Automotive Website Search Marketing
SEO Report Card
The new HTML website located at www.bmwcalifornia.net was launched in October 2007 so it is still very "young" as we make this first progress report in January 2008. As of January 18, 2008 the website still have no Google PageRank which is not uncommon in very competitive Internet markets. When the site matures and as additional links are built to the website, the rankings will continue to improve. See our report on their used car microsite at the bottom of this page. (see June 21st update below)
For almost all Google searches that don't include the name "Irvine BMW" and that bring up the new microsite on Google Page One, the existing Dealerskins flash website is not shown on Page One. This shows how effective our HTML sites can be compared to flash websites.
Google Ranking Results
Irvine BMW wanted to dominate local search and also to be a player in national searches since used cars can be sold to anyone in the United States. The following search engine rankings were measured from Google and were last taken on January 18, 2008.
The best possible organic listing in Google is the first page of search results, Listing 1. For this table, we will call this the "Top Position". We are only showing a few of the optimized search phrases due to space limitations and to keep our larger strategy confidential.
Local Search Results
National Search Results
If you consider how many car dealers exist in the United States and how many businesses are selling cars on the Internet, these results are spectacular since he site is only a few months old. If you are looking to market you products and services nationally, give us a call to discuss your marketing goals.
Irvine BMW Update - June 21, 2008
The HTML website located at www.bmwcalifornia.net now has a Google PageRank score of 3/10 which is the same ranking for their old website www.irvinebmw.net, which has been up for over 5 years. So you can see how quickly a website can gain traction when it has the right content to attract BMW car buyers and additional organic traffic. In fact, the website appears for dozens of searches that include the words "BMW" and "Orange County" or "BMW" and "California" with model names added.
For example, www.bmwcalifornia.net shows on Google Page One for:
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California BMW X6 - #1 listing
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California BMW diesel cars - #1 listing
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Orange County BMW lease - #1 listing
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Orange County BMW Service - #3 listing
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Orange County BMW Parts - #2 listing
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Orange County 128i - #1 listing
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Orange County BMW dealer (2 listings on page 1)
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California BMW X3
Irvine BMW Used Cars
We also designed a microsite sub-domain for Irvine BMW that is targeting local BMW used car searches. if you read our article on automotive lead generation websites, you can see that car dealers like Irvine are being attacked by national auto websites. So we decided to fight the big guys and we have great results to report.
Here are some examples of town name search in Orange County California that bring their used car website to page one of Google:
- fullerton used 325i
- fullerton used 525i
- laguna beach used 525i
- laguna beach used 745i
- garden grove used 525i
- mission viejo used x5
- mission viejo used x3
- mission viejo used 325i
- Rossmoor used 325i
- Rossmoor used 525i
- orange county used 525i
- orange county used 325i
- orange county used 745i
- used 745i orange county*
- used 745i laguna beach*
* you can see that reversing the search term order does not negatively affect the results
Automotive Website Designers
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Company Information
Irvine BMW is located in Orange County California and is one of the largest BMW dealers in the United States.
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Initial Website Analysis
Originally Irvine BMW had one website for their business. The site was designed by Dealerskins and is primarily a flash based website design. Due to the nature of flash and the internal site architecture it was not easy to optimize the site for high Google or yahoo SERP. The decision was made to leave the Dealerskins site alone and create a new HTML website.
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Scope of Work
We completed a new HTML website for all the cars and services Irvine BMW offered. This was created on www.bmwcalifornia.net . This site contained all the services and cars that Irvine offers.
Then we decided to test a dedicated microsite for the upcoming BMW 1 Series cars. This was because there was a great buzz for the BMW 128i and 135i cars. That microsite we designed can be found at:
The results on the dedicated 1 Series website will be published in the future since it is even younger than this website project.
Summary
The lead flow into their dealership from the Internet marketing plan that we developed has started to show progress. Once the site is fully indexed for local search, we will have a better feel for the number of leads the HTML site is generating. Since he website is only 60+ days old, we expect more results to pop in the next 3 months.
This page is a work in progress and we will complete a full year case study and post results so come back to observe the success of our SEO strategies.
BMW 1 Series Success
Visit our BMW 1 Series website to read about this exciting new coupe and convertible that will be coming to the US market in the Spring of 2008. You can read more about the car at: