I was compelled to write a politically correct article about SEO and Social Media "sales" in response to an email I received from a prospect that I met at the 7th Digital Dealer Conference in Nashville.  Out of professional respect, I have omitted the direct party names in this article. My prospect that was interested in the services that my company offered.  This week they balked at signing a contract because their OEM encouraged them to sign with "Company X".  The OEM applied some pressure to my prospect through their relationship, which is not uncommon in the automotive industry.  The the end result was that my prospect was very confused at what to do.  They asked for help. When I received an email saying that they were considering "Company X" for SEO and Social Media I was taken back for a minute.  I never heard about "Company X" in the past nor have I seen them at a recent trade show.  My prospect asked that I give him my opinion on the company.  It's hard to be objective in this case, but I decided to try. So, I Googled the name of "Company X" and smiled.  There were no social media accounts showing on Google page one or two.  There were no press releases promoting "Company X". There were no blog posts on SEO or Social Media strategies. Their SEO tags on their own websites were incomplete  and lacked insight into how the search engines worked.  Their website had a Google PageRank of Zero. So I shared these basic facts with my prospect and revealed that the "King Had No Clothes".  I am writing about this experience because in the past few days I have heard a number of stories that are very sad.  In effect, the "automotive industry" has allowed dealers to be scammed by companies that don't practice what they preach. Can a company with 200 followers on Twittter claim to be social media experts?  Is setting up a Facebook account qualify someone as a Social Media expert? In fact today I was told a story from one social media vendor that sold a "bill of goods" to a company to manage their Facebook and Twitter accounts.  When my associate asked  the company executive "Who is going to respond to any questions on Facebook?" the executive responded, "Why do we need to do that?". It looks like some companies are selling "shiny objects' and not explaining the commitment that social media engagement entails. The point of this post is that it seems that many companies have become "Social Media" experts in addition to "Internet Marketing" experts overnight.  Before you engage with any company, I urge you to make sure that they practice what they preach.  Take the time to see what real experience they have and what Google shows as their track record. I'm a content SEO advocate and I write about five articles a week on automotive marketing.  I practice what I preach.  I use SEO for lead generation for my company and spend very little on paid advertising and have more work coming in each week organically.  I practice what I preach. As new media outlets and consultants pop up on the radar, just make sure that they practice what they preach.  I welcome competent competition.  I have no idea why this OEM would support a company that had "no clothes".  I can only imagine that they did not know how to inspect their claims.  Just don't fall into the same trap.

November is Juvenile Diabetes awareness month and my company is conjunction with one of PCG's clients is seeking to raise $1 million dollars for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). The "PJs For The Cure" program is the idea of Charles Komar, CEO of Charles Komar & Sons which is one of America's largest manufacturers and suppliers of nightwear and intimates to the major retail chains. Charles Komar and Pasch Consulting Group have donated their time and money to raise money for JDRF by selling special PJs For The Cure pajamas for women, girls and boys. Our goal is to sell 40,000 pairs of pajamas at $25 each. Komar and their suppliers are donating the pajamas and covering the shipping costs, so your $25 purchase goes directly to JDRF. If we sell all 40,000 to consumers across the USA, we will raise the awareness of Juvenile Diabetes as well as help to find a cure.

Can You Add This in Your Next Dealership Newsletter?

The pajamas are high quality and come in fun designs. Some patterns allow for Moms and Daughters to have matching patterns. These are great gifts for the upcoming holidays. $25 is a great price for high quality pajamas. How you can help today: Promote the "PJs For The Cure" campaign to your Facebook and Twitter pages 40,000 pairs of pajamas may seem like a high goal but not if we can unite all the members of ADM and ask them to Tweet about the program, write a blog post, or add some photos in their next newsletter. The website that has additional information about the program is at : www.pjsforthecure.org Thank you for your consideration. If you need anything from me to promote the event, let me know. Brian Pasch 732-450-8200

My last few blog posts have been focused on content writing and microsite strategies and I would be remiss if I didn't talk about link building strategies and how they play a role in achieving your keyword optimization goals. When you create a blog or a microsite and post a well written article, there is no immediate reason why the search engines should respect your new site or the content of the article.  Sites that have already established search engine "respect" can see their new articles on Google Page one very quickly, think CNN or the Huffington Post.

Creating Votes For Your Content

One way to establish respect for the content on your microsite is to start a link building strategy.  In simple terms, a hyper-link from a good website pointing to your home page or article is a "vote" for your microsite.  The word(s) that are hyper-linked and the title tag of that hyper-link helps to establish what the vote is about. If you have a blog article about Nissan Extended Warranty plans and you are able to build links from other reputable websites to this specific article with hyper-linked text like:

• Nissan Extend Warranty
• Nissan Warranty Plans
• Car Warranty Plans
• Nissan OEM Warranty Plans
• Nissan Security Plus Warranty Prices

then you have created votes for a few combinations of what consumers may type into Google to find your page.  The more links to your microsite or blog from reputable sources with good tags is beneficial for your organic search rankings.  The challenge is to find the best places to create these external links.  The related challenge is how to insert links that the search engines will follow. I don't want to get too technical but when you find places to post a comment, a blog entry or a new story, with a hyperlink in the text, some of these websites will intercept the hyperlink and add a "nofollow" tag.  This tells the search engines no to grant any link "juice" from the main website to your blog or microsite.  So not all links are equal and you have to "view the page source" to see if they are adding the "nofollow" tag.  If the site is add a "nofollow" tag look elsewhere.

Hiring A Link Building Company

I get about 5 emails a day from companies claiming to be able to build high quality links from India, the UK or some remote destination for a few hundred dollars.  Some of these companies confuse the issue by claiming that they are ISO certified and offer a wide range of "reputable" services.  The majority of these emails are scammers and more importantly, companies claiming to understand Automotive SEO when in fact they do not. If you want to build quality links to your main dealer website or any website that you own to increase its rankings, you need to be able to verify that the links that are being considered by the search engines.  Let me say that again.  If you hired someone to build links to your website, you should be able to find them using the Yahoo "link:" command.  The Yahoo link command works better than the Google link command, just accept that for now. Also, if you want to find good places to create links, check out all your competitors websites using the Yahoo "link:" command and see which websites are pointing to their domain.  You will find a number of sites that you never heard of that you may be able to create an account and create a similar post, directory entry or comment. You snoop by going to Yahoo.com and in the search box type:    link:www.autodealer.com , where "autodealer.com" is the website of your competitor.  Take a look at the "inlinks" to see which websites have links to their site.

Link Build Workshop

At the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp in Orlando, I will be conducting a workshop on how to create powerful link building strategies for your automotive websites; primary and your microsites.   Every dealer should have over 1,000 links to their main site and hundreds of links to their microsites over time.  If you build them manually, using a well thought out plan and leveraging high PageRank websites, you will see that your website and microsites will start to rank ahead of your competition. And remember, its easy to see which sites are linking to your competitors! Attendees to the Boot Camp will also get some exclusive free links from websites that I have compiled and in class we'll create new links that will help with your Automotive SEO strategy.

As I prepare for the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp (AMBC) on February 12th in Orlando, I thought that I would start a conversation on automotive microsites and why they should be a part of an automotive marketing strategy. I will be conducting a seminar on microsite marketing strategies at the boot camp, a topic that I am very passionate about.  Microsites are a marketing sleeper strategy for most car dealers and platform providers.  Dealers who attend this seminar will be well rewarded in the years to come. Microsites are not to be confused with landing pages or doorway websites. Landing pages are an optimized web page that dealers use in a pay-per-click campaign like Google Adwords.  The landing page can be on your website or on a third party website.  If a dealer was running a tent sale and created an optimized page about the event and directed clicks from Google Adwords to this page, it would be considered a landing page. Doorway websites are a landing page placed on its own domain name.  They are normally a one page website used to capture leads from traffic generated by pay-per-click campaigns, affiliate marketing programs, or in some cases, direct traffic.  These doorway websites are not content rich and often are more graphically weighted with attractive designs or even flash technology to add pizzazz. My definition of an automotive microsite, up until last month, was 10-15 pages of targeted content placed on a targeted domain name with blogging enabled but without live inventory.  This would be a base of content that would be added to each month; 2-3 articles per month. A theoretical example is a BMW dealer that wanted to increase their service business in Atlanta.  If they purchased www.bmwserviceatlanta.net and created content about all their service offerings and common BMW service procedures, that would get hundreds of hits to this site organically each month.   Google indicates that at least 400 people a month type the phrase "BMW service Atlanta" and this domain would be an exact match for that phrase.   With good content, this microsite would be #1 in search results because the ".com" version is being redirected to another website. The question for service managers is this: "Would you like to attract another 25, 50 or 100 service customers a month from your PMA?"  With the right call to action, services specials and offers you can expect to capture some of those 400 customers each month who search that phrase.

WordPress Microsite Technology

The tool that I like to use for creating microsites is WordPress.   This popular "open source" content management system (CMS) tool is recommended because:

• There are no licensing fees
• It is easy to setup a website and blog
• It can be hosted inexpensively (<$100 a year)
• There are thousands of developers around the world improving the platform every year
• There are thousands of free software enhancements to make the website more attractive
• It is easy to maintain
• Anyone with Microsoft Word equivalent skills can create and add web pages
• You can drop in video, audio and images easily to any page
• It's an SEO consultant dream

Game Changing Technology

At the 7^th Digital Dealer Conference my definition of a WordPress microsite changed.  DealerTrend unveiled the industry's first commercially available plug-in for WordPress that displays a car dealer's new and used car inventory.  The plug-in creates an SEO optimized website page for every car you have in stock. This plug-in has changed the rules for automotive microsites because it takes what was once a 20 page microsite with rich content to a microsite with a few hundred highly optimized model specific pages.  Taking WordPress microsites to this level turns WordPress into a robust automotive inventory marketing tool.  I applaud DealerTrend for being the first to offer such a tool and taking the risk to offer it to car dealers. The Pasch Consulting Group was the first Automotive Marketing Company to integrate the DealerTrend WordPress plug-in to our Automotive WordPress microsites.  We have hundreds of microsites that are operating for lead generation, Internet Reputation Management, and branding.  Having this tool available to our customers can transform these sites into more effective tools for car sales. This plug-in creates dealer inventory microsites in minutes, once the feed is setup, and allows dealers to add content themselves or hire a consultant to write content which will make the microsite effective for organic search marketing.  For more information on the plug-in, visit www.dealertrend.com .

Can I Toss My Existing Vendor?

Some dealers have been quick to ask me if the WordPress plug-in will change the industry website landscape by offering open source website platforms that can replace the traditional leased website platforms.   The answer is no; at least for the near term.  Also, the DealerTrend plug-in is not free since it requires your inventory feed to be hosted and fed to your microsite. Adding inventory to a WordPress website is not a replacement for a full service automotive website platform offered by companies such as eBizAutos, TK Carsites, Dealer.com, DealerFire, DealerOn or Dealer eProcess.  Dealers need to have a solid infrastructure for Internet Marketing which includes tools for CRM, ILM, Newsletters, Video and SEM.  Dealers need to find a core web infrastructure that gives them a set of robust tools for search marketing, sales process management and customer support. Data integration and analysis will only get more important in months to come and the majority of dealer marketing budgets will move to online spending.   Until companies come up with WordPress Plug-ins for CRM, ILM and other functions that dealers need to run their businesses, WordPress will still be a complimentary platform. A number of people are working on WordPress tools, so in a year from now my answer could very well change.  For small independent used car dealers, the WordPress platform and an inventory plug-in may be just the trick to give them the SEO marketing tools that they need at an affordable price tag.

Can Microsites Replace Third Party Inventory Marketing Platforms?

The WordPress enhanced microsites can feed into a dealer's main website system as an affiliate marketing source.  Just as companies like Cars.com and Autotrader.com place dealer inventory on their marketing platforms and send leads to a dealer's CRM system, enhanced microsites with live inventory will perform a similar function.  This plug-in allows you to create targeted, in-state inventory marketing platforms; the possibilities are just endless. The WordPress open-source development environment and this type of plug-in makes it affordable to deploy live inventory on multiple domain optimized microsites. According to DealerTrend, dealers who implement five microsites would end up spending about $200 a month per microsite.

Are Automotive Microsites New?

Car dealer platform providers have the ability to offer microsites as part of a marketing strategy using their proprietary website software. From my viewpoint, most vendors in the website space do not see the need or the economics for such an offering. Microsites marketing concepts have been around since for at least 10 years as Ralph Paglia mentioned on the Automotive Digital Marketing community.  In 1999 Ralph was an early advocate of microsites and created numerous microsites while working at HAC Group. What makes the WordPress option interesting is that it allows for unlimited content creation and hundreds of free software enhancements.  The counter argument is that car dealer platforms are just now integrating blogs and content on-the-fly so they can now compete with the content creation element of WordPress. The rules of marketing and consumer engagement are changing.  The 2009 ASMA study of 34 website platforms revealed that nine automotive website platforms have industry leading platforms for search marketing.  This includes content on the fly and fully optimized inventory pages. We will wait to see, however, if automotive website providers have the insight to create a microsite marketing model within their existing offering.  The marketing data that we have collected would suggest that microsite marketing is here to stay and it is an untapped marketing opportunity for car dealers.

OEM Crackdown

Let me conclude by saying that some OEM's have been discouraging their dealers to own domains for web marketing that do not include their business name.  I have witnessed car dealers being forced to consolidate or shutdown their microsites that have state or city names plus their OEM brand. Restrictive marketing guidelines that forbid a Boston dealer from creating a microsite like www.toyotacamryboston.com are a lucrative opening for third party lead collectors and automotive marketing platforms to dominate local search and force car dealers to pay for leads or advertising. To be fair to OEM concerns, car dealers should not be allowed to deploy domains that include their competitor's brand name.  However, city names in or around their PMA should be open game if consumers are willing to drive to their dealership. A strict crackdown on dealer domain marketing will be a boom for third party lead collectors and would restrict car dealers who are innovative and aggressive online marketers.

PMA Maps Are Invisible To Internet Shoppers

For years, TV stations and newspapers in Metro areas like Boston have run ads from competing OEM dealers in downtown Boston and its suburbs.  Those were the rules of engagement since the media outlets crossed PMA lines.  Treating the Internet in terms of PMA boundaries is a naïve thought. Dealers should be able to innovate automotive online marketing with a microsite strategy that uses high value domain names.  Otherwise, it would be like telling car dealers that they can't advertise on TV because someone outside of their PMA might see their ad and cause an unfair marketing advantage. The first Toyota dealer in the Boston suburbs who is smart enough to purchase a domain like www.usedtoyotaboston.com should be able to market their cars on that domain.  OEM's already endorse car inventory advertising from multiple dealers in one state on Cars.com and Autotrader.com.  The hypocrisy is amazing.  Let's hope that cooler heads prevail in the coming years otherwise dealers lose significant tactical advantages.

What is Your Microsite Strategy?

Microsites are extremely effective tools for online marketing and they will increase in value as the evolution of blogging and social media turns car dealers into content marketing engines.  Having the right website assets to place that content will determine who wins the competition for high value keywords in your local PMA and state. A copy of this microsite article can be downloaded on Slideshare.

The topic of press releases is near and dear to me since I have spent the last two years experimenting with about 20+ sites and the impact on search marketing.  The key starting point in this discussion is to first determine the goal of the press release.  There are many goals that could be possible and I have just listed a few:

1. To be picked up by offline media news
2. To stir controversy or break news
3. To block competitors from Google Page One for valuable keywords
4. To create a basic link from a highly rated website

I have focused my research on numbers 3 and 4 and have found that my opinions conflict with traditional advertising agencies.  Most traditional agencies think of a press release in offline terms and that the message has to be very important.  Traditional agencies scratch their heads when I tell them that car dealers should put out press releases at least every month per brand. As an Automotive SEO consultant, I have a standard "goal" of owning the first 10 free organic search results in a Google SERP.  I want to eliminate competition for certain search phrases for my clients.  So my spin on press releases is that they are part of an offsite SEO toolkit.  They are not the solution to search dominance, but they are part of the toolkit I use.  They work well because the content is posted on a highly rated website.  Other tools in an effective off-site SEO strategies include blogs, forums, commenting on high page ranked articles that don't have a "no follow" tag, videos, document posting services, social communities, and the list goes on.  In today's competitive market, once dealers have a good website platform in place they need to consider the off-site SEO work that needs to be done each month.

Why You Need Many Tools in the Toolbox

Type into Google "Ford Transit Connect New Mexico" and you can see how free press releases services can help create SERP entries that block competition and drive traffic to a dealer's website.  Normally press releases can optimize well for 3+ word keyword phrases.  There are many examples I can give, but the concept applies to any phrase you want to optimize. Content targeting keywords is the heart of SEO.  Type into Google "digital dealer conference Nashville"  or "digital dealer Nashville" and you will see that 50% of Google page one is dominated by articles that talk about my seminar or the conference.  That is a direct decision to promote my brand.  This is the same strategy can be used for car dealer names, the cars they sell or the promotions they plan.  These press releases build SERP visibility and also good links.  Tip: When you create links in a press release hyperlink the keyword phrases that you want to promote and link to an appropriate page on your website.  Do not always create links to your home page. Press releases and their impact can vary based on which site you decide to use to publish your press release.   Spending more money on expensive press release posts ($300-$700) in most cases do not justify their costs from page one rankings.  They may generate more calls or offline copy but a $25 press release can often beat the $700 release.

Measuring ROI

The ROI is hard to measure unless your website platform has the ability to capture referring URL'swhen someone completes a lead form.  Those platforms that capture referring URL's on all forms can demonstrate easily the ROI of press releases.  Many releases that I post get anywhere from 500-1,000 visitors and cost about $100 to write and implement. Dealers that have the right platform in place can spend a few hundred dollars to create and publish a few press releases to determine ROI of this medium within 30-60 days.  This goes for any off-site SEO strategies; blogging, car forums, Facebook,. etc.  Dealers need to demand from their platform vendors to have the ability to track form submissions to the referring URL that drove that consumer session to their website.

Press Release Training

Writing and Posting Good Press Releasescould be a topic at the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp.  The session would show attendees tips on creating and posting press releases, in real-time for their dealership.  Do you think this is needed skills building exercise?  We could probably write, review and post 3-4 press releases for each dealership in attendance on four different website portals in a two hour session.  Let me know what you think...

I am working with Paul Rushing and JD Rucker to put together the details for the first Automotive Marketing Boot Camp which will be held in Orlando on the day prior to the official start of the 2010 NADA Convention. The boot camp will be a full day of intensive skills training; Automotive SEO, Social Media and tactical Internet Marketing skills. One Day of Intense Training.  Are You Ready For Boot Camp? The Boot Camp sessions will be at least 2 hours in length to give participants time to develop real life Internet marketing skills using their own laptop computer. These skills will give them the confidence to go back to their dealerships with effective marketing strategies. Every participant will be required to bring their laptop since they will be working online during class with strategies for their dealership.

Advanced Preparation and Customized Materials

Automotive Marketing Boot Camp participants will receive advance customized documentation to prepare for the skills building sessions. In addition, the boot camp instructors will be preparing dealer specific materials that will be waiting for the students when they register. The advance preparation will ensure that the basics are setup before classes start. Every participant of the Boot Camp will be part of at least four specific skill building classes. The instructors for the Boot Camp will include social media experts JD Rucker and Internet Marketing specialists Brian Pasch and Paul Rushing. Additional Boot Camp instructors will be announced next week.  The instructors will NOT be offering high level discussions but hands on tactical training.   That's why a laptop will be required; during the sessions strategies will be set in play specific for each dealership represented. Since each participant will receive customized reports and analysis of their website and marketing strategy, they will effectively have the industry's top experts consulting for your specific dealership for a full day. As a bonus, attendees will have both Thursday night and Friday morning to ask specific tactical questions of our instructors. Straight talk and intense skills training. Get ready for Boot Camp!  Paul suggested that we start at 5:30 am  with calastenics and a 3 mile run. (I doubt that will happen)

Limited To 50 People

The Automotive Marketing Boot Camp is designed to achieve small classroom sizes and effective hands on training. As a result, the registration will be limited to 50 students. Instructors will provide the step by step skills training that will yield confidence and the ability for attendees to go back to their dealership with a strategy that can be implemented. The tentative schedule for the Boot Camp is as follows: Thursday February 11, 2010

• 6:00 pm Boot Camp Registration and Cocktail Reception
• 7:00 pm Dinner Rations and Opening Remarks

Friday February 12, 2010

• 7:00 am Boot Camp Breakfast  (SOS) & Opening Remarks
• 8:00 am - 12:30 Morning Sessions
• 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch & Keynote
• 2:00 pm - 6:30 pm Afternoon Session
• 7:00 pm Graduation Ceremony & Cocktail Reception

Saturday February 13, 2010

• 7:00 am Industry Breakfast (NADA attendees invited)
• 8:00 am - 10:00 am Q&A Opportunity With Instructors

Interested?

If you are interested in attending, send an email with your contact information to Carrie Valentine at carrie@paschconsulting.com. The cost for the Boot Camp will be announced shortly. We expect the event to sell out quickly, so those who indicate their interest in advance will be given the first opportunity to register. If you have someone who you think would like attend the Boot Camp, please tell them to submit their name to Carrie as quickly as possible.  There will be six sponsorship slots available for the Boot Camp.  Vendors who are interested, should contact Brian Pasch at brian@paschconsulting.com.

One of the outcomes that was clear from the 7th Digital Dealer Conference is that the demand for more knowledge on Automotive SEO and Social Marketing strategies is very high. A seminar room, limited to one hour, is just scratching the surface. There is so much confusion in the marketplace that needs to be resolved with openness and skills training; we don't need more sales pitches. Skills training for Automotive SEO and Social Media is none existent.  There has to be a way to get past the "Marketing 101" classes that get repeated at each conference. So, I was talking with JD Rucker and Paul Rushing about organizing an Automotive SEO and Social Media Boot Camp the day before the NADA show in February to provide in depth training and hands on classes to give car dealers the skills training to perform important tasks on their own or to develop a better understanding of how to strategize and direct their consultants. It would be a full day of training to build skills and NOT just skimming through important topics.  The design is to move past the "101" style classes and dig in for people who want hands on training. The concept could be outlined like this: 1. Advance registration would allow us to create a full report on the dealer's existing website with suggestions for improvement that will be covered in the boot camp sessions.  A review of dealer's online strategies and social media assets will be included in the pre-conference report. 2. Based on the analysis in the custom report, dealer staff would be assigned to different boot camp sessions to be instructed on how to affect changes on their site that will make a difference for search marketing. 3. The sessions would provide hands on training. Everyone would need to come with a laptop so they can change their sites or create content in real-time based on the session leaders directions. The goal would be to provide enough time to cover a series of important basic SEO tasks and Social Media tasks that all dealers need to know. For example, showing dealer's staff how to create  "effective content pages" and how to add them to their website to increase organic search traffic for particular keyword phrase.   Once the page is added to their site, how to drive traffic and links to that new page.  Most website platforms now allow page creation on the fly but few dealers are leveraging this technology. Sessions on using blogs and social media tools like Digg, Twitter and Facebook that push beyond the basic 101 discussion to show traffic generation strategy, data and real results. If you think this is a valid concept and are heading to NADA, and would be interested, send me an email: brian@paschconsulting.com.  We will want to keep the classroom sizes smaller and manageable but we need to see how much demand is in the market.

One point of reference that DD7 ingrained in me was that there is a greater urgency for car dealers to  understand and implement Automotive SEO, Social Media, Internet Reputation Management (IRM), and microsites as part of their overall marketing strategy.

In the six months since last Digital Dealer Conference in Las Vegas, the types of questions that were asked of me in Nashville showed a deeper understanding of Internet marketing strategies. When dealer employees are asking questions about the best tools for blogging, what is duplicate content, best linking strategies or how to tag photos on their inventory pages it is obvious that change is in the air.

I was very excited to engage and help educate the dealers at DD7. I hope I was able to motivate those who attended my SEO seminar to go back this week and implement some things on their own.  The more dealership staff can do on their own, the faster change will occur.

It was great to see Jared's seminar on Social Media completely jammed with not a seat remaining.  The tide is turning. Having a comprehensive Internet Marketing strategy however is becoming an interesting challenge because of the staffing cuts made in the past 2 years.

Dealing With Labor Intensive Tasks

Unlike other operational paradign shifts in the automotive industry,  many new Automotive marketing strategies are labor intensive.  This is just the opposite path that software tools have offered car dealers in the past 10 years.  Implementing an SEO and Social Media strategy for every dealership is unique and multi-brand dealer groups cannot expect to see large economies of scale.

That is where this marketing shift is different than other changes in automotive innovation.  Dealers are faced with the labor requirements that quality content creation takes. Dealers are struggling with the hours it takes to encourage customers to post reviews, maintain Facebook pages and keep their blogs up to date.

In the coming months, it would be great to start threads about how to manage the "time" requirements for the new tools in automotive marketing.  It's not about outsourcing or keeping it in-house.  I think it will have to be a balance of both in-house training and outside assistance.  The market is moving too fast not to engage experts that are on the edge of change.

I'm working on some ideas to create SEO training curriculum that we can post on Driving Sales.  I would like to hear if a library of video training segments would be of interest to dealers.

DD7  PowerPoint on SEO

If you could not attend the 7th Digital Dealer Conference in Nashville and would like to read through my PowerPoint, click here to get a copy:  Automotive SEO Seminar

I decided to start a new thread, in response to a question posted by Joe Orr from Dick Hannah Honda.  It was a new topic within the post about Facebook content, so I thought I would show Joe's question and then re-post my answer.  Also, this Wednesday at 12:00 Noon EST, DrivingSales.com is hosting my co-hosted  live talk show with JD Rucker and Paul Rushing and this week's topic is this exact discussion: How to Dominate Google Page One For Your Dealership Name. Joe Orr says: My Response: Dealer Name optimization is a very strategic part of any SEO plan. It’s important to own all variations of the franchise name but that still does not block disgruntled customers. By added a few words before or after a business name can still rank. The law states that any person can purchase a domain name that includes your dealership name as long as the consumer is not let to believe that its your store. So it can’t have your logo or imagery that makes it look like a Honda store. Secondly, as long as the website is not making a profit selling something using your name, there is no recourse.

BMW Called

I had BMW attorney call me one day because I had a BMW SEO case study website up on http://www.bmwseo.com. They said that since I was in the business of making money from SEO, I can’t use the BMW in the domain even though it may help their dealers. I brought up the point that user communities use the BMW phrase in their domains and make money by inserting Adwords campaigns. BMW said that since their overall purpose was non-commercial, they would not fight them right now. So, someone can create a website www.dickhannahhondasucks.com and as long as it’s a site about their experience or other people’s reviews, you have no recourse. You have recourse if the website is selling cars which would cause public confusion.

Articles Can Rank - Not Just Domains

Aside from domains, well ranked websites can post an article that includes your dealership name in the Page Title and content and it can rank well on your name. This is unavoidable but there are ways to block most of these types of articles with better SEO. Keep in mind, if Edmunds.com wrote a keyword optimized profile page on your Dealership, it will most likely stay on Page One forever. So, dominating Google Page One and/or Page Two needs aggressive SEO strategies. Not everyone who calls themselves an SEO professional can implement Page One blocking strategies that can be easily picked off. Since you allowed five third party review websites on your Google Page One search result for “Dick Hannah Honda” you are an easy pick-off candidate.

There is a great deal of "buzz" going around about Facebook and Twitter and how the major search engines are going to index real-time content. I have to say that I have been less than impressed with the car dealer Facebook pages that I check each week.  It seems that too many dealers are just pushing out their latest newspaper ad or newest car that just came into their inventory.  I believe that after a few weeks of posts from car dealers who add 10 cars for sale a day to their Facebook feed, that the average "fan" will stop following them and block their feed.  Everyone who follows your dealership knows that you sell cars.  Don't blow the opportunity with a one-way sales pitch 24x7.

Quality Facebook Content

If this is true, then I would like to start the conversation about what dealers can share on Facebook that adds value to the readers and establishes your dealership as a Trust Agent.  Here are a few topics that car dealers can discuss on Facebook and provide meaningful content for those that follow their feed: 1. Advice on Scams - All your customers and followers have received a postcard in the mail or a phone call telling them that their car warranty is about to expire and that they need to act now!   How about a post that helps them understand the difference between manufacturer warranty plans and third party plans. 2. Advice on Parts- If your customers are cost conscience and want to do repairs on their own, what articles are you providing them that at least encourages them to buy genuine OEM parts from you and do the repairs themselves.  Don't assume the you can't compete with Pep Boys, R&S Strauss, etc. 3. How To Value Their Cars - How about advice on how to read the Kelly Blue Book charts and what they can expect when they trade in a car.  Help them work through the decision whether to trade in a car with your dealership or to sell a car on their own.  Show them both sides of the decision. 4. Advice About Selling Cars on Ebay - How about educating your readers on the risks of selling their cars direct and what they need to watch out for with eBay scams and shipping issues.  There are many people who think that eBay is the way to get the most value for their car.  Do you have an opinion to share? These are just a few topics that show the people that are following your dealership that you are not 100% about the sale and that you add value to their lives.  If anyone has other topics that you have found that have received a positive response from your followers,  please add them here. Reminder:  If you are going to Digital Dealer Conference in Nashville, make sure you book your schedule to attend my Internet Marketing and SEO seminar on Sunday November 1st at 1:00 pm.  If you ask a good question, I may throw you a collector's PCG hacky sack.