My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is Lee Manning, Co-founder of Armchair Marketing. Lee is generally considered one of, if not the top automotive digital marketers in the UK. Prior to starting his own agency, Lee had an amazing run at a UK top 20 automotive dealer group. His work quickly garnered attention and the group he was responsible for began winning awards…lots of awards. Over an 18 month span, Lee and his team won 18 prestigious industry awards.
In this week’s video, I share the details about Google’s newest automotive study titled “The auto dealer’s guide to navigating today’s digital landscape”. It shares several interesting stats about how buyer behavior has changed due to COVID and the resulting lockdowns and provides 4 tips to position your dealership for future success.
Everyday, searchers turn to Google for a variety of reasons. Sometimes people are looking to learn something brand new, sometimes they’re looking to compare their options, and other times they’re ready to act. While Google search is a great tool for all these kinds of searchers, most advertisers want to reach people most ready to convert.
While a quality landing page can help increase your conversion rate, sometimes they’re just an extra step between the user and connecting with your business. For that reason, Google’s introduced several ways to convert a user directly on the SERP. Call extensions and Call ads allow a user to call your business directly from their mobile phone, for instance.
Yesterday, Google introduced a revolutionary new way to convert directly on the SERP. Advertisers can now create Lead Form Extensions and choose to send their traffic from their ad’s headline directly to a lead form on the Google SER, rather than a landing page. Best of all, if the searcher is signed into their Google account, the form will already be pre-populated with their contact details and they can convert with one click!
Google Ads first introduced Lead Form extensions in early 2019. Like other ad extensions, Lead Form Extensions could potentially show beneath your search ad and allowed users a new way to engage with your ad, by opening a lead form with a user’s contact information already filled out. Advertisers were quick to start using Lead Form Extensions ecstatic to see some incremental leads from their search ads.
Yesterday’s announcement allows advertisers a new way to leverage their lead form extensions. Instead of showing their lead form extension beneath their ads, this update allows users to have their ad’s headline serve their lead form instead. Now advertisers don’t need to send traffic to their website at all until a user completes their lead form!
There’s no additional cost for using lead form extensions, advertisers are only charged according to their CPC bid on Google.
My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is Jim Ziegler, owner of the Ziegler SuperSystems and a legend in the automotive industry. For over 44 years, Jim has contributed his talents as a writer, magazine columnist, professional speaker, and turnaround artist at some of the biggest auto dealerships in the United States.
In order to keep your site relevant for your money-making search terms, you need a blog, and you need to publish high-quality content on your blog regularly.
What to blog about, though? Where to start?
In this post, I offer a few no-nonsense ways business owners can come up with great blog ideas by leveraging their experience and expertise in their field—no intimidating “keyword research,” “discovery,” or “competitor analysis” process required.
(For my purposes here, by “business owners,” I mean those without SEO training.)
If successful, the tips from this post won’t feed you blog ideas or topics themselves. Rather, they’ll equip you with a reproducible process to ideate stellar content ideas or topics for months (and years) to come. If you take advantage of the tips I provide, you’ll become your business’ very own brainy content strategist—and very likely a richer entrepreneur.
In this week’s episode, I take a break from digital marketing tips for another holiday-themed episode… This time, I share the top 12 SEO-themed Valentine’s Day cards. I scoured the ‘net to find the funniest cards with SEO references – hopefully you’ll get a few laughs like we did!
For all of us, 2020 was a year of change, disorder, and frustration. Even in Google Ads, the pandemic changed what we search for, where we search, and how we search online – and every PPC expert had to adjust to the new normal on and off the SERP. Entering 2021, we were all hoping to get back some control in our lives and our Paid Search campaigns. Unfortunately, Google didn’t share our plans.
Yesterday, Google announced that it’ll be reducing the number of keyword match types from 4 to 3, by eliminating Broad Match Modified keywords. Instead, phrase match keywords will now serve ads to more traffic. Confused? Same. Let’s break that down –
My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is George Nenni. George is the Founder of Generations Digital, a digital marketing consultancy for auto dealerships.
George has over 3 decades of experience helping automotive dealerships overcome an array of digital marketing challenges. He is the author of two essential books. His first is titled, A Car Dealer’s Guide to Google My Business which explores all the unique opportunities for car dealerships within Google My Business. Just before this episode launched, George released his second book, A Car Dealer’s Guide to Digital Marketing.
In this week’s video, I share the details on the recently-released 2020 Local Search Ranking Factors. Basically the bible of Local Search, the 2020 LSRF is the best guide for your Local SEO strategy in 2021. The top minds in Local SEO all contributed, and it breaks down the signals that Google’s local algorithm uses to decide which sites to show at the top of local search results.
I am excited to announce that Hannah Borchik is the newest member of the fast-growing SEO team at SearchLab. Hannah is an extremely accomplished Local SEO with over six years of experience, and today is her first day as our new Director of SEO. During the hiring process, her deep understanding of SEO, a proven track record of managerial-level success, and her sterling reputation within the SEO community made her the obvious choice to lead SearchLab’s SEO team.
Hannah is a Google My Business Product Expert and a Google Maps Product Expert. Only a small group of highly respected industry experts are included in the Product Expert program. As a PE, Hannah volunteers time to answer questions from users who are experiencing problems or bugs. Hannah and other PEs often hear about bugs and problems – and even new updates – before the rest of us mortals in the general public.
Hannah has held multiple leadership-level positions in the past. She is considered one of the leading SEO experts in the healthcare space, having overseen numerous projects for some of the largest and most complex hospital and healthcare groups in the country.
In her role at SearchLab, Hannah will operate as our SEO program leader. She is responsible for helping our SEO team reach their full potential through support and mentorship. She will work closely with Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search, to identify areas for improvements and lead ongoing training across the entire department. She will oversee professional development, optimize, manage, and maintain internal processes, and improve the overall effectiveness of our Local SEO service offering.
SearchLab is excited to add this industry leader to our rapidly growing team of digital marketers. Our clients will benefit from Hannah’s deep knowledge and impressive leadership abilities, and our team will flourish under her expert leadership.