Come for the Ride…

Most of the companies I’ve consulted for had sick budgets that allowed them to buy traffic.  While these techniques are great for them to build an audience and establish a barrier to entry, they don’t do so well for bootstrap startups and/or startups that do not have extensive experience with interactive marketing.

Since KillerStartups was a major fail, and this past week was green week, I’ve decided to run our second test on building organic traffic.  (See what I did there?)

In the world of SEO, in addition white hat, black hat techniques; good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, and tons of other duals, there’s the school of broad and generic terms vs. specific and long tail terms.  While the phrase used cars is the most generic and most popular search term in the automotive industry, chances are a new site no matter how great will not be able to get the top spots for that phrase without some leg work.

Since that phrase will ultimately be one of the primary traffic drivers for organic search - we are setting that as the long term goal.  For the short term, we are focusing on building long tail terms and allowing search stragglers to find us that way.

To do this test, I went to Compete.com to see how users are searching in the automotive space and adopted some pretty broad search rules to be applied to our pages.  Users on the web for the most part are either searching for used cars or they’re searching for specific models close to their area (e.g. nissan pathfinder 98057) To adapt to the search patterns, we changed our URLs, title tags, meta keyword and description tags to match these broad search patterns.

The upgrades were done this past week so I will check back with this in about 2-3 weeks after the engines come back to see if our website gets indexed more.  Right now, we have about 1430 pages indexed on Google which is good but not great.  More to come…

If you like this post the please consider subscribing to our full RSS feed.

Save to del.icio.us | Digg This! | Share on Facebook | reddit
Stumble It! |