. Most of the time it wouldn’t make sense and it would be time consuming. This is the case where you can write a short paragraph or two and use some of the keywords that were in the title and the YouTube uploading.

Another brilliant tool that I personally use is called SpeakerText. SpeakerText takes your YouTube videos (for the small fee of $2 per minute) and makes a transcript of the video to install underneath your video called the Caption Box. This is then imported into your web page or blog and features the video and the transcript. Now, the best part about SpeakerText is that it has a tool in it that allows you to Tweet certain parts of the video by highlighting those phrases. This is called Quote Links. Quote Links, once tweeted or shared on social media will send a link that when someone clicks on it will take that person directly to a certain part of the video. This allows dealerships to “Quote Link” directly to a keyword that is searched frequently and take someone right to their video. BOOM-Video SEO optimized.

Obviously I have just spewed a ton of information at you and this is probably going to take a little to digest. Here is the simple version, Video SEO works. Right now is one of the best times to get into it because while it IS competitive, it is less so than it will be.

If you would like more information on any of the things I just talked about please CONTACT US. We have some highly advanced people here that can help you out and provide some Video SEO services to you. Keep checking back because there is going to be more written about Video SEO and I will dive into SpeakerText.

One of the most undervalued forms of SEO and link building may very well be the press release. Many people dread writing just as much as they dread public speaking and avoid doing it at all costs. That being said, a press release may be just the tool that separates your car dealership from the one down the street.

At AutoDealershipMarketing we understand that a lot of work and thought goes into writing a great automotive press release. Whether you are writing car dealership press release for your personal dealer or a more large-scale release for a new make/model release these tips and tricks should help you become more successful.

There are hundreds of press release distribution services out there and many of them are even free. Like everything else in the world though, sometimes you get what you pay for. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that you can be successful using a free press release service, but I just think that the paid ones are better and you have a better chance of ranking higher in Search Engine Results Pages.

The first step in your quest for SEO dominance in your automotive press release is to have a title with a great keyword in it. I use Google’s Keyword Tool to determine the best keyword for the release that I am looking to send out. For example, if I am writing a press release about my car dealership carrying a specific model that recently won an award, I would title the press release: “My Dealership Carries the Award Winning (Make/Model) in (City/State). Now I know this is pretty simple and Yes it is a simple explanation but not everything has to be difficult right?

Once you get the title down, you should reflect that keyword at least two times during the body of the release. The summary should also have the original keyword in it. In the example above the keyword would be, Make/Model in City/State. A simpler example would be Chevy Silverado in Chicago.

When these keywords are inserted, links should be put in them linking the keywords back to the dealership and the model that is being promoted. For example; Chevy Silverado in Chicago links to the Chevy Silverado page. Pretty simple strategy huh?

One thing to remember with a press release is that they need to be written in a news like fashion. I like to use the reverse pyramid structure. This means you start with the most basic facts and most important news notes at the beginning and work your way down to the bottom.

The press release service that I personally like to use is VOCUS PR Web. There are many services out there that offer great release options. I just like VOCUS because the people have always been friendly and I’ve had good luck with them.

Obviously this run-down of the car dealership press release has been a very simple one. In the future I will touch on some more intimate details of writing a great automotive press release but this is just to get your feet wet. If you stick with these little tips you should be relatively successful with your press release. Keep checking AutoDealershipMarketing.com for more info and if you have any questions or would like to learn more contact us via our CONTACT US page.