Hi Jeff. As usual, I enjoy your insight. I agree with everything you have stated. You question the time, money and what else is required to reach the eyes of searching shoppers. To expand on your thought experiment about resources–Pay per click ads on search engines may be more affordable or accessible (than optimization) to a business owner in the position of buying one or both (in-house or otherwise). I feel buying traffic should be cheaper than buying traffic growth. If a dealer’s short term goal can be satisfied only with a pay-per-visitor advertising program, the magnitude of this ad spend is directly related to the lack of the website’s ability to attract the desired traffic.

You are right, if you know SEO you can get to the top of the SERPS quickly just as Paul has demonstrated. However, it would be more difficult to do this for several keyword or keyword phrases at one time (unless you had the money and resources ) if a dealer was to run a short term promotion.

What about dealers that do not have a Paul or the resources for truly effective SEO? Not to mention a dealer website platform that is SEO friendly.

Believe me, I totally agree that dealers have and will continue to overlook the importance and value of SEO. This is what made me say “a great win for dealers”. Having the ability to display relevant inventory on the first page of a google search could help the dealers that do not have a strong SEO presence. These could be the same dealers that are also paying big $$ for other listing services.

Thanks again Corey for an interesting post.

I have linked to Mike’s writing and comments twice already, so I also don’t agree that I am distorting the context. Anyone could click the links above to find the drivingsales location that you linked again here in the comments.

Your proof of it taking 4 hours to rank for a word does prove that you are a skilled SEO engineer. It does prove that words can be ranked for quickly. However, it should not be thrown out as an insult to Mike. As you can tell by reading the full context of his words, his point was that PPC is nimble, and quicker (particularly for most car dealers since that was the audience he was talking too).

The fact that it took you 4 hours to rank for a word that that could be purchased in 4 minutes doesn’t prove Mike was off note.

I think this post is mis-guided. Most agree that both a PPC and SEO campaign are best when tied together. I know Mike is a huge advocate of both, as evidenced by his writings. I don’t think it’s fair to diminish that. On the flip side, Paul you did an incredible job of organically ranking for a word very fast, I believe even mike would call that commendable.

You can see mikes full post here:

http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/dealerdotcom/2008/12/09/choosing-your-ppc-vendor-will-you-have-control/

That medium is probably best reserved for chasing credit leads or building a list for giveaway promotions.