Blogging has given consumers unprecedented power with free outlets for the distribution of their written opinion about car dealers and/or the cars that they sell. This is both a blessing and a curse depending on the content and target of the written piece. For automotive retailers, Internet Reputation Management has sky-rocketed. Dealers are finding themselves confronted with highly visible commentary of their car dealership on Google, Yahoo and MSN searches.

General Managers often feel helpless in protecting their online reputation from valid blog posts and negative posts planted by competing dealers. On the flip side, car dealers often fail to leverage positive commentary and testimonials posted on the Internet. A simple test would be to ask your dealership how many press releases do they post a month. Having a proactive strategy for disseminating positive customer feedback can often be the best defense against future negative attacks.

Internet Reputation Management services have a bright future. New web content is growing in direct relation to the explosive growth of social networking portals. Each month new tools are being made available to allow a non-technical Internet user to create their own website, blog and social networking portal. With the ease at which content can be created, organized and shared on the Internet, business owners need to be mindful of what is being written about their company.
Free Starter Tools

Protecting your reputation on the Internet can start with using a simple and effective tool called “Google Alerts”. Once you create a free Google account, you can enter specific search phrases into your own watch list. Google will then send you an email with links to articles that include the phrases in your watch list. You can request notifications as they happen or summarized daily, weekly or monthly. I would recommend that you start with the “as it happens” choice for a week, and then decide if you want to move it to “once a day”.

My watch list includes ‘Brian Pasch”, “Pasch Consulting”, “Pasch Consulting Group”, and “NJ SEO”. We also include in our watch list some of the buzz words in the niches we cover. For our Automotive Marketing Division our watch list includes: “Automotive SEO”, “Automotive Digital Marketing” , “Car Dealer Websites” and “Automotive SEO Specialist” . We use Google Alerts for both reputation management as well as tracking what other companies are posting in our competitive space.
Creating your Reputation Management Watch List

A recommended strategy for an automotive watch list would include your dealership name, your product names and the names of your key executives. Knowing what is being said, both positive and negative, is the first step in creating a sustained reputation management plan.
Your Internet Reputation Management strategy should have a clear escalation plan for positive and negative commentary. Positive commentary should be evaluated and the very best should be included on your own company blog or website news page. You may want to get permission from the individual to repurpose their commentary in your marketing materials.

Negative content should have an immediate response strategy which is best handled by a seasoned SEO and Reputation Management Consultant (RPC). Every post will have a different strategy depending on where the post was made and the policies of the website host.

Negative Attacks Apply to All Businesses

Recently, a New York City executive coaching and placement firm called the Pasch Consulting Group about a barrage of vicious attacks on the firm’s founder and on the services they offer for executives in transition. The negative posts were well planned and well placed so that they appeared on Google Page One, when consumers issued a search on the company name. The CEO said that these comments were directly hurting their business and needed immediate relief.

The company’s lawyer had already pursued legal action against the individual who posted the verbal assaults under different names and aliases. This disgruntled individual eventually signed a retraction letter and promised to stop this Internet reputation attack. In reality, he never stopped posting. So we were called in to help. Within 30 days we were able to have the most visible articles removed from the various websites. We also found additional negative posts on business portal sites that we were able to remove directly.

PCG created an offensive plan to get articles posted about the hundreds of satisfied clients the company had from its long history. For this client, they never invested the time to post their client testimonials and case studies on the Internet. Using various techniques, PCG was able to add significant content in Google page 1 and 2 for searches on their company name.

Reputation Management for Car Dealers

For Automotive Dealers, online reputation management must be part of your Internet Marketing Strategy to protect your Primary Market Area (PMA) from neighboring car dealers. If a car dealer’s visible Internet reputation is poor, consumers may very well shop at a neighboring dealership.
I have seen posts on the Internet that were outlandish and shocking. If I were in the market to buy a car, these negative posts would give me second thoughts about buying from certain dealers. It only takes a few angry consumers to make any dealership look like the devil. You can search Google yourself to find dealers being called racist, discriminatory and deceptive.

Often, consumers have a choice between two dealers that are 15 miles apart. If one car dealer has glowing reputation scores and one has low scores, reputation can sway their final pick. I recognize that other factors play a part in that final decision like price, convenience and availability. However, if your Internet reputation can be improved, taking remedial action is mandatory to continue to grow your Internet sales leads.

Sites like DealerRater.com, Yahoo Local, Insider Pages, Google Maps and Yelp all have review engines that can appear on Google Page One when consumers search your business name. General Managers need to implement a system to regularly request positive review from their customers. This can include new car customers as well as service customers.

Automotive retailers should create a list of all review website pages in an email and send these links to satisfied customers. The email should request that they post an honest review of your company; make it easy for them to post a review with one click of their mouse. Do not attempt to post customer reviews from your own business computers. Many of these sites track IP addresses and you could be banned from the directory for review spamming.

Empowering Your Satisfied Customers

Reputation Management requires both an offensive and defensive strategy. The longer your offensive strategy is in place, the harder it is for negative commentary to drastically affect your business. If you have been lax at posting positive commentary, then ANY negative commentary will look out of proportion.

Car Dealers can no longer ignore public commentary and commercial review websites. A restaurant
owner that has a comment posted on the Internet about a food poisoning episode, without balanced commentary, will be affected for consumers looking to try a new restaurant using Internet based searches. A hotel that has posts about dirty bed linens and mildew will see their online bookings drop. Simply stated, any post with your company name needs to be reviewed.

The Pasch Consulting Group has effective methodologies and strategies to assist business owners in implementing a solid reputation management action plan. If you would like additional information, visit www.paschconsulting.com

I have received almost 100 emails in 80 days. That's the number of follow-up marketing emails I have received from an automotive lead collection service after I requested ONE "no obligation" car quote. This was initiated when I submitted an Infiniti car quote request to see how various lead collection services operated.

Will this type of marketing force consumers to enact a Do Not Email Law?

On July 8, 2008 I typed into Google "Red Bank Infiniti" and one of the listing on page one was a new lead collection service called ConnectWithLife. I clicked on the listing because the name seemed odd for an automotive lead website. The listing looks like this:

Find a Local Red Bank NJ Infiniti Dealer - ConnectWithLife Autos ...
Infiniti dealers in Red Bank NJ are competing for your business - Free Price Quotes on New Infiniti in Red Bank Nj, Dealer Price Quotes, ...
www.connectwithlife.com/infiniti-dealers/in-red-bank-nj.html - 205k - Cached - Similar pages

So, I filled out the basic forms and then there was a question checkbox that read:

"I would like to be notified of other ConnectWithLife! money-saving offers".

I interpreted this checkbox as giving ConnectWithLife permission to sell my email address for marketing purposes other than this one car quote request. I made sure it WAS not checked. My interpretation was wrong.

By not checking the box, it meant that other third party companies would not immediately get my email address BUT the company running this site, Reply.com, could send me other offers from website properties that they control. These companies include:

• homevalues.reply.com
• myride.com
• autos.reply.com
• homevalues.reply.com
• realestate.icastle.com
• autobytelnetwork.com

The good news is that I got a car quote from a local dealer within 24 hours. The bad news is that I opened Pandora's email box .

No Just Automotive Solicitations

Looking at my inbox shows that to date, 50% of the 90+ emails were for real estate solicitations, foreclosures and home valuation messages. The balance of the emails was car marketing emails of various makes and models. Getting other car sales emails is tolerable but foreclosure and real estate emails has nothing to do with my primary purpose; to get an Infiniti car quote.

I am writing this post because car dealers are hooked on the “drug” of third party leads. For many dealers, third party leads make up the bulk of their Internet car sales. They are easy to buy, cost around $20 per lead, and it keeps their Internet sales team busy. As long as the lead cost is covered by car sales profits, dealers continue to buy. This may seem like perfect business sense but have dealers asked how these leads being collected? Have dealers considered if this lead source is sustainable?

Do Not Call Law - Do Not Email Law

If this amount of email is typical from other automotive lead collection websites, then the future for this lead collection model is bleak. Consumers got fed up with over calling into their homes and created the Do Not Call registry. How long will it take before consumers fight back about over "emailing" from single source sites like this one? Now that I know that I would get approximately one email a day from requesting a car quote, I would never use a service like this again. I would go right to a local dealer’s website.

It's an important note to say that ConnectWithLife is not violating any laws that I am aware of. Their privacy policy clearly states what they do with collected emails. The real question is how many consumers scroll down to the footer, click and read a privacy policy before requesting a car quote. Their privacy policy contains industry standard CYA language and a clear message that says by using the site they can or may sell your name to third parties, depending on your permission or if they were to close their business and sell their list.

Can you imagine what consumers mailboxes look like if they visited three or four car quote services? If this is standard practice, they would have hundreds of car solicitation emails in their inbox. This cannot create a great impression for automotive marketing. It doesn't surprise me why consumers are reluctant to give out their email address on pop-up coupons or call to action offers on car websites. They are getting bombarded with emails.

Dealer Direct Price Quotes

I have requested email price quotes from car dealer websites and I will get one email a month, from most dealers, informing me of their current deals. This is very reasonable since the automotive market thrives on new specials each month.

As long as dealers not abuse the trust given to them by consumers, it won’t take long for consumers to decide that going to dealer websites is the safer choice for car quotes. If this is the case, then the dealers that appear at the top of search listing will benefit. Those with ineffective SEO strategies will suffer.

The dealers who agree with this assessment will make sure they are using the latest in SEO and Internet marketing strategies to get their websites AHEAD of these lead collectors for car searches in their PMA. They will realize that if they don’t build competitive lead collection strategies they will in effect, taken on a new business partner. We have helped a number of our automotive clients build lead collection websites that out rank and outpace lead flow from third party services. Our studies have also shown that lead collected directly from dealer websites have a higher conversion.

Take Control of Dealer Direct Lead Generation

The longer car dealers wait to create their own Internet lead collection model, the more vulnerable they become if the email marketing rules change. The DNC list put approximately 50% of outbound telemarketing companies out of business. If third party lead collection services can't make money by email blasting, lead costs could double, triple or just go away.

Over calling by telemarketers was not illegal until consumers fought back. Email blasting is not illegal when consumers volunteer their email address. How long will it take for new email rules to go into effect which require lead collection forms to state how many emails a month will consumers be sent?

The dealer that builds their own collection model can continue to use third party leads as long as they perform, but will have a greater quantity of leads from their own websites. This dealer will have hedged their Internet business sales success and gain back control of their Internet sales future.

Taking The First Steps

If you are looking for new ways to collect more direct consumer leads, give me a call at 732-842-4720 and we can review some strategies that really work, that are dealer owned and controlled.

I have to take my SEO hat off to the marketing team at www.DealerRater.com. They have created a website platform that for most Google searches on dealer names, advertises their website on Google Page one organic results. This is not an insignificant feat and one that all SEO consultants should recognize. They have also scored a big win by having Google include their user reviews on Google Maps results. This is a home run for their business model.

The characteristic that I like most about DealerRater.com is that they are the model of entrepreneurial spirit. Their Internet business model gives car dealers who are the best at customer service and Internet marketing an edge. Dealers who think that consumers don’t care about CSI will get run over by Dealerrater’s business model.

In the recent past year the company has offered their “Dealer Certification” program which was pure genius to allow dealers to respond to negative posts on their site (for a fee). Today, they are raising the bar by offering banner advertising on "key" locations of their site.

I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag in this post. Car dealers who are reading this post, should inquire about their “competitive” display ad opportunities. It’s ingenuous. Imagine posting your banner ad over your competitor's review page. Mmmmnnnn. This is a cage match in the making.

If you need help to find this golden nugget, contact Heather MacKinnon who called me today to give me a heads up for some of my clients.

If you need some additional insights, email me: brian@paschconsulting.com

For many car retailers, their inventory pages make up over 85% of the total content pages on their website.  Organic search optimization and search ranking are heavily skewed to reward good content and good SEO architecture. So with this in mind, every dealer should know the strengths and weaknesses of their inventory listing module.  This knowledge can then direct your efforts to promote and sell cars in the Internet.

I created the ASMA Checklist to make it easy to compare different inventory modules for their search engine optimization potential. Some dealer inventory modules are optimized for search marketing and others are not.  Use this grid to score your site for important SEO architectural factors. This document will guide you on how to collect the data for the ASMA checklist.

If all the items in the checklist are “Yes” then you have an outstanding opportunity to market your cars for model specific searches in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Other factors, not included in the ASMA checklist, will determine the overall ability of your inventory module to sell cars once a consumer lands on the page.  The ASMA checklist is only evaluating the search marketing strengths and not design and interactive aspects of inventory modules.

On-Site Hosted Inventory – This is the hardest one to determine unless you have asked your vendor about this in the past. You want your inventory module hosted onsite and on your URL.  The ideal SEO friendly inventory module will produce unique pages for each car that is displayed.

Offsite hosted inventory means that your inventory is sitting on an outside website or web service and the pages are displayed in a “framed” page on your site.  Off-site hosted inventory does not help your SERP rankings because the pages are not associated with your URL.   An analogy is an electronic photo frame.  The wood frame is stationary (your website) but the photos are changing from a memory card (offsite hosted inventory).  The two are not hard connected and Google will only reward your website in SERP rankings if your inventory is hard connected.

If all your car detail pages are displayed on the same page like “New_Inventory.aspx” and just the inside contents of the page change when you click on a car, this is a framed off-site inventory system.  To Google and Yahoo, you have ONE index page regardless of you have 1,000 cars in stock. 

To see if your inventory is hosted off site, click through a few cars in your used car inventory and see if the URL name changes.  If it stays the same, you most likely have a framed off site inventory module.   You can also do a “view source” of the car detail page code and search for the word “iframe”.

If the URL name contains another website address, then the inventory module is most likely being redirected to an offsite location.

Unique Page Titles & META Descriptions – Google Webmaster Guidelines recommend that ever page on your website has a unique page title and META description.   Google’s webmaster tools even has a page dedicated to point out duplicate tags for webmasters to correct so the knowledge is ready available.  To check to see if you site’s inventory module is producing unique data, use the Google “site:” command.

Go into Google and type in this command:  site:www.yourwebsite.com

This will list all the pages indexed in Google.  Since most dealer sites have over 100 pages, you will have to click through a few pages of search results to see all the pages in your site.  If you see pages that have duplicate titles and descriptions, the inventory module is not helping you market via organic search.  This also makes it very difficult for your site to appear for consumers search that use year, make and model.

Unique META Keywords tag – It is widely known that Google and Yahoo have ignored the META keyword tag and instead have focused on other factors of web page architecture.  I have included this in the checklist so dealers to check and see if the keyword tag is being used improperly for spamming. 

A keyword tag should have 5-10 keywords that apply ONLY TO THAT PAGE.  I have visited dealer sites to find that they have 30-50 keywords jammed in the META keywords tag.  This should be corrected immediately because you do not want Google to think you are trying to spam the index.  If all your META keyword tags are the same for every car in stock, don’t fret since that tag is basically a neutral event now.

To view the keywords on any web page, right click your mouse on the outer edge of the page and in Internet Explorer a choice will come up to “View Source”.  This will open up your text editor.  The page will look like a foreign language to many but it’s just the HTML code to create that page.  Search for the word “keywords” and you will find your META keywords tag.

Optimized URL Names – This is a very important feature since if your inventory module has unique page titles and unique META descriptions, this feature would put you ahead of the competition.  There are three common strategies for URL names, ranked from worst to bet.

Worst – One page name that has a replacing center section for each car.  These pages could be named “new-inventory.apx” and “used-Inventory.aspx” so to Google you have two pages on your site for cars and NO unique tags.

Average – One page for each car but the URL string contains a data tag that no one will ever search.  This is called a dynamic page and there are hundreds of articles on the web why dynamic pages are not helpful for organic search optimization. An example of a dynamic page is: /preowned/dsp_viewcar.cfm?vin=JNRAS08W58X205839

Best – One page for each car and the URL string has the year, make and model in the URL name.  An example of this is: detail-2007-bmw-3_series-328xi_sedan-3452069.html

When you have completed your ASMA Checklist, you now have actionable data.  If you have discovered that your inventory module is not SEO friendly, then you can look for ways to better promote your cars. There may also be an upgrade available from your software provider so call them and ask.  To be competitive in today’s marketplace, you should have an ASMA compliant site.   

You can also check your competitor’s websites to see how their inventory module stacks up.  I have tested about 20 dealer software platforms as part of this research and the results vary across the board.  If you would like examples of any of these issues that are brought up in this article, I can send you links to dealer sites that demonstrate the topic of interest.  

Google has started to offer instant Flash “like” ads that can run in your Google Adwords accounts.
I created a few “display ads” using this new technology and actually I am very pleased with the final product. Basically, if you have a logo or photo and your ad message, you can create an eye catching flash advertisement in a minute.

To find this new feature, log into your Google Adwords Account and pick a campaign. Then go to the “Ad Variations” tab and you will see a new option called: “Display ad builder New! “

This takes Google Adwords “placements” to a new level in that you can create professional looking ads to place on local high traffic websites without the need of a graphics designer. This is a great example of how technology is making our society more productive.

That said, not all GSM or Internet Managers will feel comfortable with creating their own ads but they should start to get acquainted with this new technology. Once they do it once, the creativity will surely flow!