While researching car share clubs/programs in Philadelphia I noticed that both main rivals on local market – Zipcar and Philly Car Share -have to work harder on their search engine strategies (if there are any..). I’m aware that both are very recognizable brands in Philly, nevertheless it should be in their interest to dominate search engine results. This post is all about some very basic SEO issues found on both sites.
Brands’ Local Popularity
Firstly lets look at the brand searches (“zip car” and “philly car share”) Googled in the Philadelphia Metro area (click on the image to enlarge it):
Google searches: "zip car" vs "philly car share" in Philadelphia
Clearly from the Google Insights graph we can see that Zip Car brand steady receives more searches than Philly Car Share. The latter car sharing club’s popularity has been continuously decreasing after peaking in September 2007. Many factors can contribute to decreasing the popularity of a brand, however in the Philly Car Share example I suspect the customer service and fee policies to be the main drivers of brand decline.
Philly Car Share Ratings on Yelp
Keyword Strategy
Let’s leave brand issues behind us and take a look at the generic phrases both companies are targeting.
Zip Car
I was surprised that Zip Car, a nationwide service, is ignoring the phrase “car share” in their HTML titles in favor of the less popular “car sharing”:
Click on images to enlarge
"car share" vs "car sharing" - Google searches in USA
One could say that since they rank 1st in Google for “car share” it does not matter. Sure but they are not number one in Yahoo! or Bing and with a slightly better constructed homepage HTML title they could improve on this. Optimizing the <title> element of a page is a quick win without draining resources.
Moreover, by building some content around “car share” Zip car could “steal” some mid weight search terms from rivals like CityCarShare or PhillyCarShare who have a natural advantage with their more generic domain name.
The opportunities are lost not only on the homepage but also on the deeper pages. Having duplicate titles on so many pages (around 68% of indexed pages have duplicate titles) is just bad practice. One quick fix would be adding the location or name of a sponsored institution i.e “Occasional Driving Plan for Colby College Students – Zipcar”
PhillyCarShare
Our local car share scheme has even worse “SEO sins”. Again optimizing the HTML title and meta description are basic SEO on-page tasks which have an impact on both rankings and click-through-rates from the search result pages. Beside branded “PhillyCarShare” there are barely any other keywords words on their key pages’ HTML titles. The PhillyCarShare homepage “ignores” search engines completely:
HTML code from homepage of PhillyCarShare
By neglecting basic on-page optimization, PhillyCarShare is hurting its click through rate from search engine result pages as well as the perception of its brand. Would you click on a listing like this?:
PhillyCarShare search engine listing
With over 10,000 external links pointing to PhillyCarShare’s homepage URL, and many of links editorially given (from local blogs), the care sharing club can successfully target and rank for any relevant key phrases.
On a positive note PhillyCarShare does present car locations on HTML titles, however they could extend this by adding zip codes and names of neighborhoods.
Like Zipcar, PhillyCarShare is not targeting mid weight search terms like: “car share program” , “car share club” , “car sharing scheme” or “car sharing service”
Summary:
Judging by the marketing push both companies are conducting on the Philadelphia streets, one would think that their search marketing strategies would be mastered to perfection. Unfortunately it seems that both Zipcar and PhillyCarShare are ignoring the online channel with the highest return on investment. Tip: Maybe if PhillyCarShare had analytics tagged on their pages they would be able to make more favorable business decisions.
