Competing pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies eat into marketing budgets unnecessarily and Autoweb Design’s digital solutions director Martin Dew will be urging retailers to curtail ‘maverick spend’ when he hosts a masterclass session at Automotive Management Live.

Automotive Management Live 2019, on November 7 at Birmingham NEC, has a series of masterclass sessions from some of the industry’s leading suppliers, an exhibitors hall and insight theatres with expert speakers discussing FCA compliance, motor finance, training, people management and the used car market. All are available free of charge to dealers and manufacturers that register.

Dew said: “We see time and again PPC and SEO strategies that overlap or conflict. Although often we see no strategy in place with the mindset of throwing money at it to make a problem go away, but that actually creates the problem.”

Autoweb Design’s session at Automotive Management Live 2019 will provide key insights into the differences between PPC and SEO and how ensuring the two strategies dovetail delivers better results for less money. A holistic strategy ensures website and search engine marketing (PPC and SEO) activities work together delivering the right message resulting in a good user journey on the website.

Dew added: “We tend to see people looking for quick wins such as location-based strategies but organically the business already dominates locally making it pointless paying to appear.

"Sometimes we see different people responsible for PPC and SEO, both want to demonstrate they have delivered so both potentially go for the low hanging fruit.”

Delegates at Automotive Management Live 2019 will hear how adopting integrated strategies such as using PPC to test numbers of website users who click on a certain search term which will inform whether it’s worth investing in a long-term search engine optimisation strategy, reduces spend and can increase website traffic.

Dew said: “Very often we see people investing in SEO and PPC on either the same keywords or two strategies that just don’t complement each other at all. Meanwhile, the website needs to reflect the SEO and PPC strategies as the user journey has to be right.

"That’s ensuring people land on the relevant page or a specific landing page has been created. This too needs to be tested which can be done using PPC whilst at the same time developing a long-term SEO strategy.

“All stakeholders, such as general and sales managers need to be engaged as a lot of people are overly focussed about searching for something like ‘used car dealerships in Leeds’ yet their ad doesn’t appear. The answer might be that people who search for that term don’t turn into leads on your website.

"We are better off spending on ‘used Ford Fiesta Leeds’, for example, because people are more likely to convert," he said.

“It’s not necessarily about reducing marketing budgets but freeing up money to invest in other channels. However, it is about eliminating wasted marketing spend.”