Case #3: Building Traffic

 

 

Company: General Motors

 

Website: http://www.gm.com/

I chose to evaluate the online marketing strategies of General Motors because of their apparent efforts to increase website visits through numerous traffic building techniques. Founded in 1908, General Motors currently employs about 284,000 people around the world, manufacturing its cars and trucks in 33 countries (www.gm.com). According to Alexa, a web information company similar to Google Analytics, GM.com has a traffic rank of 17,846, or about 70-100 million visits per day.

Their website is designed to primarily attract task oriented users because most of their customer base is interested in purchasing their products, and the website is constructed to promote and inform potential clients about the available options GM offers. The site caters to all task behavioral needs including e-commerce, corporate information retrieval, technical support, and information searching. The website is easy to navigate through, has fast responsive time (hardly 2 seconds), and high interactivity and quality content through flash animation. There are clearly labeled navigation bars, drop-down menus supplying additional information, a Google search bar to clearly identify the key words sought by the task user, and the facilitation of the purchasing of their products. One such example is their vehicles page which allows users to search GM products by brands, body style, prices, fuel economy, seating capacity, towing and horsepower. The search can be further modified, through a drop down menu, to specify within these original options. By dragging two or more vehicles into a box to compare the differences between each, user interactivity is enhanced. All navigation bars are clearly identifiable and bring ease to car information gathering. The ability to easily locate specific information regarding the company and identify the available retail stores in particular regions clearly indicates a website embodying a task oriented marketing technique.

GM has utilized a house of brands strategy because each of their product lines has a strong brand image that many customers may associate individually. Their brands include Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, GMC, Saturn, HUMMER, Saab, and Cadillac. Many consumers may not be aware that these products are owned by GM and effectively wouldn’t know to search for GM without this branding strategy. This branding strength helps to build traffic without the use of search engines.

Search engine optimization is clearly at its finest because not only does GM come up on Google’s first page, it represents the first site found on Google, and all the available information on the first three pages relates to the company. The title tag found on the General Motor homepage reads “General Motors Shop GM Vehicles- Find Your Perfect Car”. It also identifies that website as the corporate website, identifying important keywords that users may type in when researching this particular transportation industry. The site content reads, “The Official Site of General Motors. Your resource for everything GM, The #1 Selling Vehicle Manufacturer in the World for 76 Consecutive Years.” Here, words like “official site”, “General Motors”, and “#1 selling vehicle manufacturer” are incredibly important. They also employ simple URL descriptions to avoid confusion and clearly represent the page being viewed. Such examples are www.gm.com/corporate for the corporate information page or www.gm.com/shop to search products. Their meta tags are pretty elaborate and encompass a plethora of keywords including a list of the following:

GM, GM cars, General Motors Website, general motors cars, general motors trucks, general motors vans, general motors sport utility vehicles, general motors suvs, general motors vans, gm trucks, gm vans, gm sport utility vehicles, gm suvs, gm website, gm corporate site, general motors company site, gm customers, general motors customers, automobiles, general motors company, gm company, general motors corporation, gm mini vans, general motors minivans

I’m pretty sure they got everything covered. This provides a valuable traffic building technique by purchasing a site’s most valuable and relevant keywords. These keywords are noticeably unique to GM, thereby potentially lowering the popularity of the keyword search and thus the price/word. They provide a link to every brand they own as well as to every partnership they partake in, which include community, environment, safety, technology, and educational partnerships. According to Alexa, GM has over ten pages of companies linked into their site reaching 3,747 links in total. These links can be found to include Apple, CNN, Wikipedia, and many other well known sites. With all these marketing strategies effectively working to create ease of navigation and understanding, traffic can be immensely built to GM’s corporate site.

Other traffic building efforts include the placement of their website address on many advertisements and marketing campaigns, as well as sponsorships. All of these combined make General Motors’ online marketing and traffic building efforts extremely effective in generating more visits to their site and thus more exposure.