Placing video on your sign up pages is a cinch. Using platforms such as YouTube and Viddler can be effective but you have limited control of branding, plus in most cases the user experience typically permits viewers to access other videos which can take away from or be a distraction to your objective of getting the visitor to sign up.

In this webinar you will get to see how using the video players that come with your AutoConversion account give you better control and flexibility with displaying videos on your sign up pages, plus we will take a look at the viewer analytics for the video appearing on the sign up page for one of our top customers.

This webinar begins at 11:30 am Thursday August 27th and is expected to last about 20-30 minutes so nice and short and sweet. To register click here or the button below.

From 2003 to about 2006, pay-per-click advertising, particularly in the auto industry, took the field by storm. Car dealers were practically forced to spend thousands upon thousands on PPC advertising to stay in the game. Website technology evolved into a death trap for car dealers because the SEO aspect of car dealer websites was completely disregarded. As a result, when the PPC bubble deflated, car dealers were left with few choices for a truly competent website platform.

Website providers have been scrambling the past 2-3 years revamping or overhauling their platforms to meet the automotive SEO needs for car dealers. Today the SEO rat race in the automotive online retail business is about as over-saturated as CRM was 5 years ago. Mysteriously, while everyone now offers “the best SEO”, many dealers still lack vital understanding about the true role that SEO plays in one’s business.

An example of this was revealed to me during a phone with a dealer group. The dealer contacted us about our content marketing services. He explained that he did his own keyword reporting using Web CEO and that he has effectively positioned his websites across thousands of keywords. He had a good video presence going but still when he searched for a particular set of keywords, his competitor sites appeared in the top results but not his. One of which he suggested sold a whopping “6″ cars a month, which is hardly any at all.

While scoping out everything and listening it was clear that not only did this dealer know and understand all the fundamental automotive SEO practices but also was applying them to his online presence, and I told him this. I explained that he is doing everything we teach our dealers to do and that as far as I could tell he was far ahead of the game.

“But why does our competitor rank higher”, he asked.

My response was two-fold…

a.) Just because a site appears higher in a few searches you perform manually doesn’t mean it ranks higher for others nor does it mean the site ranks higher for the majority of keywords you target.
b.) Just because your competitor ranks higher doesn’t mean they sell more cars.

This second response was key. Dealers tend to approach automotive SEO as some sort of silver bullet to their sales needs. But it’s not. SEO is about attraction, visibility, and possibility. I wouldn’t even classify SEO as creating sales opportunities. That’s what conversion accomplishes. SEO creates the possibility for conversion. Big difference.

I don’t know if this is what the dealer needed to or wanted to hear. I think appearing higher in search was more important to him than having a more successful business. I could be wrong. But what I took home from that conversation was the realization of how even the more sophisticated of dealers that has his head wrapped around all this SEO stuff, can sometimes miss the significance SEO has with your business.

If you are looking at video marketing as “the next big thing” or as a silver bullet to your online marketing needs, be warned. Video is great and highly effective, but it’s time-consuming and expensive. You will need good SEO to get your videos watched, and you will also need an effective conversion mechanism. Video itself is not the best conversion tool. Those that have experimented with viral video marketing may testify to this.