Optimize your SEO

RSS Marketing is an unfamiliar term in automotive, but that is likely to change as the awareness towards good SEO becomes increasingly more apparent to auto dealers…and competitive.

SEO, or search engine optimization, fell to the wayside a few years ago to PPC, or pay-per-click advertising which was introduced by Google AdSense and AdWords. Automotive companies quickly began offering PPC services and some companies even introduced self-managed or dynamically driven PPC systems that required little or no oversight by dealers. But search marketing has shifted this past year back towards SEO, and the rules have changed.

Conventional SEO was about meta tags and search engine registration. Dealers could pay companies like Real Traffic Productions to perform SEO services to their sites and keep their sites well indexed with the search engines, but with the evolution of blogs and RSS, SEO strategies have evolved. Today’s SEO effectiveness stems from content relevancy and linking, two labor-intensive activities that are not only outside the scope for auto dealers but also difficult for advertising agencies to pull off because the profit margins are too low for such technically laborious work.

Welcome RSS Marketing, which is a technique designed around the practice of blogging for business. RSS, which stands for “really simple syndication” makes it possible for people to publish content on the Web and make it available to anyone with an RSS reader. Essentially, RSS is content broadcasting just like radio and television are audio/video broadcastings.

One way to broadcast an RSS feed is with a blog. The blog would be the network station broadcasting the feed (signal) and an RSS reader would transmit the data into a viewable format just like radios and televisions do. RSS feeds are inherent with all blog software which is not much more than a scaled down content management system, or CMS, that easily installs on most web servers. What this means for dealers is that with they can publish content via RSS and make it available to their consumer audiences instantly and easily.

While some people still equate blogs to being merely online journals, blogs are much more than this, especially when leveraged for business purposes. Auto dealers are beginning to realize this and SEO companies are beginning to offer products and services that leverage these technologies. RSS marketing is simply a means for driving website traffic to a well-optimized website by publishing content that is relevant and useful to search engines and Internet users.