SHERWOOD FORD

SHERWOOD PARK, ALBERTA, CANADA

Sherwood Ford

Sherwood Ford has been serving the Edmonton community since 1936. That's a long time to hold such a great reputation. By pairing with DealerFire, they were investing in their brand voice, and how that voice was reflected in their digital strategy. Read on to find out how they accomplished their goals in a very short time by utilization of DealerFire websites and marketing.  

BACKGROUND

Sherwood Ford has their market down. Since 1936, they've been providing the same outstanding service that customers have come to expect. They are one of the oldest car dealerships in Edmonton, and have been known as the "Giant Advantage" dealer for many years. In 1996, Mark Hicks purchased the dealership and remains the owner/operator to this day. You can find him in the showroom every day, working with customers and making sure the dealership doesn't lose the reputation it has spent so much time refining.

When Sherwood Ford contracted DealerFire services, we had a tall order. Provide best-in-class service while also maintaining the brand voice that Sherwood Ford been dialing in for the better part of 50 years. One of the primary objectives was a growth in organic visibility. The dealership wanted to ensure that their brand was seen as the most trustworthy in Edmonton, and they wanted to ensure that they were considered the info kings of the area - no one could answer customer questions better.

CUSTOMER SINCE

2015

PRODUCT SUITE

WEBSITES, DIGITAL MARKETING

Sherwood Ford

THE CHALLENGE

Starting a content marketing strategy can be a waiting game for most dealers. It takes time to curate the content, make sure it's being crawled and indexed properly, and prove ROI. Sometimes it can take between 90-120 days to really see a return. When we first started with Sherwood, we set expectations that, as long as we put in the hard work, they would see results.

Whenever starting with local SEO strategy, it's important to pick the right topics. The topics that are going to get the most eyeballs, and the most engagement. If you choose correctly, it will set the tone for the entire length of the content campaign. 

 

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THE SOLUTION

In 2011, Sherwood Ford made the transition from Edmonton to Sherwood Park, which meant their content strategy could potentially be interrupted because of the change in physical address. In order to compensate for this, DealerFire content writers made sure to do exhaustive research on the market and the dealer's primary competition. They found that, although the dealer had changed addresses, the best market to target was still Edmonton. The next three months were filled with the initial website content build out. This included model pages, comparison content and service-related landing pages. During the time the content was being assembled, Sherwood Ford launched their paid search campaigns to fill in their inbound lead volume while organic was being scaled up.

 

Once the base content had been rolled out, the dealer started to see significant gains in organic traffic. This was approximately 90 days out from the initial go to market. Instead of continuing with generic content, Sherwood Ford and the DealerFire team decided to go one level deeper in their on-site efforts by combining model content with new offers and incentives. The goal was to drive more conversions from the traffic that had been generated by the original campaign. 

 

After 12 months, the dealer had seen huge increases in both organic and paid traffic. That was coupled with their increases in inventory views and total conversions. 

Sherwood Ford

THE RESULTS

By pairing our content marketing and paid search, Sherwood Ford is able to get a leg up on the competition and bring more people to the website, and the user experience on the site itself allows visitors to easily navigate to and from the information they're looking for and convert.

Our ultimate goal with content and PPC campaigns was to drive the most relevant clicks to website and increase conversions in the form of phone calls and lead forms.

+57.2%

INCREASE IN TOTAL LEADS

+92.1%

INCREASE IN TOTAL VDP VIEWS

+44.4%

INCREASE IN TOTAL SESSIONS

$43

COST PER ACQUSITION FROM SEM

Sherwood Ford

"Our online exposure has grown rapidly since signing up with Dealerfire, we have seen the traffic on our site quadruple since we first signed up 3 years ago. Our reps work with us like they are a part of our team and solve any issues quickly."

- KURTIS HICKS

SHERWOOD FORD, GENERAL MANAGER

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