Automotive SEO 

Content marketing (SEO) is something dealerships started to learn and understand around 2013 – 2014.  Some masters of the craft, even earlier.  Since then there’s been a major fallout of companies able to produce quality content.  Whether you have one person or a team of in-house writers they must know all the rules the search engines play-by.  The golden rule, produce original, relevant and high quality content that produces revenue for your business.

• Keep Your Current Provider, Pay Less

• This is one of the biggest opportunities dealerships have when it comes to advertising spend and it can be seen at too many dealerships across the nation.  If your current paid search company is landing people on SRP’s or the homepage of your website.  They are doing it wrong.   Use SEO to work with your paid provider to create landing pages for low-funnel buying questions.  This keeps users engaged on your website therefore increasing your chances of a conversion.

5 Essential Components To Landing Pages

1 - Engaging Headlines w/ Proper H1 & H2

2 - Information Relative To The Searched Keywords

3 - Video, Pictures, Infographics

4 - The Benefits of Your Offering

5 - Clear Call-to-Action

If you’re landing paid search on pages that don’t include these things, STOP.  You’re paying too much and users are leaving your site without converting.  This is also known as wasted ad-spend.

Pay Less Overtime With Your Paid Search

• For example, if your keyword is “new chevrolet lease offers” and your current provider is sending them to your homepage or chevy SRP’s on your website.  Stop buying that keyword, your customers are bouncing.  And you’re paying a premium for that keyword, probably close to $10 or more.

• With quality content, land people that click on your ad to landing pages specifically talking about your brands’ lease offers.  And clicks could cost you 50% less.

• That’s right, with great quality content, you could be spending 50% less on paid search.  Either you get double the results for the same spend, or you use that money for other advertising avenues.

Dealerships spend an average of $500,000 per year on advertising.  As you read this, you might be realizing that your dealership spends well over one million dollars on advertising. Either way, it's a large sum of cash.  All of this marketing drives action, or at least is designed to create action on behalf of the consumer.  But when that consumer takes action on your marketing dollars, how is your dealership responding?  Is there a specific process your salespeople are taught when it comes to responding to marketing leads? Or did you just spend money on turning people away. 

The most successful companies in the world, dealerships included, have a detailed training program sales associates have to complete before they are able to engage with a real customer.  These same companies and dealerships are putting salespeople through continued training programs that shape the development of the employee all year.  If we follow this example, not only should dealerships be training salespeople when they are on-boarded, but each and every month.

Great training results in less turnover. Invest in your people and they are more likely to stick around. Effective and continued training also increases the ability for salespeople to be more successful in their jobs.  It’s no secret that when salespeople do better, the dealership makes more money. 

Training your sales staff isn’t just for large dealerships and dealer groups. It begins with thinking about your own processes for responding to internet leads.  Here are some things to ask yourself:

•  Where is the process written down?
•  What is to be included with every response?
•  How do you handle best price requests?
•  What is your time limit for responding to leads and making a call?
•  How many times do you attempt contact before moving on?

If you can pinpoint your sales process and find your pain points, you’re already on your way to maximizing your leads. It’s as simple as looking in to how your team is answering the phone. Effective lead capture depends on your ability to answer the following questions when the consumer makes a call to you store:

•  What is our uniform greeting for answering the phone?
•  Do we have steps for obtaining consumer contact information?
•  How does our team “sell” the appointment?
•  Does sales staff know how to handle the tough questions like, "What's your best price?" or  "What's my trade worth?"
•  When is it ok to give out pricing and availability?

It’s my recommendation that your dealership, or dealer group appoint a trainer specifically for sales staff.  This means having a person at your dealership dedicated to training and developing your staff in sales, service and parts. If you don't want to hire a trainer or convert an employee to be one, there are great companies that will listen to calls and provide feedback on how your leads are handled. Do what’s right for your dealership, but make sure training is a part of your business.

Invest in your sales people, their training, and how to process leads. Training programs are awesome, video training can sometimes be effective. Always remember it's up to SALESPEOPLE to watch videos and up to SALESPEOPLE to use what they watch in videos in actual customer interaction.

If you’re implementing training, make sure that management is reviewing your phone calls and how your leads are being handled. If salespeople are missing the mark, don't let them answer phones or respond to Internet leads.  Make them pay for their training.  They'll catch on quick, or they'll leave. Your business does not want "lifer salespeople" you want employees with a drive and a passion to succeed.  Great companies move employees up through the ranks, or employees leave for better opportunity (at least they think so!)

Refine your process for handling your leads. Don't add more lead sources or cut the ones you think aren't working because maybe leads aren't down, your salespeople are.

But wait, there is something brewing up this week and it's taking some flack on social media.

The global website conversion rate as of Q3 2015 is 2.95%.  Let's also keep in mind that conversion rate means money has been exchanged.  This is true to the definition, but in automotive the term is misused.  Money is exchanged in the F&I office, web conversions are leads.

Remember that not all of these leads give credit where credit is due, lots of consumers show up without calling or emailing.  That's a web lead, but most dealers don't account for it.

Paul Potratz has a webinar on FEB 18th asking about a conversion rate of over 50% for an automotive website.

I think it's a good topic to talk about and I'm interested to see what the company has in store for us.

The conversion rate in automotive, as defined by some web companies can be whatever the company wants it to be.  So any conversion rate can be possible.  Not saying for a moment this is what's happening.

Before I was a Phone Ninja, I was VP of Sales for DealerFire, we defined conversion rate to our dealers as a phone call, lead form submission, online chat and a showroom visit.  But it didn't mean we had an exchange of money taking place.  Our average conversion rate was just under 3%. Sometimes closer to 2%.

Paul makes a good point when he said that if you're busy doubting and the company is busy paying attention to something your web company isn't, you're going to lose.  I'm eager to listen and hoping to learn something.

I go into a lot more detail here in this post from a couple years ago.  check it out.  http://www.drivingsales.com/blogs/christian/2014/05/05/the-truth-about-vdp  

And go check out that http://www.monetate.com/resources/research report!

The year, 2002.  The dealership was a completely different place than it is today.  I remember my sales manager working with me one-on-one every day.  From around 9 in the morning to 3:30 we would go over closing techniques,  he would show me how he was going to pencil deals, he would teach me qualifying questions to ask, trial closes during the test drive.  
My first week at the dealership was an amazing experience, the manager pointed to the lot and told me to go drive every car out there.  I was 20 years old and had access to a lot of 350 cars, I grabbed the keys and hit the gas.  This was unfortunately before Subaru became known for its turbocharged cars but they did have the WRX and the most expensive car on the lot was an Isuzu Trooper, limited.  

I say those days were different because it was wildly a business-first mindset.  As opposed to a consumer first or customer service mindset.  We at the dealership put so much emphasis on steps to the sale because it was a complete mind game to increase gross profit on the deal.  The silent walk-around on a trade in works, if you go around and point and stare at all the imperfections of a car the owner will tell you about every scratch and ding on the car!  There were Autotrader and cars.com then but it wasn't used by many consumers to value their trade in.  Consumers would come in with their research written in notebooks.  Being at a Subaru dealership, we saw tons of engineers, scientists, MD's and professors.  Selling into this type of clientele was not hard, it was different.  We had to be on our A-game with product knowledge and understand that they were going to leave and come back, and then leave again and then come back to buy.  Consumer reports was still a thing and Edmunds was just popping onto the scene as an online research tool.

A few huge rules of being a salesperson, don't talk when your manager or someone is trying to close a deal.  After a closing question, don't say a word.

Our general manager, a gentleman by the name of Bill Breed was an incredible leader and knew the business in and out.  To the salespeople he would tell us three things, know know know your inventory, always have your D-tag in a safe place, and never lose keys.  Bill was also big on phone training and product knowledge.

I think those two things are still key today.  We were taught to perfect our walkarounds and always go on 30-minute test drives.  How many people work at a dealership today where the test drive route takes more than 10 minutes?  All of the Subaru salespeople were required to give walkarounds in front of the entire sales staff and maintain ongoing phone training to take phone calls. 

If you could do those two things properly, you would be successful selling cars, and in turn, the dealership would be successful.  We were doing around 220 cars in our prime, and that was a Subaru-Isuzu store in Olathe, KS. 

It was a privilege at the dealership to answer phones, every time the phones would ring, you would hear salespeople saying, "money's calling."  It's true too, when that phone rings, that's your money calling.  Most every salesperson had a phone script taped to their desk, we knew that it was there to help us make money, but also because if we were being secret shopped, we wanted that perfect score.  Our GM always told us, if you didn't set the appointment, don't count on them showing up and asking for you.   And he was right!  Not having an appointment, and telling them to come in and ask for you or setting a weak appointment never ended up with the customer asking for you.  Even if you had your upsheet with all of their info, you were still splitting the deal if they didn't come in and ask for you.

The strong appointment builds a solid rapport with the consumer before they even come in.  You know their name, they know yours (sometimes even have written it down), you have already validated that the vehicle they are calling in about is an excellent selection, you know about their trade-in, you have given them a couple of options on your availability to come into the dealership, and have given them directions to your store.

When people talk about getting back to basics when it comes to selling cars, these two things will make a significant impact on your dealerships monthly numbers.  Today in 2016 these two important skills have stood the test of time, they are always important and still in every great sales trainers curriculum. 

If your salespeople aren't trained on how to handle phone calls, they don't answer the phone, if they can't do a proper demo, the don't sell cars.

Oak Lawn Toyota just trounced most marketing firms that I know about... This is epic and you have to see it...

It was so good, Car Blog CarDebater did a story on it that I came across today...

Would love to hear your feeback and if you have any other links to some cool dealership videos....   

Oak Lawn Toyota is not my client... just calling out great work!!

here is the link to view the video!

http://www.cardebater.com/toyota-dealerships-keys-in-a-box-music-video-is-pure-gold

Vehicle Details Pages (VDPs) have been a hot topic for some time now. Over the past few months, I have become increasingly convinced that their importance is not completely understood within the automotive industry.

E-commerce websites outside of automotive put a lot of emphasis on product pages. They are extremely important and measured with precise accuracy.  Here are some things that are taken into consideration:

• Conversion Rate - What percentage of website visitors (now called sessions) are turning into paying customers?
• Cost per Transaction - How much does each transaction cost your business
• A / B Testing - Do certain versions of product pages produce more (or higher grossing) sales
• Average Transaction Value - Every time I ring the register, how much am I ringing it for
• Days and Visits to Purchase - How many days between the user’s website visit to the sale?
• Types of Users - What are the demographics of my website visitors?
• Task Completion - Did the user complete the task you wanted them to do while on your site?

From where do these criteria come? E-Commerce giants that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars per day online.  The same e-Commerce giants that are getting over 100 million page views per day.  

I have heard a few automotive website companies talk about and compare the industry to Amazon.  I don’t believe this is an applicable or accurate model for car dealers. Take into consideration these quick stats about Amazon:

• $74 billion in sales last year
• ​$202 million in sales per day
• Over 150 million visitors each day
• Online only
• Trusted, fair prices, fast, convenient

Now, take a look at this scenario.

 If I had a dealership group of 60 rooftops, and my stores were all open 7 days a week and each one of them sold 7 cars per day.

* My average selling price is $30,000.  Each one of my websites gets 15,000 sessions per month.  

• $4.6B in sales last year
• ​$12.6 Million in sales per day
• Over 30,000 visits per day
• In Person Only
• Trust has to be earned
• Fair Prices? Fast? Convenient?

It should be easy to see that apples do not equal oranges in the example above.  Amazon can A/B test product pages within an hour on any given day of the year.  Cyber Monday 2013 was the single most impressive day in E-commerce history, raking in an astounding $2 Billion.  The Average Conversion rate of all e-commerce websites is 2.67% as defined here: Monetate.  Is your website company telling you that your conversion rate is higher?  Are you hearing companies promise 25% increase in conversion?  If they are, chances are they do not fully understand what conversion means.

For my clients a conversion is this: Website visitors who come to the dealership and service or purchase a vehicle.  

I do sometimes have clients that ask map / direction clicks and phone numbers to be tracked within analytics.  While these tell us about a click, they do not count as a conversion in my book.  I do not possess the secret sauce for website conversion.  I simply aim to get as many of them as possible.  My clients are well versed on bounce rate, total sessions, session duration and conversion rate.  

With respect to bounce rate, I want my clients getting entrances and visits from all over the country, not just their hometown.  When you have visits from all over, your bounce rate may rise, but when you’re putting out blogs and landing pages that let consumers research on your website, that is not a bad thing.  

For instance, if a consumer types this into Google - 2014 s class vs 7 series - the result is a landing page on a dealer's website that compares the two models.  The information only takes 60 seconds or so to read and if the user leaves after viewing, this plays a part in your bounce rate and average session duration.  If the dealership brings sessions from around the world to their website to answer a question that search engines are being asked every day this is a good thing.  In the example above, pages like this bring in thousands of visitors each month.

Your dealership isn’t opposed to selling cars outside of your PMA right?  The more content you have on your website in the form of landing pages, blog posting and rich content pages, the more organic traffic and entrances into your website you will have. Conversion rate may drop as website sessions increase, but as long as more conversions happen, I don’t see the business owner thinking twice about the minutiae. With too many factors playing into it, there isn’t one defined conversion rate in the auto industry. The standard for success is still website sessions compared to cars sold and serviced.   

Autonation recently announced that they would stop relying on third-party websites to drive traffic to their websites.  Mike Jackson also told CNBC that Tesla should be able to sell cars direct to consumers.  Two things are happening here:

1. Dealerships should now start to invest in content writers that drive traffic to their OWN websites.  

2. A better consumer experience is necessary when merchandising vehicles online.

This isn’t Amazon, and Scott Hernalseen said this at the 2013 DrivingSales Executive Summit, “Dealers must have a clear merchandising and pricing strategy that makes their vehicles stand out from the competition.”  Dealerships should be pointing web traffic (most importantly Google and Bing Searches) to their own website.  Third-party listing and lead providers know that content is king and that they are capturing searchers, bringing them to their sites, then selling to you.  

Tim Martell, CEO and Founder of Wikimotive, said that third-party lead providers are “toxic to car dealers.” He explains that their negative impact begins in the messaging to consumers through use of distressing language against the dealership to position themselves as the only trusted resource. The first 

experience the consumer has in the buying process enforces the distrust.

The second thing that happens is that the lead is then sent to at least three to five competing 

car dealers where their own automated processes barrage the prospect with follow-ups. The consumer is left regretting ever entering their contact information in the first place.  Martell adds, “Let’s not forget that in some cases, consumers will submit leads on multiple third-party sites. You do the math; phone calls and 

emails ensue for a few weeks to a few months. Some experts have suggested that a single lead will cause well over $1,000 to change hands by the end of one lead process while others have suggested that it never ends. That the leads continue to be sold and resold forever.”

Most third-party lead providers send traffic to VDP pages.  The problem with this is that VDP pages in the auto industry are old and outdated.  When I visit websites such as Converse, Zara or Coach, for example, I get one experience. When I visit car dealer websites I get another experience.

Ali Mendiola of DealerTrack recently told dealers, in her online webinar “How to break free from the website lead-to-sale conversion rate blues,” that VDP pages offer no guidance and give the consumer too many options. She said that “all of the buttons are the same” and that dealers should “limit the amount of information that is on the VDPs”.  I couldn't agree more.

 

A call-to-action click is meaningless if it stops there.  Where does the click take them? Do you want yet another opinion on what their trade-in is worth? Take a look at what the manufacturers offer consumers on their own VDP pages.

Shockingly, it looks nothing like a VDP on one of it’s own franchised sites!  It does resemble e-commerce sites.  From Mercedes-Benz to Kia, it’s all about a big photo, the price and one call to action.  Not form leads. We all know that consumers do not surrender this type of information so easily.  

The expert of online psychology Nathalie Nahai’s book Webs of Influence, allow us to understand our hidden motivations when viewing product pages and how to design persuasive experiences.  Nathalie, whom has spoken to Google, Ebay, and Harvard Business Review, understands the principles of how to get the web user to do what you (the business) want them to do.  The vehicle details pages used on our client’s websites implement these principles.  Two noticeable mentions are the use of one main call to action and large images to persuade action.

Now look at the Nissan VDP. Yes! This is more like it; a large photo, no clutter and one main call to action.  This lets consumers have the same experience across the entire e-commerce brand.  One more thing, since the majority of new clients are all now built on responsive platforms, all of this is available on their iPads, iPhones and Android devices in the very same seamless format.  For a case study of how this works you can access here: http://bit.ly/1uqj7SW

I will close out with another statement from Mr. Martell, “VDPs show correlation. They are not causation.” You can send traffic to a particular VDP, but if it’s priced wrong, has poor photos or descriptions and more, it will never sell. “VDPs are merely an exposure metric,” he continued. Is more exposure good? Yes. But the context and the validity of the data is what matters.  He warns,”Don’t let the gurus trick you into believing that your own knowledge isn’t valid by the advent of technology and information. It’s time to take back control and stop lining the pockets of vendors.”

  Continue to be the excellent automotive retail professional that you were when you started in the industry. Use your own original content - content that both you and your car buyers care about. The consumer gets to connect with a local business that has what they want and you get the opportunity to become their valuable local resource they were hoping to find. Everybody wins. You. Win.