As car dealers develop their SEO strategies with their vendors, they should be well-aware of how the companies they work with are handling Google Penguin. The update from April, 2012, has quite a few SEOs in other industries scrambling to regain their search rankings. It hasn't been as devastating in the automotive industry but we have seen some companies whose dealers have dropped. Penguin is the "webspam" algorithm change that is going after aggressive link-building techniques. For years Google has utilized inbound links as a measurement to help determine search rankings. This is the best way for them to do this because it acts as a relevancy "voting" system of sorts; the more links you have from quality sites pointing to yours, the more authoritative it is in Google's eyes. The challenge has been with strong SEO firms who are aware of this and exploit it by building links to their sites. There's nothing wrong with building links if i...

Nearly every business in the world has considered using social media for their brand (or at least been told by someone to do so). It's an important concept because social media has all of the characteristics of an excellent set of venues for getting out a brand message - popularity, ease, reach, and interactivity. The challenge is that with so many businesses doing it, many messages start with great intentions and end up falling on deaf (aka nonexistent) ears. There are ways to use social media properly to get out the message whether it's a general PR item or a major announcement. While press releases are still a strong method of doing it, there are certain restrictions that make social media and blogs in particular a superior message delivery system. Those reasons are easy to list:   Press releases are good for an initial burst, but once published can fade quickly, get de-indexed, or get deleted altogether Social media can take a message and spread it o...

No, it's not spam, but it is associated with a pork product. Search engine optimization has a bad name in many circles. It is synonymous with spamming much in the same way that racial, lifestyle, and religious stereotypes work; the few bad apples make the normal, honorable "SEOs" look bad. With that said, this isn't about them. People are getting more involved with their websites and they often ask what they should be focused upon to get their search rankings higher. I always tell them the same thing, and it's held true since 2007. In fact, it's become even more important. Bacon. Bacon is the key to SEO when it comes to business owners or non-SEO tech people. It's part of every good SEOs arsenal but it's the one thing that truly requires no SEO or web development knowledge. Everyone can work with bacon. It's not literally bacon, of course. It's the concept of having something extra that normally enhances but rarely stands alone as ...

I was having a discussion with a dealer over a nice vodka tonic and a nice cigar when the discussion turned to conferences. "There are just too many that it's hard to know which ones to go to and which ones to skip," he said. This concerned me a bit. I've been on that side of the debate before but with the help of friends like Jared Hamilton, Brian Pasch, and Ralph Paglia I have come to the conclusion that the industry doesn't have enough conferenes. Before people start calling me a lunatic, hear me out... NADA is "the" conference that most attend. It's the only one that can draw a large percentage of representation from the dealer community and often brings everything together in a single venue so that dealers can get the latest and greatest information, see the cool new products and innovations hitting the market, and network with their OEMs, peers, and vendors to help come up with solutions to keep the industry strong. A decade ago, it ...

Every few months, we hear about how Google or Bing have a new program or change in their search algorithm that will kill search spammers. These rumors and announcements have often had an effect but it has never been enough to really make an impact. The last two weeks, there have been signs that the latest changes may actually be working. Can they eliminate search spam altogether by the end of the year? When Google rolled out their Panda update last year, many of the larger content sites were affected. Low-quality content was the target last year and after nearly a dozen known updates, search results have been better as a result. What wasn't addressed was the plague of "blackhat SEO" that utilizes different tactics to help websites rank better for keywords that can send massive traffic to their clients. An unofficial announcement at SXSW by Matt Cutts, Google search spam czar, points to changes that Google has planned that addresses the blackhat issue. "We ...

A few days ago I posted about promotion versus attraction in content marketing and I used the example of a story we posted about the Willys Jeep. The concept is one that is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) very challenging for dealers and even vendors to understand. Why would we post something on a dealer's website that didn't directly help sell more cars? It comes down to social signals and the trust factor associated with a website and its search engine opimization practices. Here's how: The Valuable Resource Those of us in the automotive industry are experts about cars and the different aspects of vehicles in ways that others simply are not. Our websites are normally all about cars and both Google and Bing know it. The challenge is that there are dozens, even hundreds of other websites associated with our local area that are also all about cars. Pieces of content such as the one above put our websites in a different light. By...

One of our KPA SEO clients asked about a particular piece of content we posted. It was a combination of an infographic, a story, and images that were only loosely-related to the purpose of the website as a Dodge/Jeep dealer. The article itself was about the Willys Jeep and offered some historical data and cool facts. We explained that this particular piece wasn't designed necessarily to help them sell more cars but to help expose a sharable piece of content that could go viral through social media. We link to the homepage with an appropriate anchor text for clear SEO reason, but otherwise the entire piece is meant specifically to add value to the overall community by giving them some cool facts and figures that can be of interest. The results are relatively predictable. On Reddit, it will do very well because it has a very nice TIL (Today I Learned) in the form of this quote: "TIL the US Army asked 135 automakers for bids to build a WWII recon vehicle. The criteria we...

Every few months, I read articles or hear at a conference about how search engine optimization is dead. I've heard these statements for the last 5 years and they often attribute the same reasons for the demise of SEO (even years later). Search engine optimization is still the single most important component for driving additional buyer traffic to a car dealer's website. Period. I would absolutely love to debate that point with anyone. There are shiny, bouncing balls that are valid such as social media and retargeting. They're important. They're just not as important as organic rankings on search. Many look at PPC as a tangible, high-value method of driving traffic. It is. However, with less than 1/4th of searchers ever clicking on ads, it's simply not as powerful as strong search engine optimization that reaches nearly 100% of searchers. The latest argument is about how Google and Bing have declared recently that they are making changes soon to attack ove...

They say that speed kills, but on the internet it's a lack of speed that really does the damage. Today we are living in an "instant America" where increased speed and access to the internet has made us less patient and more expectant of having the things we want the moment we want them. During normal internet browsing, around 25% of people will leave a website that doesn't load in 4 seconds or less. On mobile, the expectations are still great with around 50% leaving a website that takes over 10 seconds to load. With so much emphasis on speed, website owners must learn to simplify their websites to accommodate. This infographic details that and other important facts about American culture and our love affair with instant results. Created by: Online Graduate Programs Image: Techi. Hat Tip: Automotive SEO. ...

As Pinterest continues to rise in exposure and prominence in social media, many dealers have been asking me how to make it work for them. There are certain techniques that we, fortunately or unfortunately, save for clients, but here's one that you can use today to help improve the virality and SEO of your website. It starts with being interesting. Nobody on Pinterest (and social media in general) wants to see the special you have on your 2011 program cars. They want to see something "cool" on social media. Pinterest can make the fun part of managing your dealer website actually have value for your online marketing efforts. Here's the technique: Using your website content management system, create a page that looks something like this: 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge. Be sure to include unique content - a paragraph or two is fine. Don't forget your image credits! It's important that you link to the sources of the images. It's the right thing to...

Under normal circumstances I try not to repost on multiple automotive social network venues, but this one was too easy. Here's why: We had created a very simple infographic for Social Jumpstart. We build tons of infographics for various companies regularly, but this one stuck out for me because of the high velocity that it has been spreading virally. The research phase for this particular graphic gave me more information about social media and its unbelievable scale that I started digging deeper into the numbers. What I found reaffirmed what we've been saying for a while, that social media is not a broadcasting tool for businesses but rather a venue through which traction comes from the stories surrounding goals and not the goals themselves. I'll go into more detail about the findings in a future DS blog post, but for now, here's the graphic. It did very well on Venture Beat and is getting picked up by other major publications this week, but it's the wa...

Gas prices are on the rise. We hear about the turmoil in the Middle East, the political fighting in the US, and the prices at the pump going up. Gas is trending and dealers should be helping their customers prepare for the changes through their websites and social media. Instead of going over generalities, I'm going to paint a hypothetical of what I would be doing if I were running a dealership right now. Step 1: Highlight the Challenge on the Homepage of My Site Many dealers have banners on their homepage that can be changed very easily. The first banner I would present would ask a question, "How many MPGs does your vehicle get?" Below the question, I would highlight the MPGs of three of my vehicles that get good gas mileage (or two that get good mileage and one EV if you have any available). It would simply be 3 pictures of vehicles with the MPGs listed next to them. Step 2: Build an MPG Page If your website vendor has an easy-to-use content management ...

There have been many debates on Driving Sales about organic SEO versus pay per click advertising over the years. Google Places - the maps listings - is a topic that normally gets classified separately as it's not as easy to "buy" one's way to the top. Or is it? That's the topic of another discussion, but first let's take a look at the reasons behind the dual-top-rankings that are filling searches for car dealers on a regular basis. Google started putting an emphasis on maps and changing them to what we're seeing today as the enhanced Google Places offering on October 16th, 2010. I remember vividly the call I received from TK Founder Richard Valenta something he had just seen with the adjusted maps. Moments later, it was gone, but he had screen shot evidence. I looked it up on SEO forums and "secret groups" in which I participated and nobody had seen it. We were onto something and didn't want to tip our hand so we simply watched and pr...

The trend for the last 3 or 4 years has been for businesses to try to tap into social media as a broadcasting tool. It's not universal, but many (most) see social media as a place to post their messages to prospective clients in hopes of switching on the social media faucet that touches a billion people worldwide. The promise of social media for businesses, particularly local ones, has only been seen by a small percentage. Most believe there's something there, but they aren't certain that their efforts are going anywhere. In many cases, they're not. It's not that social media is so challenging that only the select few can get in, nor is it that there's no value in it. It's about intention. Those with the intention of sheer marketing with social media will likely be met with limited rewards. People don't go to Facebook or Twitter to see what they want to buy or which services to select. They go to engage, to have fun, and to experience the virtual f...

For the last 3 years, search engine optimization has grown as one of the primary aspects of automotive internet marketing upon which dealers and vendors focus. Everyone has hear a pitch (or two, or ten) from experts and salespeople at vendors telling why SEO is important and what it takes to dominate the market area for a dealership. Much of what is out there is both legitimate and powerful. Some is antiquated. Much is simply wrong. That's not to say that there's no value in listening to the different opinions of what really drives search traffic, how to do it right, and where to find best practices, but it doesn't have to be so complicated. In the video below, we take a look at some of the readily-accepted components of SEO as described in an article by Mashable and broken down by yours truly. It's good to see efforts stronger understanding starting to permeate the internet. Here, we see how it affects dealers. If you have any questions, feel free to comment...

"Mobile has taken over." It's a subtle difference to what I've been saying for the last 3 years, but it changes everything about the way we think about automotive marketing. Just a few months ago, the statement would have been, "Mobile is taking over." See the difference. This isn't the death of laptops and desktops. It's not time to abandon traditional SEO or PPC. It simply adds another layer to our automotive marketing needs. Your customers are spending more time on their mobile devices. Some do more of their surfing and searching through iOS and Android than they do on Windows or Mac. Are you paying attention to them? You should be. To put it into perspective, here's an infographic that breaks down the rise of geosocial and location-based interactions between people and the businesses around them. Click to enlarge. ...

This is a dangerous topic and I'm heading down a steep slope on this one as people may misunderstand, but it's important to get it out anyway. Your Facebook page is important to you business, but it should only account for a small portion of your social media marketing day. Period. Most businesses that we work with have a strong leaning towards Facebook, just as they should. Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, even Google+ have a role in the social media strategy for most businesses, but Facebook covers most of the needs simply because it's where most of the people spend most of their social media time. The challenge is no longer with convincing business to use Facebook. It's in getting them to stop thinking that their Facebook page is their Facebook presence. There is so much more to Facebook than putting up landing tabs and status updates. Facebook is a communication tool that allows businesses to reach out to their customers and prospective customers while allowing ...

As more dealers and vendors start to understand the importance of link-building for organic search engine rankings, I get a lot of questions about anchor text. The actual text itself that's associated with the link is the anchor. It (as well as the link title) tell the search engines what the link is supposed to be about. I'm often quoted from a 2008 Automotive SEO video as saying that "links are like votes". If links are votes telling the search engines which URL that site is "voting for", then the anchor text and titles tell the search engines which term your vote should count towards. While most links are getting properly anchored, there are still a couple of questions that continue to pop up. I'll post some examples, but I'll use non-TK Carsites clients so it's not thought that this post is simply for our own SEO use. To those who get the links, consider it a gift. Are links without anchors worthless? No. They still give credibilit...

In 2012, there's a person you need to hire if you haven't already. Every dealership or dealer group that wants to succeed MUST hire a Digital Manager. I go into more details about what a digital manager does in a blog post on Techi, but here I want to shed some light on the differences between an internet manager/BDC manager and a true digital manager. First, digital managers are more than just the person sitting on Twitter and Facebook all day. They should be using these as tools, certainly, but that should be only a small part of it. If your dealership has a full time social media person, that's great, but that's not the end of it. You need more. You need content. Real content. You need pages added to your site constantly that are created by real people. Automated "SEO pages" are junk thanks to Google Panda (and I would happily debate that point with any vendor pushing the "more pages is better for SEO" rhetoric that simply doesn't wor...

If there's one thing that dealers shouldn't pass up, it's an easy button. There are so many complicated things in the marketing world online today that when something presents itself that is easy, fast, and has a return on investment, we can't let it go. That's why I have been so surprised lately (even at the DSES) when so many dealers have told me that they've abandoned Twitter altogether. Does it have the same value as Facebook? No. Is it loaded with noise and spam? Yes. I covered these and other reasons that Twitter is getting abandoned at Soshable. Still, there's one very compelling reason why dealers should not abandon Twitter: it simply doesn't take a lot of time. An internet manager or marketing manager (or better yet, the owner or GM) can run an extremely successful dealership Twitter account by spending less than 10 minutes a day. Here are some tips on how to do it: Monitoring Takes 1 Minute a Day (Literally) - Hop into your account...

As we prepare for the biggest Driving Sales Executive Summit in history, 3 things are clear: The future can be bright for advanced-thinking dealers. There is a shift happening in the way that dealers think and compete. Search and social are converging into a single strategy. When I speak in Las Vegas about "Search and Social for the Next Year" I will be trying to squeeze 3 hours worth of material into 30 minutes. It can be done and will not require extra-fast speaking. What it WILL require is a little prep- and post-work for the dealers. I will be going over some of the big changes that are happening now and the ones that are coming up, particularly for Google and Facebook. I will be doing something that I've never really done before at an event - recommending strategies that include other vendors (some of which are active here on Driving Sales). As always, there will be no pitching involved; anyone who has heard me speak knows that I sometimes forget ...

As in industry, automotive has had a history of being behind the times when it comes to internet adoption. That has seemed to change in the last couple of years as dealers and manufacturers have launched full-force into embracing search and social in ways that surpassed other industries. There's still a ways to go, especially in social media,. While most are taking on Facebook and YouTube and a good amount are embracing Twitter and blogging, there are platforms that all but the most forward-thinking have failed to embrace. We have often recommended to dealers that they should focus on "the big four" and leave everything else to the side, but that's only for sake of focus. It's easier to stay on target with less distractions. Those who have embraced social fully have either been met with failure or success. It sounds like an obvious statement, but the difference between social and other areas such as search or classifieds is that in those areas there is mu...

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when comparing search engines and social media for their marketing is assuming that since many of the basic activities are the same that the same strategies will work on both. While a unified approach to managing campaigns on search and social is recommended, one must understand the distinctions in not only the platforms but also the mindset of the people using them. The fishing analogy works well, here. I don't believe in calling potential customers "fish" but for the sake of understanding, it's easier that way for now. The Similarities Between Search and Social The fact that they're both almost entirely defined by how the real world interacts with people online means that some similarities are clear. Both are used to: Gather information and have questions answered Learn more about companies and other people Find alternative perspectives other than a company's website When we want a specifi...

This post is part of a series titled 10 Ways to Use Social Media for Day-to-Day Business. Every day we will be expanding upon a new tip until the list is complete. If there's one medium to bet on for the future, it's video. Tweeting may someday fall out of favor. Thousands of new blogs are popping up every day, making it hard to get in through the noise. Even Facebook, as gigantic as it is today, could collapse under its own weight from a couple of wrong moves. Video, on the other hand, is going to be around in one form or another for a long, long time on the internet. We, as humans, love the sit-back-and-enjoy style of information consumption. It's what made the television such a gargantuan medium and it will continue to drive the internet for decades to come. Your business must be using video to promote an enhance your day-to-day business. Period. End of st... well, not quite the end of the story. There's more: Frequency by Personality How often you post is...

Which way is better? This is a question for vendors, dealers, and just about everyone else. It seems that there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to working with large, multi-focus vendors who are able to unify and consolidate both efforts as well as billing. On the flip side, there are those who believe that "specialist" style vendors are better to work with, holding them accountable for their own space rather than many. Which do you prefer? What are the pros and cons as you see it? We have put up a poll on Facebook that asks the question. Please, either leave a comment here with your preference and why, vote on the issue at Facebook, or both. There's nothing better at DrivingSales than good, strong feedback. ...

There are advantages and disadvantages to building proprietary, unique automotive internet marketing software. When TK started building Connect, we knew what we were getting into and thankfully the development and testing have fallen directly in line with our expectations. Is it really better to build? The other options - white label and partnerships - have advantages of their own. As we move forward with our next batch of projects, I wanted to tap into the Driving Sales community and find out what dealers and other vendors prefer and why. Building a platform, whether it's for websites, SEO, PPC, social media, or whatever, allows for complete control and fully automotive integration. It can be expensive and time-consuming, but having control gives vendors the ability to customize as they see fit. Using white labeled products is the most common technique used by vendors. Granted, very few people know this - that's the point of white labeling. To take a pre-existing pr...

Some of the most important marketing tools start off with a completely different use in mind. Texting is one of them. Anyone who has a teen with a smartphone knows that it's a "best practice" to have an unlimited texting plan. They love it. Most adults have embraced texting over the years as a good method of communication. Whether you're one of those people or not, you should definitely at least be looking at the different ways to integrate text messaging into your marketing strategy. It doesn't necessarily even have to be outgoing. Sometimes, encouraging potential customers to contact you via text is a quick and easy way to collect more information about them. They don't always want to call and talk to a salesperson, but a text message is less direct (at least that's the perception). It offers a degree of separation that some customers crave. Texting is big and getting bigger. You should be collecting cell numbers through text messaging whenver...

The thought crossed my mind the other day to search vendors for the different SEO packages they offered. I wanted to see where the high-end was and who was still hovering in the low-end, "make your site SEO-friendly" realm. What I found surprised me. Those who have read my writing here in the past know that I do not get all controversial about topics - I prefer to stay productive and constructive at all times. However, I had to point this little tidbit out because, as someone who has been doing Automotive SEO for 4 years now, I found it disconcerting. One size cannot fit all. When it comes to search, different cities, brands, and goals determine the level of SEO. A Mercedes dealership in a small town can get away with little or no SEO as they likely have their market covered. A Honda dealer in a large metro may need to have the latest and greatest "super-awesome-mega-SEO-package-of-the-month" just to stay above the fold for important searches. I guess this i...

This is a portion of an article titled Why the Automotive Industry is Shifting to New Media. While social media is the “new sexy” in the industry, search is still the primary tool that consumers use to research different vehicles. Once they make their decision on which vehicles to consider, the go again to the search engines to find the vehicles themselves. OEMs such as General Motors may be spending millions on making a splash in social media, but they continue to use paid search as a primary means of driving traffic both to their corporate properties as well as their dealer websites. Organic search is trending as the primary method of driving traffic at the dealer level. The vast majority of dealers in the US utilize some level of search engine optimization to help get their websites ranked higher. The industry has turned into one of the most competitive with major metros crowded with dealers and 3rd-party lead vendors vying for the top 10 spots for high-volume s...

Every few months, we see a dip in sentiment regarding social media. It's been going on consistently since early 2009 and we know that it will continue. Dealers try social, see little reason to continue, and set things on autopilot or abandon it altogether. Then, something changes that makes social media more important and the searches for "Automotive Social Media" spike again. Get ready to do the search. Social just got more important again. A LOT more important. During the Digital Marketing Strategies Conference in Napa last earlier this month, I gave a keynote that highlighted Google's commitment to social media (as soon as Jared, Bart, and Arnold send me the video, I'll be happy to post it here... hint, hint). Google reaffirmed that commitment in a big way earlier today that will change the way savvy dealers do social media. Google Social Search is a game changer. It will insert links into the natural search stream based upon social connections that ...