Auto Dealers
Changes in enterprise-grade e-commerce and online search capture technologies have allowed Aggregators, such as Truecar, to capture over 80% of your local web audience. After capturing your audience, these auto information middlemen sell you back the customer traffic you used to get organically, which cuts into your margins.
Dealers that understand they need to use new search technologies and tactics can obtain the same customer traffic but at a more reasonable cost, becoming tomorrow’s leading dealers in their local market. Dealers that fail to adopt these new cost-efficient traffic acquisition approaches will quickly fall behind.
Aggregators Dominate the Sales Funnel
Retail / Etail
Retail giants like Amazon and eBay are dominating the retail e-commerce shopping with strong technical capabilities and their ability to provide relevant information for an extremely wide range of customer questions.
In order to compete, enterprise sites need to understand user intent and then provide differentiated content experiences at scale. Your products are there and your category pages have the inventory, but there’s not enough unique useful content to get your pages to the top of the search results.
Etailers that can provide this full product discovery solution for up to millions of your retail web pages will be the future leaders in this market.
Travel
Google has become synonymous with “finding answers” and that is especially true today in the travel industry with Google Flights. Finding and booking affordable flights and routes is now as easy as simply visiting the default search engine. Other travel aggregators, such as Kayak, also have the ability to beat most travel brands in SEO, leaving travel sites out in the cold waiting for visitors.
Travel, airline, and hospitality brands that want to be successful ask how can they compete with the aggregators and bring our customers back to us? Travel brands that use new technologies and tactics can bring these customers back. Travel brands that don’t use these new approaches will be left with fewer customers and lower margin.
Home Services
Local market SEO for home services businesses is a difficult arena to win in. Competing against large home service directories, such as Angie’s list, that have a large number of locations, home service business listings, and professionals is challenging for organizations that lack deep technical understanding on how to bring search traffic to their site.
Companies that win in this space compete by using pricing, reviews, and other data to create helpful, informative, rich, and customized content for their customers across all their business pages which makes it easy for Google to find useful information to answer your prospects' questions. Companies that don’t take this approach spend more on paid search, run at lower margins, and fall behind innovative competitors.
“In the majority of home services verticals (pest control, lawn care, etc.), over 55% of consumers run a search before scheduling an appointment”
Legal
Finding the right lawyer for a specific case can be tedious and stressful for consumers. There are many law firms searching for the best marketing strategy to use to help customers find them. Although social media has become a popular marketing channel for law firm brands, search is still the channel that people use first. A lawyer aggregator site’s purpose, such as Findlaw, is to aggregate attorney profiles, geographical location, and legal expertise, to help consumers discover the lawyer through search engines while making the aggregator money when they resell the lead to the law firm.
Law firms that obtain customer search traffic build focused pages with unique, useful, transactional content at scale to steer potential customers to their more relevant site. Law firms that continue to use outdated approaches lose their valuable prospect traffic to aggregator directories that will continue to capture up to 90% of their audience and sell it back to the firm reducing the firm’s margin.