In this week’s Five on Friday, we’ve got a great collection of subscription news updates, free SEO tools, and holiday marketing tips and turkeys. Yes, turkeys. Ad Age explores the growing car subscription industry, Shopify shares free SEO tools to make your subscription site more search-engine friendly and discoverable, Amazon and Whole Foods drop prices for the Thanksgiving holiday, including specials just for Prime members, and Small Business Trends shares five festive ways to integrate the holiday season into your end-of-year marketing efforts.

Car Manufacturers Are Jumping on the Subscription Bandwagon

Once upon a time, you had to go to a car lot, work with a salesman, test drive a car, and arrange financing before driving home with a shiny, new car or truck. Car manufacturers, who are trying to use the subscription economy to their advantage, are getting in on the action. We’ve written about a few of these car subscription services this year, including Care by Volvo, Ford’s Canvas, Flexdrive by Cox Automotive and Holman Enterprises, GM’s BOOK by Cadillac and Hyundai, and in July, we did a report about the Coming Car Crisis.

In a recent article by Ad Age, ‘Subscription-Based Car Buying Picks Up Steam,’ E. J. Schultz said the industry continues to move in this direction. In recent months, Book by Cadillac and Canvas have expanded into new markets, and Porsche has launched its own car subscription service. While these programs are similar to the traditional model where you’d make a monthly car or leasing payment, the advantage to these programs is that the pricing is all-inclusive, meaning the subscription fee includes maintenance, insurance, taxes, registration, etc.

Subscribers can also exchange vehicles more easily and, in some cases, much more often. The downside? Availability and choice of vehicles are still limited, and all-inclusive pricing is much more expensive than buying or leasing a car or truck. For example, BOOK by Cadillac charges an $1,800-a-month subscription fee which includes high-end luxury vehicles, insurance, routine maintenance and repairs, registration, OnStar, SiriusXM, 4G LTE, and state and local taxes.

Ford’s Canvas subscription offers flexible pricing in the $400 – $600 a month range, based on the type of vehicle, mileage anticipated, and how long you drive a particular vehicle. It gets cheaper the longer you keep it.

‘People are moving toward pay-for-use across the board,’ said Jose Puente, president of Flexdrive, in the Ad Age article. ‘You see that in entertainment, you see it in things like Airbnb. ‘

Puente went onto say that the market has been ripe for pay-for-use services for a long time, but consumers didn’t have a lot of options. Now because of innovation and technology, companies like car manufacturers are jumping on board.

Read the full article on Ad Age here.

3 Free SEO Tools to Try

If you sell subscription products or services online, then Search Engine Optimization is always on your ‘to do’ list to make your company more search-engine friendly and discoverable. In a recent blog post on Shopify, ‘8 Free and Simple SEO Tools for Bootstrapped Business Owners,’ Braveen Kumar offers tools to try. We’re sharing three of them here:

1. Keywords Everywhere: This free keyword tool is a browser add-on that gives you free search volume, cost-per-click and competition data for most of the keyword research tools, including Google, eBay, Google Keyword Planner, Bing, YouTube, Amazon and more. It is available for Chrome and Firefox.
2. Soovle: This tool provides keyword suggestions through autocomplete suggestions from other search engines, including Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia and more.
3. Screaming Frog: The Screaming Frog is a website crawler that checks for broken links, duplicate content, audits redirects, generates XML sitemaps, evaluates onsite SEO and more.

Read about all of the tools on Shopify here.

FT Editor Calls Out Google and Facebook as Media Companies

In a November 14 article on PressGazette.com, Freddy Mayhew shares Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s thoughts on the digital revolution, specifically calling out Google and Facebook for challenging the news industry. Barber shared those thoughts at a Society of Editors conference earlier this week.

‘The reality is that they are influencing or even deciding via algorithms what information is consumed,’ Barber said. ‘And remember, they have the power both to remove or publish content without assuming liability.’

‘They must drop the pretense that they are simply platforms and channels for publishers rather than media companies themselves,’ added Barber.

Read Mayhew’s full article, ‘FT Editor Lionel Barber calls on “deeply flawed” social media networks to “drop the pretense” they are not media companies,’ here.

Amazon and Whole Foods Move One Step Closer to Integration with Grocery Price Cuts

Amazon and Whole Foods have moved one step closer to integration with lower prices on best-sellers and holiday grocery items. On Wednesday, the companies announced the price cuts, and said Prime members will receive additional discounts on organic and no antibiotic turkeys through the Thanksgiving holiday, while supplies last. Reduced prices on other products, such as broth from Pacific Foods and organic eggs and milk from Organic Valley, will be available to all customers, including those who aren’t Prime members. These pricing changes are in addition to ones previously announced upon completion of the acquisition earlier this fall.

‘These are the latest new lower prices in our ongoing integration and innovation with Amazon, and we’re just getting started,’ said John Mackey, Whole Foods Market co-founder and CEO, in a joint press release. ‘In the few months we’ve been working together, our partnership has proven to be a great fit. We’ll continue to work closely together to ensure we’re consistently surprising and delighting our customers while moving toward our goal of reaching more people with Whole Foods Market’s high-quality, natural, and organic food.’

5 Festive Ways to Use the Holiday Season in your End-of-Year Marketing Efforts 

Want new, creative ways to include the holiday season in your end-of-year marketing efforts? Earlier this week, The Young Entrepreneur Council shared ‘15 Original Ways to Include the Holiday Season in Your Marketing‘ on Small Business Trends. Here are five we’d love to try:

1. Thank loyal customers with gifts or discounts they can pass on to those on their own gift-giving lists.
2. Offer a holiday coupon as a customer exits your site. The coupon offers a special discount in exchange for the customer’s email address, which you can then use to market to them throughout the holidays.
3. Time a product launch to coincide with the holiday season. This week GameStop is launching its new Power Pass subscription, a pre-owned game rental subscription, a perfect stocking stuffer for gamers.
4. Match charitable gifts. We love this idea! As a thank you to your customers, offer to match their end-of-year charitable gifts. This shows your customers that you care about what they care about.
5. Write holiday-themed blog posts. This is a great opportunity to up your SEO game while also getting the chance to tell your audience about your subscription products and services.

For the other 10 ideas, read the original article at SmallBizTrends.com here.

We hope you enjoyed this week’s Five on Friday column. Have a great Thanksgiving holiday, whether you are hosting an intimate family gathering or Friendsgiving for 50.