We’ve all been hearing, “They can’t buy it if they can’t find it.” Findability, a word that can’t be found in Webster’s Dictionary yet, is an age-old concept that has slowly found its way to the Internet and the automotive industry. Findability simply means customers can locate you and buy from you on the Internet. This year the automotive industry is buzzing about Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing (SEO and SEM), and rightfully so. With an increasingly Internet savvy car buying market and the overwhelming use of websites in the car buying process, the stakes are high to make the most of your web presence. The Internet has taken clues from our physical surroundings. Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, are similar to huge maps of the World Wide Web. Navigation bars are our street signs. Site maps resemble building directories helping us find our way in a new space. These are some examples of the tools used to find what we need in both the physical world and on the Internet. The Key Components of the Findability buzz. SEO is simple in concept but difficult in practice. Search engines rank websites in order of popularity and relevance to the search words users enter. SEO focuses on making your dealership as popular and relevant as possible for car buyers. SEO is only one of the key components needed to make it easy for car buyers to find your dealership online. It is important to note that getting and staying on top takes ongoing time and effort. SEM, on the other hand, is the fun, quick stuff. SEM is advertising through search engines. Advertising budgets exist for print, television or radio, and SEM now is a part of that budget. On any given day, you could have an SEM ad that is seen by hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people on Google alone. Not too shabby. Sports Analogy Like professional boxers who spend months, even years, training and fine tuning their bodies for a prize fight; SEO requires diligence and “eye on the prize” long-term focus. There is no easy way to get ready for this competition. It takes training and refining over the long haul to be prepared to stand out as the best. SEM is like the coach who jump starts the training and kicks the boxer (SEO) in the tail to help build and keep the necessary momentum to win the prize. SEM can help drive traffic to your website almost immediately. The more traffic SEM directs to your site, the more popular it becomes. The more popular it is, the higher your search engine ranking becomes. That’s SEO and SEM working together! The higher your search engine ranking becomes, the more car buyers can find your site. When more car buyers find you, you can sell more cars. So… Boxer (SEO) + Coach (SEM) = Winning the Prize (Findability). Car buyers can buy from you only if they can find you. Once they find you, you must make sure that your website is a lead generating machine. We’ll save that for a future article. Vol 3, Issue 6