Alex Melen shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Alex, a huge thanks to you for investing the time to share your wisdom with those who are seeking it. We think it’s so important for us to share stories with our neighbors, friends and community because knowledge multiples when we share with each other. Let’s jump in: What do you think is misunderstood about your business?

One of the biggest misconceptions about digital marketing is on the SEO side. Too many still believe that SEO is some kind of mysterious black box. Too many agencies still sell it that way: vague promises, unclear deliverables, and a lot of smoke and mirrors. But the truth is, SEO isn’t magic. It’s work. Real, measurable, strategic work.

At SmartSites, we’ve built our reputation by demystifying that process. SEO is about putting in the hours—consistently and intelligently. It’s content creation that actually answers what people are searching for. It’s link building that earns trust and authority. It’s fixing technical issues that prevent search engines from even seeing your site properly. There’s no shortcut, no secret sauce—just a relentless focus on doing the right things, the right way, over time.

What’s misunderstood is that SEO isn’t a one-time fix or a plug-and-play tool. It’s a long-term investment in visibility, credibility, and growth. And when done transparently and strategically, it delivers results that compound. That’s what we do at SmartSites—and that’s why we’ve stayed ahead in an industry that’s constantly evolving.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?

Hi, I’m Alex Melen—an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and digital marketing enthusiast who’s been riding the wave of online innovation since the dial-up days. I co-founded SmartSites with a simple mission: to build a digital agency that actually delivers results, not just buzzwords. What started as a small team of digital visionaries has grown into a global force—over 400 full-time employees across six offices, serving clients in virtually every industry.

SmartSites has been recognized by AdWeek and the Inc. 5000 for multiple consecutive years, and we’re proud to be America’s top-rated digital marketing agency. What makes us different? We’re relentlessly data-driven, obsessively customer-focused, and we believe transparency beats gimmicks every time.

Over the past three decades, I’ve had the privilege of keynoting nearly a hundred conferences and being featured in outlets like Forbes, Bloomberg, NPR, and Business Week’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs. But what drives me most is helping businesses grow—whether it’s through smarter SEO, sharper paid media, or simply making digital work harder for them.

Right now, I’m focused on scaling SmartSites while continuing to push the boundaries of what digital marketing can do. It’s an exciting time to be in this space—and I’m grateful to be part of shaping its future.

Okay, so here’s a deep one: Who saw you clearly before you could see yourself?

Honestly, for me, it was quite the opposite. It wasn’t someone seeing my potential early—it was the overwhelming number of people who didn’t. Back when I was diving into digital in the late 90’s, most people didn’t understand the space, didn’t believe in its future, and certainly didn’t see what I could build within it. That skepticism, that lack of belief, became fuel.

It pushed me to prove what digital could do—not just for me, but for businesses everywhere. It’s what drove me to co-found SmartSites and grow it into one of the fastest-growing digital agencies in America. Every time someone underestimated the power of SEO, or dismissed digital marketing as a trend, it reinforced my belief that I was on the right path.

So while I didn’t have someone who saw me clearly before I saw myself, I had something just as powerful: resistance. And that resistance helped me sharpen my vision, build resilience, and ultimately create something that speaks for itself.

Was there ever a time you almost gave up?

I’ve never been someone who gives up easily—there’ve been very few moments in my life where I seriously considered walking away from something I believed in. But one moment stands out clearly: the early days of my first startup, T35 Hosting.

Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the internet was still the Wild West, and the legal system hadn’t quite caught up to the digital age. One day, I was forced to temporarily shut down the entire business because of content a client had hosted on our servers. It was a gut punch. I was young, building something from scratch, and suddenly it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me.

I was only out of the game for a few weeks, but in that time, I had a chance to reflect—on how far I’d come, what I’d built, and what I still believed was possible. That pause didn’t break me. It recharged me. I came back stronger, re-launched T35 Hosting, and scaled it even further. It’s still running today, decades later.

That experience taught me that setbacks aren’t signs to quit—they’re signals to reassess, refocus, and come back sharper. And that mindset has carried through everything I’ve built since, including SmartSites.

Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? Is the public version of you the real you?

Absolutely. I’ve never seen the point in putting on a persona. Every personal interaction I have—whether it’s on stage, in a meeting, or just grabbing coffee—is always the real me. I don’t have a curated version or a filtered facade. What you see is what you get.

Even in my book, Automotive Search Marketing, I laid it all out—no secrets, no fluff. Just straight-up me and the exact steps I’ve taken to help hundreds of dealerships improve their digital marketing. Whether I’m writing, speaking at a conference, or working with clients day-to-day, I bring the same energy, the same mindset, and the same transparency.

Honestly, it would be way too much effort not to be myself. And in this industry—where trust and authenticity matter more than ever—I think being real is the most valuable thing you can offer.

Okay, we’ve made it essentially to the end. One last question before you go. What are you doing today that won’t pay off for 7–10 years?

If we’re talking strictly ROI, then a lot of what I do outside of work probably won’t “pay off” in the traditional sense—and I’m perfectly okay with that.

I’m a huge automotive enthusiast. I follow car news religiously, dive deep into forums, track model releases, and obsess over engineering details most people overlook. Same goes for travel—I’ll go out of my way to book specific flight paths or aircraft types just for the experience. It takes time, planning, and a lot of nerding out. But it’s what I love.

These passions might not directly impact SmartSites or my next business move, and they probably won’t pay off in 7–10 years. But I believe you have to spend at least part of your time doing something that fuels you—not because it’s strategic, but because it’s fulfilling. That energy, that curiosity, that joy—it spills over into everything else I do. And in the long run, that’s a kind of payoff too.

As we kick off 2024, we thought it’d be a great opportunity get the views of two digital marketing experts in automotive: SmartSites’ Alex Melen and Overfuel’s Alex Griffis.

There were no shortage of events in 2023 for the automotive industry–more emerging technologies, increasing popularity of online car-buying, and most importantly, the advances in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). The way consumers interact with the automotive industry continued to shift over the course of the year, creating new challenges for dealerships to keep pace in a fast-changing environment.

As we look at 2024, how much of an impact will AI have? How is advertising strategy changing? Overall, what does 2024 hold for dealerships and their digital presence? Let’s hear what Melen and Griffis have to say.

What was a surprising trend in 2023 that’s likely to carry over into 2024?

Alex Melen: “Seeing pay-per-click advertising costs continue to increase (a trend that will continue into 2024). As more and more dealers shift their spending to digital, search marketing (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads) continues to attract the lion’s share of the budget, driving up costs. As a result, 2023 experienced one of the biggest jumps in cost-per-click increases in the last few years. That said, search marketing continues to be the best platform for car dealership—and will become even more so with the deprecation of cookies and third-party data. Search continues to be one of the few places in the world where consumers self-identify their intent (i.e.: search for “audi q5 lease deal” or “audi dealership near me”)—allowing advertisers to bid on the specific audiences and self-identified intent.”

Alex Griffis:“One of the most exciting surprises was hearing dealerships use the acronym CWV, or Core Web Vitals, which measures how websites perform based on real-world usage data. It was surprising because, for a long time, we’ve known only 39% of automotive websites achieve good CWB ratings, making it the second-worst performing industry behind Travel. Dealerships are discovering that poor web performance is coming at a significant opportunity cost, and awareness of this issue will continue to increase in 2024.”

Was there a trend in 2023 that you foresee declining in 2024?

Alex Melen: “I think 2024 will mark the end of the minimalist effort and attitudes we’ve seen across auto over the last three years. After some very profitable years in the industry (where demand outstripped supply), I think auto will return to the basics of working hard for every sale and every opportunity across every job function. This applies to vendors just as much as dealership employees—I’ve seen many vendors get by with minimal effort over the last few years, delivering minimal value for the dealership. I believe 2024 will be the year of re-evaluation of both internal strategies at dealerships, their external vendors, and their marketing activities.”

Alex Griffis:“It may not be the most popular opinion, but I foresee the use of live chat products, especially those that are AI-driven, struggling for adoption for three reasons: One, it’s no secret that AI was all the rage last year and many automotive companies joined the race, resulting in clunky products that sold cars for $1. Second, there’s a growing distrust between consumers and AI-based products. Storyblok, a content management system (CMS), revealed that 85% of consumers aren’t interested in using AI to help them make a purchase. Lastly, based on analytics data we’ve collected, live chat has a negative impact on conversion rates when implemented poorly. On vehicle pages, clicking the ‘close’ button on live chat accounted for 20% of all clicks.”

As we kick off 2024, what should be on dealerships’ radars?

Alex Melen: “2024—more even than 2023—will be the year of change. From challenging market conditions, to cookie tracking going away, to the rise of AI and Google’s Search Generative Experience. As I preached during the start of the COVID years, dealerships will need to be agile and proactive (vs reactive). As we saw during the pandemic, the dealerships that were agile and able to adapt profited greatly. Those that weren’t, are no longer in business—despite two record years that followed the start of COVID.”

Alex Griffis: “Website speed, hands down. Over the course of 2023, we saw clients increase organic search traffic by 200-300% by simply making speed a priority and paying close attention to CWV. In March 2024, Google is reportedly releasing new metrics and standards for website responsiveness, which will put even more pressure on dealerships whose websites perform poorly on mobile. Since we’re seeing over 80% of website traffic originating from a mobile device, solving the performance issues are a must.”

What role will AI play in automotive for 2024?

Alex Melen: “Generative AI has the potential to be extremely impactful—if used correctly. I wrote my book on search marketing just a month shy of the explosion of ChatGPT, and it was done the old-fashioned way: one click at a time. I briefly mentioned the coming Generative AI revolution; however, I assumed that Google would not only devalue AI-generated content but label it as such. Considering that even free tools can identify AI-generated content, it’s a no-brainer that Google, which purchased DeepMind in 2014, would easily be able to identify and label (and potentially penalize) AI content.

However, in February 2023, Google came out with their guidance saying that they will continue to treat content following their current guidelines (following the EEAT model), regardless of how it was created. That said, Google continues to reward content based on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In most cases, AI-generated content will not meet that criteria and will naturally be devalued in search results.

With that said, Generative AI can be used to help create content ideas, generate first drafts of content, and so forth. For 2024, I believe this new approach will gain traction, and Generative AI will become a tool to help create content. And of course, it still continues to be extremely powerful at helping with your social media content, generating campaign ideas, creating ad-copy, responding to reviews, and so much more.”

Alex Griffis:“AI-based products will continue to surge, but many will fail to launch and that’s okay. To Alex’s point, I think there are opportunities for AI to be used responsibly, like boosting productivity or assisting in content generation. In fact, there are many use cases for AI in automotive that aren’t purely conversational.

A few great examples come to mind. Inventory management is improving through analyzing historical data, crunching numbers, and helping dealerships better price their inventory to be competitive. We’ve started using a model internally for predictive vehicle maintenance and automated outreach to customers. It feels like the focus on conversational AI has totally overlooked the other customer touch points that are more subtle and behind the scenes.

As companies iterate to make automotive AI products better, I think the
most gains will be made in the sales enablement or customer experience
applications.”

ChatGPT has come out of nowhere to become one of the hottest new topics and tools of the year. For example, looking at Google Search interest over time, searches for ChatGPT were 0 before December 2022 (which makes sense since it only launched in November 2022 – just a few short months ago).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT have become one of today’s most game-changing – and debated – technologies. Reactions from marketers to AI tools have been lukewarm thus far and all over the map in terms of the reaction. Typical responses have ranged from fear of AI taking over their job (and the world!) to asserting AI can’t help them in any way.

The truth – at least for today, lies somewhere in the middle. ChatGPT (Pre-trained Transformer), is an AI-driven chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. Elon Musk has also been extensively involved with OpenAI since the companies founding in 2015 and was part of the team that created the initial OpenAI Charter. However, he resigned from the board in 2018 (after voicing some concerns about potential issues that this publicly- available AI can cause).

ChatGPT, in its current release, is a powerful tool that can help create content, generate ideas, and draft documents – all automatically on the fly. While there are some concerns that it will ultimately make manual SEO content creation obsolete, for the time being – the manual component of content creation will still reign as king. There are tools that can identify what content was AI-generated, and I would be shocked if Google doesn’t utilize its own internal AI (don’t forget, the purchased DeepMind back in 2014!) to identify and devalue machine-generated content. My gut feeling is that within the next few quarters, Google will start not only devaluating AI-based content but also identifying it in the search results as such.

So where does it leave marketers? How can they use ChatGPT and any other upcoming AI-based tools to their advantage? At the very least, I encourage everyone to access the tool and play around with it. Spending just 10 minutes on it will give you great insights and ideas of what it can accomplish.

For those ready to dive in and start using it for their SEO strategy – here are some great ways to use it. First, of course, you’ll need to go to ChatGPT and ask it the below questions, for example:

“Generate a list of blog post ideas for a car dealership”

ChatGPT will spit out 10 ideas for blog posts that you can then evaluate and decide which makes sense to write about.

Another great idea is to ask ChatGPT what pages and content you should have on your site. For example:

What types of pages should a car dealership website have?

There are also plenty of applications for ChatGPT outside of SEO. For example, social media– where unique human-written content isn’t as important– could really benefit from this AI. For example, try:

Write a 100+ words worth of Facebook Ad Copy for a car dealership in the New York City area. Include a call to action.

Or perhaps

Write five funny tweets about working at a car dealership

ChatGPT can also be a great tool to help you with writing emails or even responding to client reviews, for example:

Write a response to a user who left this review on our car dealership google listing: “My third time getting a car from Prestige Lexus of Ramsey and Steve Glenwick is my man. All three times, he gave the respect and trust that is truly hard to find at a car dealership, especially these days. No pressure to buy.”

As you can see, the sky is the limit with ChatGPT and the various AI tools that will follow. But remember, always review what it generates, have a concrete strategy, and apply the human touch! Happy learning!

P.S.: This article was written manually and, aside from the screenshots and examples, was not generated by ChatGPT (I feel like we’ll soon start seeing this kind of disclaimer more and more often).

Original Source: https://read.nxtbook.com/digital_dealer/dealer_magazine/march_april_2023/how_to_leverage_chatgpt_for_y.html

We’re excited to have interviewed New York City SEO Expert Alex Melen from SmartSites for the next installment of our Featured SEO Expert Series!

SmartSites is one of SEOblog’s Top SEO companies in New York City.

Alex Melen is an award-winning entrepreneur and keynote speaker. He is the founder of web hosting company T35 Hosting, founded in 1997, and co-founder of advertising agency SmartSite, founded in 2011. SmartSites now manages over $100MM/year in advertising spend and has six offices and over 350 employees worldwide. SmartSites has been featured in the INC 5000 for six consecutive years as one of the fastest-growing digital agencies. Alex has been featured in Business Week’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs, Bloomberg, Forbes, NPR and more.

SmartSites is an award-winning website design and digital marketing agency, with a focus on search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. SmartSites was founded by brothers Alex and Michael Melen, who grew up with a passion for all things digital. With an innovative vision and a lot of hard work, SmartSites quickly became one of America’s fastest-growing companies. Their relentless focus on their clients has led them to over 100 five-star reviews since our inception in 2011. 

What would you say is unique and/or challenging about the SEO industry in 2023?

“Just like we’ve heard for decades, I’m once again hearing that SEO will be dead in 2023. I believe 2023 will see the rise of machine learning with services like ChatGPT threatening the traditional aspects of SEO. However, I truly believe that the tried-and-true manual content writing will continue to outperform (for 2023, at least!). It will be interested to see how Google and other search engines handle machine-generated content. I believe that Google will soon start highlighting the machine/AI-generated content from content that is manually produced. In 2023 for the very least, we will still have an advantage against the AI.”

How does your agency stand out in a crowded market like the New York city area?

“We continue to pride ourselves on our reputation – which is second to none. Our continuous commitment to our clients continues to shine through. As we have since 2011, we continue to help our customers succeed online.”

Can you share a success story from a local SEO campaign centered around a local area? Include any stats and highlights if possible!

“I’ve personally been very involved in the automotive side of the business. To that extent, we have recently been able to create a how-to resource center for a local Lexus dealership with [hundreds] of pages of content on how people can service, diagnose, and troubleshoot their Lexus. The content started ranking within a few months and now ranks nationally for almost every single page of content. In fact, most now come up in featured snippets and even come up in voice results!”

What is the best advice you ever received in business?

“The best advice I’ve ever received actually was indirectly from my brother and co-founder of SmartSites. It’s something he practices himself – but the advice was to work on the business, not in the business. I often struggle to delegate and think of the bigger picture, but that original concept of working on the business still resonates with me.”

What do you think is the most important quality that makes an agency truly great?

“As an agency, we don’t make any physical goods; we don’t produce any widgets. For us, our employees are our biggest asset. Keeping our employees happy and having them be passionate about what we do continues to be our greatest asset and is what makes our agency great.”

Any predictions for the future of SEO?

“As we briefly discussed in the first question – I believe a big part of SEO is going to be dealing with AI-generated content and automation. Both create a huge challenge for Google in determining what should rank and what shouldn’t. Google themselves have spent huge amounts of money developing their own AI, and I believe we will see them start putting it to use. I also think that AI-generated content will start being highlighted as such, and at least in the short term, will rank worse than manually generated content. It’s certainly an interesting time in SEO, and I think the next two years will see more changes than the previous decade combined.”

What is your reaction when you hear that “SEO is dying”?

“It’s something I’ve been hearing for almost two decades now – as long as we keep hearing it, we’ll know that SEO is still here and is as important as ever.”

What do you think is the most important contributor to keeping clients happy?

“Being passionate about helping your clients succeed (along with generating great results!) will continue to be the most important contributor to keeping clients happy. Happy & passionate employees – dedicated to helping their clients succeed online – is how we all win!”

Interested in being considered as an SEOblog “Featured SEO Expert”? Reach out to our team at info@seoblog.com! We’d love to hear from you and give you a high-traffic platform to share your SEO agency’s story and insights.

Original Source: https://www.seoblog.com/seoblog-interview-new-york-city-area-seo-expert-alex-melen-from-smartsites/

As we close up 2022 and enter 2023 the good news is that PPC Marketing – specifically search marketing (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads), continues to perform very well. In a world of chasing user attention, search marketing continues to be one of the few avenues of pull marketing. In other words, instead of forcing banners to audiences that you think might be interested, search marketing allows you to show your ad to those already looking for the cars you sell, your type of dealership, etc.

Now for the bad news – paid search marketing, dominated of course by Google Ads, continues to become more and more expensive. The cost per click (the way you pay for ads on Google), has increased significantly every year since it was launched. And no, it’s not Google just trying to take your money. Google (and other paid search platforms like Microsoft) operates as an auction model. Your ranking on paid results is determined by the most you’re willing to pay per click. The way Google charges you is not the max CPC that you select, but actually by charging you just a penny more than the person below is willing to pay for that click. In other words, advertisers with the winning bid paid 1 cent more than the runner-up.

Google’s success is unfortunately the reason prices continue to increase as more and more funds are being moved to Google Ads, causing the price per click to increase for everyone. As certain as I was that this year’s CPCs will be more than last, I’m certain that next year will be even higher, and the year after even more. However, that doesn’t mean Google Ads is not worth investing in; in fact, paid search (along with organic search) continues to be the best investment you can make in driving visitors, leads, and ultimately sales to your dealership.

However, that doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune! There are some great ways to save money on your Dealership PPC Marketing. I cover this in more detail in my upcoming book: Automotive Search Marketing Secrets. But I’ll also highlight some of the more important ones here:

1. Conversion Tracking & AI-Driven Smart Bidding – Google Ads gives you access to very sophisticated AI-driven machine learning bidding strategies to help you bid more efficiently and save money. What this does is allows Google to use data to bid more for people more likely to convert and less for those that won’t. While your cost per click might not necessarily decrease, your cost per lead and per sale will. However, to make use of machine learning, you need to make sure you’re capturing all of your conversion values. Go through your website with the mindset of “what actions on the site should count as conversions to my dealership”. Some great lower funnel ones are the finance application page, trade-in form, new car lead, used car lease, contact form, live-chat start, phone call, service scheduling, etc.. For an upper funnel, something like a VDP is as far as I’d go (SRP’s are too upper funnel). Once you established all of your conversions, you need to set them up in Google Ads and assign values to them. In 9 out of 10 cases, dealerships end the process at just setting up the conversions – without assigning values. Without values, Google will treat a VDP conversion the same as a phone call – which is obviously not the case. Ideally, you’d want to assign dollar values – for example, what is a phone call lead worth to you? $100? If you don’t have dollar values for all of the conversions, you can use ratios: if a VDP is 1, a phone call would be 100 (worth 100 times more). With this, Google’s algorithm will make sure to bid correctly based on the expected conversions, saving you money.

2. Don’t bid on your dealership name! In most cases, your competitors aren’t allowed to bid on your name – so you don’t really have a reason to bid on it yourself. Try doing a google search for your name and see what comes up. If you’re the only one bidding on it, you can probably stop or lower the amount you spend on that. Bidding on your own name can often “goose” results, making conversion rates look great – however, you’re just paying for clicks that were already going to click to your site from your organic or GMB (now GBP) listing! I’ve seen some agencies spend as much as 80% of the total budget bidding on a dealership name.

3. Set bid caps. While I have full trust in Google’s machine learning algorithm, it’s not perfect and can sometimes bid very aggressively for a click that might never be ROI positive for you. For example, no matter how high Google sees the propensity of a user searching something like “Mercedes-Benz wiper blades”, you might not want to spend something crazy like $50 per click on that search term since you will never be profitable on it even if they do buy wiper blades from you! While most of Google’s machine-learning strategies discourage setting bid caps, you can still do so by creating portfolio bid strategies and setting them at the portfolio level. Just to keep Google in check, you might want to set something like a $10 CPC limit on most campaigns (or maybe even lower depending on what your average cost per click is).

4. Add negatives on an ongoing basis. Google continues to go broader and broader with keyword bidding. Even if you’re bidding for phrases, Google will automatically bid on similar or related phrases in an effort to get you more traffic. This can often lead to bidding (and paying for!) unrelated keywords. For example, just because you’re bidding on a new “Porsche 911” doesn’t mean you want to pay for someone searching for a “Porsche 911 watch” or a “Porsche job working on a 911”. Make sure to review your search terms and set negatives on a monthly basis (and more often if you can!). This will make sure to trim the wasted spend while at the same time improving your campaign metrics.

5. Always experiment, test and improve! Managing your paid search campaigns isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it task. You always want to be experimenting with new ad copy, new ad types, new campaigns – and even new platforms (like Microsoft Ads!). The best path to improvement (and thus getting more results for less spend) is to continually monitor, analyze, test and optimize.

Ready to spend less on PPC ads? The above 5 items should be a great way to get started but of course, not the end-all-and-be-all. Always engage with the agency or person who’s running your PPC Ads. The most successful PPC campaigns are a two-way conversion and partnership between the dealership and the agency/person running them. When both work together, you will always get the best results and spend less.

Original Source: https://digitaldealer.com/marketing-advertising/5-ways-save-money-dealership-ppc-marketing/