So I got a Droid for Christmas this year from Laura and let me tell you, it’s probably one of the coolest phones I have ever played with. In fact I’m using probably the. Best apps I’ve found to post this from he phone.

When you think about buying a car one of the first things to cross your mind is, “How the heck am I gonna pay for this car?” Well when people start to think about that exact question we want to be the company that they find when they search for an auto loan on the internet. Right now my company currently is very prominent in the bad credit sector of the auto loans market but pretty unknown in the main stream of automotive financing.

My goal is to take at least one of our sites to the top of page one for auto, auto loans, car loan, or car loans.  I will achieve this by getting around 300 inbound links along with major socialization of these sites.

So first off the keywords I will be going after are going to be be targeted at local areas and 9 out of 10 times include the actual city name that I am trying to get. I will also be trying to get a page one rank for each Lansing car dealership name, ie. Saywers Chevrolet. Currently this site has been out for just over a year but it really hasn’t taken on a life of it’s own. I already have decent ranking for most of the generic terms that I went after in the beginning but now I want to expand the site and get more user involvement.

So the domain name that I will be using for this challenge id LansingUsedCar.com. I like to try and get rankings for the low hanging fruit before we I go in for the more generic terms, not this time. I have a great domain and I think I can get it pushed up in the rankings for  genric terms fairly quick.

1. Lansing Used Car
2. Lansing Used Cars
3. Used Cars Lansing
4. Lansing Mi Used Cars
5. Lansing MI Used Car

The first step in this process is to set up the site so that it’s user friendly and architecturally sound. We have to create a clear and  concise path for both users and search bots. The site currently is pretty clustered and the users don’t even know they can sell their cars for free. After we get the site flow right and look half way decent we’ll get this bad boy out there and get it ranked even higher for these terms and many more.

Rule #1 – The domain is king! It doesn’t matter if you have a url like this www.cashforclunkers.com or www.cash–for–clunkers.com, as long as the domain has the same words as the search. This used to be the case with Google but it really isn’t any longer. Sure the domain name does have a lot of weight, but Google will automatically discount any double hyphenated domains and treat them as SERP spam. Bing will allow these domains to appear in the results as long as the content matches the domain.

Rule #2 – Weigh the site down with your keywords from the top of the page right on down to the bottom. Repeat it in as many places as you can. With the other search engines this tactic will NOT work. Bing loves to see an exact match for the search keyword and thinks that if it’s repeated on the page that the page must be relevant.

Rule #3 – Just like with any other search engine you need to make sure that there is a sufficient amount of site content. As I am sure you have already looked at Bing and it’s results you will notice that almost every top listed site, no matter  the topic, has a list of pages that appear when you hover over a result. These extra links do exactly as Bing claims on their newest ad campaign, it gives answers. When you have a topic for your site , even a one paragraph topic, make sure to create a page and title it properly, this way it will show up in the side bar of the rollover. This will give you a much better chance of getting the potential client to convert. If you answer their questions they will take action.

Rule #4 – Remember to keep you site up to date. Bing is a “fast” engine. What I mean by that is, Bing doesn’t have results in their top 10 for that long if the site is not updated. I have had sites disappear from Bing if the content is not up to date or the site hasn’t been touched in a month. Usually it takes about 30 days for the site to go away if you haven’t updated it, so be sure to at least put a constantly updating feed on the home page or a rotating text of some kind.

By following these couple rules, you should have NO problem making it to the top of Bing and staying there.

I have an arsenal of tools at my disposal, I just need to figure out which ones I’ll use to get the job done.  Right now I think the best thing for us to do would be to is to run around and do 30 second interviews with tailgaters and post them to the site. We can take advantage of a bunch of social sites if we do this along with with up to the minute tweets from each sporting event.

I have also been thinking of way we can promote on the road. Maybe we should take a trip to every away game in a special wrapped KIA and update  via twitter, facebook, youtube, 12seconds and more, this way the company is seen at every Uof M event for a year.  This will also drive traffic up significantly to our social profiles in turn creating traffic to our main website which turns into floor traffic. I think it can work but it will take a bunch of extra effort to get it done.

Just the begining of this idea I still have until game #1 of the football season to figure it all out.

So with all this advertising we decided that we could actually gain a lot of leads for our dealer base by using every dealers catch phrase as our target. It seems like every time you turn on the TV you see another auto dealer advertising the Cash for Clunkers program. Now I’ve been working with car dealers for quit some time now and the one I know that they never take care of is the internet. How do I know this you ask? Well it’s simple! They don’t think that internet advertising is the way to go. Can you believe it? My company does over 1500 leads per day and we’re not even the top company for auto leads. If dealership owners realized how many more cars they could sell if they put 1/4 of the ad budget towards the internet they would  be surprised.

Anyhow back to the topic, Cash For Clunkers. What I found out, simply by mistake, about this keyphrase is that often times people mis spell their search query and end up on a totally different topic than what they were originally looking for, in this case “klunker”.  What we decided to do is take this mis spelling and integrate it with in a Bing targeted site.  We call a Bing site any site that has 1 or 2 dashes in the domain.  Google doesn’t like the dashes in domains for some reason, I think it’s a spam deterient or something, but the other top 2 search engines really care.  What I did next was simply change the word clunker to klunker throughout a secondary page of the site http://www.cash–for–clunkers.com and let the bots do the rest. Well it turns out that this little mis spelling test gets about 75 unique vistors per day and has turned into about 15 leads per day. Not bad for a double dashed domain name and a mis spelled keyword!

A few examples of low hanging fruit that I’ve attacked in the past are some of the highest trafficked keywords that my company now goes after in our everyday SEO plan. Most of those words still don’t have very much competition and remain easy to stay on top for, however once competition comes along you have to do a little work to try and out smart them. Let’s take a look at some of those types of words that I’ve scored on and that are now turning a profit for the company.

1. Bankruptcy Auto Financing – Currently this keyword has alot of competition but, it hasn’t always been that way. When we first realized that people were actually searching for this we decided to do a little research and see if it was actually worth trying to get to #1 for it. What we found was actually quite amazing. The competition was minimal, the the exact keyword domain  was available, and we easily got to page 1 with a single blog entry. When this happens it says a few things;  the “G” sees that we are relevant , and most importantly the sites that are there probably don’t even know that they show up for the keyword so it makes it easier to beat them.  After purchasing the domain and developing a quick site we launched http://www.bankruptcyautofinancing.com and within 2 weeks we over took our blog entry on page 1 and eneded up at #1 for the term. Suddenly within 30 days we had already paid for the resources used to build the site and started turning a profit from the leads we were gathering.
2. Cars Under 1000 – This keyword had no competition and took only 4 days to reach #1 using some of the simplest SEO tactics known to man. All we did was find a domain name that contained the keyword and fill the site with extremely useful data. When working with niche keywords you have to always keep in mind that people have only one thing in mind when they are searching within a niche, to find what they are looking for. You will also need to remember  if someone is looking for a $1,000 car that’s all they want. They don’t want to see what the best value on a new car is, they don’t want an auto loan (at least not yet), all  they want is a cheap used car for less than a thousand bucks. http://www.findcarsunder1000.com

Today I will be building an SEO site that focuses on several keywords based on one common keyword; New Cars Under.  Now as this is being put out to the world I can release a little of the research I did to decided on attacking this particular keyword. First we already get a ton of traffic because a test that I ran on our main site lotpro.com. I now know that we can make money on these keywords as well as match car buyers with car dealers in their local area. Second, the domain was available. Anytime I can get a domain name that generates high amounts of traffic, I buy it.  No matter what anyone tells you EVERY search engine loves keyword domains.  I’ll only spend about 6 hours of time building out this site to get through phase one: traffic, rankings, and leads. After I reach a certain amount of traffic I’ll look at redesigning and the site as well as work on conversion and calls to action.  Normally before I move to step 2 I’ll check out the traffic and rankings to make sure that they are sustainable and able to do what we want, create leads.  Traffic is great but in the end, at least at my current job, leads are what keeps us in business.

Check back in a week or two to see if I have acomplished the mission with my new keyword targets!

After speaking with their “webmaster” and receiving emails that finally have some substance I will finish their site in about 30 mins. The funny thing is, Auto Credit Express is amazing at SEO/SEM – we are the industry leaders, yet they decided just last week to only have us build their website not SEO it. I am going to make sure that it receives no organic traffic from anything that I do. I will not be doing any meta info or wordsmithing any content to get them higher rankings.  I guess we’ll see if their webmaster has any skills.  I’m not to sure that he will be able to help them in that department due to the fact that he claims Search Engines actually list Flash sites in their results.  This is not the case for anything outside of entertainment site. Why wouldn’t every company have a flash website if they could get traffic from it.  I know I would.  The problem is no SE will place it in the top 10 for any term, unless it’s the NHL or the Beastie Boys, you know directly typed in high profile names.

My suggestion to any web folks out there, don’t agree to do “speed” sites, they always expect more than your contract says, often times it’s a he said she said BS game these people like to play. Anyway I will be taking care of this site for the next 30 mins then I will post a link.

On this site I’m going to speed blog about the kids sporting events as well some of the TV shows we watch at our house. Up until about 8:30 in the evening 60% of the TV shows at our house are some sort of childrens programming. I’ll leave the speed blogging alone for those but I will write about the shows we watch after 8:30 and certainly about the sports that are on like Detroit Football, Tiger Baseball, Redwing Hockey and International Soccer.

Well hopefully this will do for the first of many Speed blogs to come. Stay Tuned!