CarsDirect

The Challenge

CarsDirect is one of the largest automotive ecommerce websites in the world, offering car buyers a no-hassle way to find the new or used vehicle that’s right for them. Instead of navigating the stress-filled car dealership experience with limited inventory, pushy salespeople, and opaque pricing, consumers can complete the entire process from the comfort of their own home. But while that may seem like a no-brainer, making customers feel comfortable researching, comparing, AND buying a car completely online wasn’t always easy.

The Insight

While some consumers still prefer to buy a car the old fashioned way, more and more are turning to search engines like Google to help them start the process. In order to capture these “top-of-funnel” consumers with high buying intent, you need content that not only addresses their informational needs (inventory, pricing, trims, etc.) but builds trust and inspires them to act. And while CarsDirect had a wealth of automotive experience and insights to share, they didn’t have the internal resources or processes needed to produce authoritative automotive content at scale.

The Work

The first step was to identify all of the relevant keywords that people were searching during their car buying process. To do this, we hired and trained a team of content research assistants to identify potential keyword topics using a variety of tools (including Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, competitive analysis, and our own internal organic search data). Note: this was before tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and SEOmoz made keyword research vastly more efficient.

With a pipeline of content topics coming out of our research department, I hired a small automotive editorial team and trained them on how to turn the keywords and topics into content briefs that could be given to freelance copywriters to turn into articles. They would also be responsible for reviewing and proofreading the final content before it was ready for publishing.

At the height of our content production I had 10 keyword researchers, 6 editorial managers, and 50+ freelance copywriters producing over 500 individual pieces of content a month. From new vehicle reviews and head-to-head comparisons to segment-specific buying guides and Top 10 lists, we created content that helped users make sense of the complicated automotive landscape and pushed them further down the purchasing funnel. And we did it at scale.

The Results

While I was there, we were able to increase CarsDirect organic search traffic by 200,000+ per month, driving both increased lead volume to their sales team and incremental revenue through display advertising. But almost as important, I helped define the roles, responsibilities, processes, and tools that helped make quality content production at scale a reality.