State of Search for Carroll County, West Georgia
Are our local businesses showing up well in the search engines?
As an long-standing Internet Marketing team who just recently banded together to form a proper Internet Marketing firm (press release), we decided that one of our first steps would be researching the current State of Search of our local businesses in the major “search engines,” including Google and Bing. We have decided to make our research public, as we know it will inform and educate, and thus it will benefit businesses and organizations throughout Carroll County. We will post our findings here as we go along. Eventually, we will provide a meta-analysis in one easy-to-read document, and we will distribute it free of cost.
West Georgia is blessed with its small-town comforts, and located so close to Atlanta’s big city opportunities. However, as our national and international economies shift into the digital age, West Georgia has been a few steps behind the pace of technological change. While our businesses are creating websites, big city businesses are using advanced Search Engine Optimization campaigns to bring their sites to the top of the search results and to get more conversions, which yields increased revenue and profitability.
We invite you to see the landscape of Carroll County Internet Marketing through the eyes of our expert staff. We sincerely hope that our findings will benefit you, and motivate you, to make the commitment to upping your game, and making your online presence stellar. Individually it will make you more prosperous. Collectively, it will help our create jobs, expand our tax base, and bring back the carefree days of a healthier economy.
Our Process
We analyzed top ten categories for advertised listings in the local phone book, and then began the process of studying their online presence. The intention here is to see which businesses most advertised in the traditional environment of the phone book and how they are adapting to the Internet age. We will count-down from the 10th to the 1st most heavily advertised local business category.
This process does not examine the best strategies to optimize these businesses’ online presence. That type of analysis is reserved for clients. Instead, this simply shows you how these businesses are doing in their online efforts. It is their “State of Search” today, not a game-plan for them to implement. We’ve intentionally not mentioned the businesses that we see need the most help, as it could be embarrassing for them to be singled-out. Finally, we are wordy. We apologize for that. We want to provide good stuff for the community to chew on, and accept that we will lose many reader’s attention because of our verbosity.
The 10th most advertised industry: Auto Dealers
While the presence of auto dealers bottoms out the top 10 in the phone book’s advertising, it does dominate many other advertising venues like the newspaper and the Internet. In fact, the average auto consumer does online research before he or she engages with any sales people. People use the Internet to determine which make and model to pursue, and where to make the purchase. Therefore, automotive websites influence the spending of billions of dollars every year.
Searching for car dealers in Carrollton, Georgia
Let’s first look at a Google search for “car dealer.” Although this is a really broad search, and doesn’t include whether the searcher seeks a new or used car, nor which car make the searcher desires, it is still a good starting point.
We’ll begin with the anatomy of the search result page:
The first three results on the page, with the pinkish background color, are advertisements through Google Adwords. They are for used Mercedes in Atlanta, a general Ford website that shows you the nearest dealers to you, and the site for CarMax used vehicle dealers.
Of these three advertised sites, the Ford one is the only one directing traffic to a Carroll County, Georgia business- to Pugmire Ford. It also informs the visitor as to the Ford Dealers in Bremen and in Villa Rica, as well as in Newnan. While Ford is doing it’s job of making it’s dealers visible, this site also is providing Carrollton shoppers with the knowledge of other Ford dealers to price shop at, without having to drive too far. This is a mixed bag for the dealer, but good for consumers and the manufacturer.
In addition to those top three results, all of the results on the right column are the paid results. That means that the advertiser pays Google every time someone clicks on their ad.
The “natural”, or “”organic results, are the ones starting, in this case, with the “News for car dealer.” Here Google decided that it was relevant to put news articles in front of the other listings.
Under the three news articles on “car dealer” is the website for national used car dealer CarMax. Although they happen to have a location not too far from Carrollton, in Lithia Springs, they are the number one position for the same search anywhere in the country, including in Hawaii where there is no CarMax.
The next listing is for autotrader. It is a site that offers a plethora of information on the car buying process, including new car dealer and used cars listings. They have used cars posted in Carrollton, but would be primarily driving Carroll County eyes to Lithia Springs, Atlanta, Norcross, and beyond.
Google Places
The results continue with “Places for car dealer near Carrollton, GA.” “Places” is a “company directory” listing on Google. It typically includes the company name, address, and phone number. The company can claim the page and add useful information to the listing including adding their website’s url, email, images, hours, and other relevant information. This is all free. This page also has reviews on this business from around the web (Google lifts these from other sites) and offers reviews from Google users. It makes great sense to claim and optimize your page with keyword-rich text and images with proper alt attributes (a basic service that any Internet Marketer could provide, and which is included in all of our packages).
“Places” includes reviews. Reviews are a tricky subject to approach. The Internet is full of reviews that either destroy a businesses reputation because of one or a few customer’s poor experiences (or unreasonable expectations), and it is full of reviews that are written anonymously by the business itself that toots its own horn. If you read a review making a used car dealer sound as inviting as a destination spa, it might be a review to take with a grain of salt. Likewise, if the review claims that the cars are embedded with evil, again think twice before accepting such claims. As a practice, we get our clients real reviews from their most appreciative customers. This sets the proper, authentic tone. Without an adequate base of reviews, all you need is one person in a bad mood to make your whole business look like a treacherous enterprise.
You can click on “Places for car dealer near Carrollton, GA” to get the full results of all local dealers. That would be a great place to start a car search, as it provides a bird’s eye view to the local landscape.
The first listing is for Walker Cadillac Pontiac Buick. The business added their website link, which gives them traffic, without any expense. In fact, the top 5 dealerships have their website url (domain name) connected to their listing. The next 5, however, don’t. With all of the Internet searching for cars these days, these dealers are doing themselves a disservice by not getting searchers into their inventory online. Endless sites are trying to buy these searcher’s traffic, and it is available for free to anyone who positions his/her site correctly.
Going back to the search above (two images up), nothing else on the first page of results is related to Carrollton. The rest of the results are national or international websites.
Searching with the words “Carrollton, Georgia”
Next thing to look at is how dealers show up in searches that include the words Carrollton, Georgia. These searches will deliver very different results. It looks like “Places,” but it is not.
This next search is for “carrollton georgia car dealers.” Gone are the ads on top of the search listings. And, instead of the news and the CarMax and AutoTrader results at the top, we’ve got local from the beginning.
Interestingly, the first position does not match the first position of the Places page. This time it goes to a used card dealer on Bankhead Hwy. Walker is listed in the number two position. Another used dealer on Bankhead is in the third slot, followed by Scott Evans at four and Mike Bell at five.
Why are Walker and Mike Bell not at the top?
That question is at the heart of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. The art of SEO is bringing a client’s site up higher in search results. Google uses advanced, secret algorithms to determine the positioning of websites. Google does its best to determine what is the best result for the searcher, not for the businesses that are vying for traffic. Your SEO is your advocate. We have your interests in mind, and get you the position that you deserve. Search Engine Marketing brings your site to the top of Google and Bing, and gives yours sales team more opportunities to close deals. Google doesn’t care about your site ranking high or low, creating many sales or no sales.
If you want to see some of the major factors involved in creating a winning SEO campaign, feel free to visit our Internet Marketing Plans-Pricing page. Here you can see the long list of the category of activities that we do to make a site rise to the top of the results. All SEO firms have their own version of this list. One’s success at implementing these activities intelligently and skillfully is what makes for search engine dominance. Just as all surgeons, lawyers, and accountants, are not equally qualified, talented, and skillful, the same applies to Internet Marketers. Find one whom you trust, and treat them as the team-mate that they are. Together, great work is done.
Carrollton dealers are not showing online outside of Carrollton
Finally, we look at the position of Carrollton auto dealers outside of Carrollton. We’ll ran searches as if we were actual users in Villa Rica, Douglasville, and Atlanta.
From Villa Rica, when we searched for car dealers there was no mention of any Carrollton dealers on the first pages. If we went to Google Places, we could find the first Carrollton dealer at position 15. From Douglasville, no dealer showed up in any of the first 100 listings. Same from Atlanta. This shows us that Carrollton dealers aren’t seeing much traffic from outside the county. But, most of us have the experience of leaving the county at some point to purchase a vehicle. This shows the potential is there for trans-geo traffic. It just needs visibility, and compelling sites.
Let’s create another search scenario. Searcher is in Douglasville, and they are looking for a “ford dealer.” No results show for Carrollton’s Ford dealer in the main Google results. If the user is savvy, the next clicks is onto the map image to see the ford dealers mapped out across the region. Here is the map: the origin of the search is Douglasville and it is marked with the star, and the map is marked with letters for the Ford dealers in order of relevancy in Google’s algorithmic eyes. The dealers are also listed in this same order on the side of the map, so it is important to be at the top of the alphabet.
You can see that A is in Lithia Springs, B is in Villa Rica, and C in Dallas. These make sense given their proximity to Douglasville. But from there things fall out of place.
Dallas’ second Ford dealer list as I. Why not D? And, why does D belong to a dealer in Marietta which is much further away?
And, most important for this survey on West Georgia’s State of Search, why is Carrollton’s Pugmire listed as Q? Q means that its placement on the page is 17 positions down. It means that Google finds that the 30 minute (24 mile) ride from Douglasville to Carrollton for a Ford as less worthy of recommendation then the 51 minute (42 mile) ride to the Ford dealer in Alpharetta (listed as N, or position 14). Why is Google sending its users on a 51 minute ride instead of a 30 minute ride? The question doesn’t need to be answered (although when we run tests we can see why in the metrics). The question that does need to be answered is: how much would all of this additional business be worth to your business? An industry, like the auto industry, can realize a really high ROI on Internet Marketing.
It would help Carroll County to change this situation
Two obvious benefits of increasing the online presences of local auto dealers is that more local people would buy their vehicles within Carroll County, and that the Carroll County car dealers would sell more cars to people residing outside the county. Both ways would help our local employment, expand our tax base, and get more dollars circulating in our communities.
From the individual dealer’s side, he who acts most swiftly and most skillfully will gain a competitive edge. More people turn to the Internet these days for their major purchases than to the traditional outlets of printed media. The Internet is the go-to place for consumer information. A newspaper “buy now” sales ad can catch the eye of many. But, most shoppers turn to the Internet before they make any major purchases. If you are not on-top of your Internet Marketing game, then you are missing out on a huge stream of business. Consumers come on many levels, and a business is best off if it speaks to each type of consumer in their own language.
It is easy to change this situation: the “third wave”
The first wave of people who made websites for businesses were programmers. We needed their geeky, technical minds to write the code necessary to make a website work. That was the 1990s. As website creation became easier, which was heavily influenced by the DreamWeaver web creation software, more artistic types began to make websites for businesses. This was 2000-2006. These sites were much more beautiful to look at, and were full of beautiful colors, images, and moving objects.
We are now in the third wave of this online movement. The third wave utilizes programmers and designers, yet does not let them make the decisions. The third wave is the wave of the practical, numbers-driven Internet Marketers. Third wave Internet Marketers create a total online presence using every available tool. We create sites that are optimized for the search engines. And, we do what it takes to drive traffic to the site. We make the site popular in the eyes of the search engines, so that they appear at the top of search results. And, craft the content of the site to create sales funnels. We use the Internet to create a second sales floor for our clients. And, we deliver the results of greater exposure, more traffic, more conversions, increased revenues, and new levels of profitability. Third wave Internet Marketing includes all the wonders of Web 2.0: social media, social bookmarking, videos, and anything else that is light, fast, web-based, and personalizable.
Anywhere, including small-town Georgia, SEO delivers high ROIs. Contact us if you’d like to enhance your revenues by dramatically expanding traffic to your site. We’d be happy to assess your site and give you feedback and options.
Next on our list, the State of Search for Plumbers in West Georgia. We use to find them in the phone book. We all need them at times. How are they doing in their online presence? Are they easy to find? Who is succeeding, and why? That is to be covered in our next post.
