Should you hire an SEO company?
This is the million dollar question and the answer isn’t always a resounding “Yes” as each RV Dealer is in a different stage within their business development.
If you are on the fence on the best direction to go, here are a couple tips to help you make the best decision.
When a RV dealer should “NOT” hire an SEO company:
1 – You Don’t Know SEO Basics
Do not hire an SEO company if you don’t know the basics of SEO. This is huge, but if you are managing the website for an RV dealership, you must know the basics of SEO so that you can weed out the bad SEO companies.
Want to learn SEO for your RV dealership? Here is your complete SEO guide.
Once you go through our SEO guide, you will be able to know when an SEO company isn’t worth their salt.
2 – When you don’t have resources to dedicate to SEO
No, this isn’t just about money, but also has to do with time as well.
An RV dealer must be able to manage their inventory: take photos or videos to upload to the website. So if a dealer doesn’t have the time to do that, then they need to setup a workflow for that prior to bringing an SEO company on-board.
3 – Don’t hire an agency if they have a 12 month commitment
Annual contracts are crazy. A company should want to earn your business every day instead of working hard to get the contract and then disappearing.
Hire an SEO company that offers monthly services so that you can let them go if they aren’t performing. Keep in mind that SEO is not instant, but the SEO company should show results for an SEO company within the first 60 days.
4 – Don’t hire SEO company Without Transparency
Don’t hire an SEO company if they don’t show you a game plan of how they are going to do your search engine optimization. Transparency is key.
If they don’t give you keywords that they are going to target, or the content and / or backlinks that they are going to create, then just walk away.
Every SEO agency should be transparent in what’s going on.
5 – Don’t hire Without Results
If they can’t show results – don’t hire an SEO company if they can’t beat out their competition.
When to hire an SEO company:
1 – When you have money set aside for online marketing
When you have money set aside for online marketing – SEO services for RV dealers ranges greatly, from $100 / month to $5,000 / month and more.
But as the age old saying goes… “You get what you pay for”. If you buy a burger from McDonalds, it is cheap and makes you feel good for a couple minutes, but down the road you will always feel sick.
The average cost of SEO is around $800 to $1,500 / month depending on the dealer’s needs and aggressiveness. Keep in mind that SEO is not instant, so you will need to have enough money for at least six months to give the company time to increase rankings, traffic and leads. At that point you can see if they give a great ROI to continue.
2 – When you know what RV brands and RV classes you want to promote.
Yes, an SEO company can help you with keyword selection. Everything comes down to return on investment. So, when you know brand, class or type of RV brings in the best ROI, then you can hire an SEO company with your specific focus.
3 – Hire an SEO company that only works within the RV industry.
The RV industry is unique, but sometimes hiring a local SEO company that doesn’t know the industry won’t give you the results you desire or as fast.
Take it from us, we’ve been the local SEO company before and we spread ourselves too thin trying to learn each industry (construction, real estate, dental and law, just to name a few). And it takes a TON of time to learn how to perform SEO in each industry.
Since we’ve started working with only RV dealers, we’ve been able to achieve better results and faster!
4 – Hire an SEO company if you are looking for long term success.
If you are wanting instant leads, then PPC services may be the better option as SEO is not instant.
A PPC campaign can be setup and live within a couple of hours, but getting your page in Google may take 3-4 weeks at a minimum.
This isn’t to say that SEO isn’t viable or shouldn’t be invested in, but we say this to give you the proper expectations prior to starting.
There are thousands of ways that customers search online in order to purchase an RV. Long term success happens when you prioritize your top ROI sales keywords (travel trailers for sale) and then focus on supportive industry related keyword phrases (RV shows, RV storage, Best rv travel locations etc).
Final Thoughts
Hiring an SEO company can be incredibly beneficial to your RV dealership if you are in position to do so. Hopefully this article helped shed some light on what to look for before hiring an SEO company.
If you have questions, please comment below.
