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/

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), operate 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 is being moved to Google Ads, causing the price per click to increase for everyone. As certain as I was that this year’s CPC’s will be more than last, I’m certain that next years will be even higher, and the year after even more. However, that doesn’t mean Google Ads is not worth investing to; 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 the 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: 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 ratio’s: 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 sometime 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 $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 an 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 is 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://www.drivingsales.com/smartsites/blog/ways-to-save-money-on-dealership-ppc-marketing

We were lucky to catch up with Alex Melen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alex, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

With digital importance already growing, COVID pushed us 10 years forward in a 3mo time. The importance of digital and having a digital presence can’t be overstated these days. Business’s that have typically gotten by without having a website or being online now find that it’s crucial to their survival. Think of mall retailers, restaurants, even local mom-and-pop hardware stores. While many of these were fine without a website just a few years ago – these days, they all require a website presence – which translates to a website, search marketing (SEO/SEM) and social media marketing.

However, that’s not necessarily a unique trend – and something most others already realize. The big trend I have personally been seeing in the last 2 years is that with this influx of business’s entering the digital space the cost to advertise has grown tremendously. Not only that, but the room for error has decreased and the consumers patience for slow loading websites or inconsistence has gone down to nothing. It’s no longer acceptable to just do the bare minimum – everything you need to do has to be data-driven, consistent and easy for the consumer. If your advertising doesn’t match your website, you will lose the consumer. if your website creates too much friction during the consumer experience, you will lose the consumer. If your messaging, pricing and customer service isn’t top notch, you will lose the consumer.

This is a trend I see continuing in the next few years where only those who are being strategic, data driven, and investing in improving the customer experience, will succeed.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

SmartSites is an award winning website design and digital marketing agency, with a focus on search engine marketing (SEO & PPC). 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.

Our relentless focus on our clients has led us to over 100 5-star reviews since our inception in 2011. When Dun & Bradstreet asked “”How satisfied do you feel about the quality of service?””, we scored a phenomenal 97%. We keep our clients happy by delivering results that exceed their expectations.

Think Web. Think Smart.

Any advice for managing a team?

For us, as with any service business, the employees are our top priority. We don’t manufacture a product or produce any tangible good. Instead, our service is provided by our employees and our job as company owners, executives, etc.. is to empower our employees to be successful AND happy in what they do. And I personally believe those things are connected. Employees should be empowered to do their best; they shouldn’t be micromanaged or simply told what to do. Our job at the executive level is to put the right people in the right positions and then empower them to make the best decisions. Of course we create a support system at every level and provide them the resources to make them successful.

It’s also important to have proper financial incentives which means two things: 1) a competitive salary and benefits. and 2) perhaps more importantly, a commission/bonus system that will automatically reward those who want to go the extra mile. This commission/bonus system needs to of course be transparent and easily understood by all. That way, the employees themselves are ultimately in charge of how much they can make – versus just hoping for 3% yearly bonuses.

Combined with empowering them to grow in their position (and grow outside of their position too!), I believe is the best way to maintaining high morale.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Reputation is perhaps the most important thing you can have in your business. It’s very hard to build, and very easy to lose. One of our main priorities as a company is to maintain our stellar reputation and empower our employees to go above and beyond in all ways possible to make that happen. As with almost any business, your reputation will make and break you and should be a priority for all.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.smartsites.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smartsitesnj/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SmartSites/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smartsites/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/smartsitesnj
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2ex4W9pofr2pnZubJEAeTQ/videos?view=0
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/smartsites-paramus
• Other: My personal site: www.alexmelen.com

Suggest a Story: CanvasRebel is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.

Original Source: https://canvasrebel.com/meet-alex-melen/

Now more than ever, people are starting their research for a new car online. A Google/Kantar Gearshift Study found that 89% of research for new cars happens online in the U.S. (with both coasts pushing much closer to 100%). The same study found that search continues to be the top online source for researching a new vehicle, with 78% starting their car research on a search engine. Not only are shoppers researching online – they are purchasing online, with 16% of new car buyers ordering or purchasing their vehicle online in 2021 (compared to 1% in 2018!). And a recent study found that nearly 70% of car buyers are considering an online purchase for their next car.

Why is this important? With consumers being more digital-centric, reaching shoppers online with the right inventory and information will be more important than ever. That’s where vehicle listing ads (VLAs) come into play. You are probably familiar with Google’s shopping ads if you’ve ever shopped for an electronic on Google in the last decade. First introduced in 2012, Google Shopping ads revolutionized the eCommerce space to the point that almost 100% of our eCommerce clients utilize shopping ads as part of their marketing strategy. Vehicle ads are here to revolutionize the automotive shopping experience, just as shopping ads did for eCommerce. What makes these unique is the ad you display highlights the vehicle image, location, make/model, price, dealership name, and mileage. This gives the consumer tremendous amounts of information about the vehicle before they even make the click. Now for the challenges: Vehicle Listing Ads are still complicated to set up (and set up correctly!), and correct measurement becomes even more important. The setup process can be summarized in the following steps:

1. Create a merchant Center account (like you would for selling eCommerce)
2. Sign up for VLAs with Google for them to convert your Merchant Center to allow VLAs.
3. Complete the Vehicles Ads Program sign-up, setting up all of the information in the account – including validating the phone numbers.
4. Create a feed of your inventory. This tends to be the most time-consuming task since most vendors still struggle with providing a properly formatted Google feed. The alternative here is to crawl the site and manually create the feed.
5. You can now submit the feed to Google for approval.
6. Once approved, you can link it up to your Google Ads campaign.
7. And finally, you can create and launch the VLA campaign.

But wait, there is more! You also want to make sure you have conversion tracking setup properly to not only measure relevant conversions but also assign an appropriate value to each conversion. With VLAs heavily leaning on Google’s Machine Learning (and using auction time bidding), improperly setting up conversion tracking will significantly impact your results. You also want to watch out for VDP conversions, which can be recorded but shouldn’t be a primary conversion (since every click will be a VDP!). Time to enable and set to forget! Well, not quite. You always want to ensure your VLA feed is valid and showing accurate information (you shouldn’t be advertising cars that are no longer available!). Additionally, you want to set up complementary search text ads to complement the VLAs. Google’s internal research study showed that advertisers who complemented existing search campaigns with vehicle ads saw a +25% average increase in conversions (without increasing spend).

Once you’re up and running – the results are typically very strong. On average, we’ve seen a cost per click of $1.50 (vs. $3-4 for search ads), with very high intent metrics like store visits, phone calls, and inventory leads. Although worth noting that when conversion metrics were not adequately set up, the CPCs were still low, but conversion metrics were much lower than search ads. Ready to take your VLAs to the next level? There are also various levels of a campaign structure that can be set to allow you to highlight specific inventory, spend money on the cars that need to be sold, and give you ultimate flexibility. For example:

And lastly, it’s worth noting that Microsoft Ads beat Google to Vehicle Listing Ads and has been offering them for several years. They don’t have the scale, but they have some unique advantages (like showing on MSN properties outside of search results). If you’re doing Google VLAs, you should most likely do the Microsoft equivalent as well:

Want to learn more? If you’re registered for Digital Dealer Las Vegas, you can catch my virtual session on VLAs post-show on the event app. And don’t hesitate to reach out if you need assistance in getting your VLAs set up and taking your digital marketing to the next level.

Original Source: https://read.nxtbook.com/digital_dealer/dealer_magazine/may_june_2022/drive_traffic_to_your_dealers.html