Seacoast Mazda Case Study

The Client: 

Seacoast Mazda is a new and used Mazda dealer located on the Seacoast of New Hampshire.  They were a small to average size dealer selling roughly 20 to 25 new and 20 to 25 used vehicles every month.  LIke most dealers they had concerns with advertising budget and driving traffic to their website. Their organic traffic was lacking YOY, they were not ranking on page 1 for the most basic search terms, and had little and outdated SEO done to their website.  They had a good product, and a good platform, but not enough customers were finding them.  In order to gain customers, they focused on 3rd party vendors and paid ads.  Their goal was to grow from a 40 to 45 cars a month store, to 60 to 65 cars per month.  We knew a focused SEO strategy around quality content would work for them.  They were also patient, with the understanding  that SEO is an investment in their website, and takes time to work. 

We started working with Seacoast Mazda in June of 2018.  For the month of June 2018 they had 5,758 visitors to their site from Organic alone.   Flash forward to June of 2020 and they are up over 77% with over 10,200 visitors to their site from Organic: 

Building a foundation: 

Over the next few years we implemented an SEO plan where we first concentrated on the site’s “foundation”. We focused on and fixed the sites metadata, re-wrote the site homepage and “About Us” section with internal links as well as optimized images with alt text through the entire site.  Next we focused on conversion rate optimization.  Basically they already had traffic, but it wasn't converting.  If we drove more traffic to a site that didn’t convert, it would just be wasted traffic.  We made some website modifications to drive more customers to vehicles. Next we did A/B testing to determine which calls to action worked best for their product and market.  Once we had the site dialed in to over a 2.5% conversion rate we knew we were ready to drive some real traffic.   

Content is King: 

Seacoast Mazda was tired of continually spending money on third party vendors.  Our plan focused on 6 new SEO pages every month.  This consisted of:

• 2 Model research pages with 1500 words each, focusing on the model (ex. All new  Mazda3). 
• 2 comparison pages with 1000 words each comparing the vehicle to a competitor (ex. Mazda3 vs Honda Civic).
• 2 blog posts with 500 words each which was a supporting article (ex. Mazda 3 new trims for current year).

This wasn’t your typical “cookie cutter” content.  Some big box SEO agencies will produce the same basic content on multiple stores and just change location data. The other piece with this new content is that it had to be appealing for the reader.  Having boring and monotonous articles won’t get read, they have to be entertaining, worthwhile, and matter. Good content is written and formatted for both Google as well as the reader helping you both in ranking as well as the purchasing process. At some point the user/reader has to make a decision to "come off the page" and reach out.  Being a thought leader, providing useful information, building trust, this is all based on the initial message that a company is delivering. This is real content. 

But like we mentioned before, ranking with SEO takes time. Even with this new content approach they were still struggling with organic traffic.  After 6 months their traffic was still down YOY.  

Even with traffic still being down we were seeing good news.  Bounce rate was dropping, people were viewing more pages and spending more time on the site.  With this good news we continued our approach.  Six new SEO pages built every month, continual A/B testing as well as monitoring metadata insured we’d get the growth we were after.  SEO takes time and this content is king approach will get us the results we’re after. 

Results: 

We have now been working with Seacoast Mazda for 2 years and have built over 140 SEO pages for their store.  So where are they now?  We are happy to report that as of September 2020 they have had their 5th consecutive record setting sales month.  Their traffic from organic is through the roof.  In September of 2020 they had 9,556 visitors for organic alone.  This was an increase YOY of over 152%!  New sessions were up, new users were up and bounce rate was down! 

Recap: 

Seacoast Mazda is a small to medium size Mazda dealer on the seacoast of New Hampshire.  Two years ago they joined forces with Conversion Automotive Marketing to implement a structured SEO strategy to drive organic traffic to their website.  This process and investment took time, but the results have really paid off.  Over two years later and they have had 5 consecutive record setting months.  Their organic traffic is up over 150% YOY and they do not need to focus as much on 3rd party vendors to drive real traffic to their website.  Seacoast Mazda realized that SEO is an investment.  They are now seeing that organic traffic is free after the initial investment and stays and continues to grow, unlike Paid ads which are money draining with little equity.