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Major Automobile Manufacturers Stink at Search Engine Optimization
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Novato, California - (Website Hosting Directory) - March 21, 2006 - According to recently released data, the major automotive manufacturers are suffering poor search engine rankings, lagging behind car publishers and buying services in virtually every online category - with the exception of Hybrid and Fuel Efficiency terms.
The CampaignTracker Automotive Industry Scorecard which revealed the serious disadvantages in the search engine marketing campaigns of major car manufacturers, was conducted by search engine marketing (SEM) analytics technology specialist, SEMphonic.
The research also noted that major automakers fared worse, on the whole, with natural search placement (search engine optimization or SEO) than they did with paid placement (pay-per-click or PPC).
In related news, Honda received the Search Engine Marketing Analytics (SEMA) award for "Best Overall SEM Performance Among Carmakers in the Automotive Industry." Hybrid Search was the only category where the automakers won out-right with natural search. It was also a category where the automakers competed quite well with both the Publishers and the Buying Services. Among the strong companies in this category were Honda, GM and Toyota.
In two bellwether categories for online car shopping (Car Pricing Terms and Car Buying Terms), the major automakers fared especially poorly.
According to the published report, the major automakers were virtually invisible in the natural search listings for both these categories. Publishers (like NADA and KBB) dominated the natural search listing - especially for pricing words. On the other hand, Buying Services (like Autobytel, CarPrices.com and CarsDirect) owned the vast majority of paid placements. The Automotive Portals (Automotive Portals run by MSN, Yahoo and also the Wikipedia) had a modest presence in organic listings and very little paid presence.
The study results illustrate the difficulties that major carmakers have had in competing for natural search listings. The problems were highlighted by last month's de-listing of BMW Germany on Google for keyword stuffing.
The site has since been re-listed after making some website changes.
According to the report, the two strongest categories for automakers were Car Type Terms (like Convertible, Sedan, Hatchback, Luxury Car) and Hybrid and Fuel-Efficiency Terms.
Gary Angel, President and Chief Technical Officer, of SEMphonic commented on the news, ''The spottiness of presence we see from the major carmakers is typical of many industries where the traditional brands aren't competing well with the online specialists. We were surprised to find that Wikipedia showed up as a serious organic presence in this SEMA study - which illustrates the importance, in certain industries, of knowing what's being said there.''
CampaignTracker, SEMphonic's Internet advertising analysis tool, studied the automotive space online by generating an industry keyword list with more than 1,000 automotive terms. These terms were then categorized by type and the performance of all the competitors within each category was analyzed.
A full copy of the study may be purchased from SEMphonic.
To learn more, please visit:
www.semphonic.com.
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