A few months ago, Greg made a video about your content being stuck in 2005 and how dealers need to rethink their content strategy. Too often are there multiple pages with content like “get your *insert service* here in *insert city 20 miles away*” — and all of them use the exact same text. That’s not going to help your customers, and none of the pages will show up well in Google. So, if those old ideas don’t work, what does?

Take your dealer hat off and think about the first time you bought a car. It could have been during the dark times of no internet, or it may have been more recent. What were some of the things you wish someone told you? What did you not know about the process or about the dealership? Your website visitors have some of those same questions. Answer those questions with content on your site Here’s a list to get you started:

What do I need to bring to the dealership?

How long is the process?

If I need a cosigner, what should I do?

Should I buy or lease?

When is my first payment due?

These are just a few, but these types of questions are great topic ideas for your blog, a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page, or even a fancy guide for the car-buying process that your dealership can share across the internet.

You shouldn’t write content simply because you think it will show up in Google searches. Everything that goes on your site should be there to make your user experience better. If you’re writing content to answer the questions that you know your customers will have, you’ll win on multiple fronts. Customers will love your site because it helps them, so you’ll get more traffic and more conversions. Google will love your site because you’ve got robust content that’s useful to humans.

You hear those sleigh bells jingling, ring-ting tingling, too. The holiday season is upon us and it’s everybody’s dream to wake up on Christmas Day with a brand new car on their driveway. Dealers are in fierce competition during the final stretch of the year, with promotions happening everywhere. If you’re not preparing for the holiday season by getting your dealership SEM- and SEO-ready, then you’re already falling behind. Don’t be a Grinch - follow this handy little guide put together by the SEO & SEM experts at DealerOn.

SEM Wish List

How do you optimize your SEM efforts for maximum results during the holiday season? First, consider the vast amount of people considering purchasing a vehicle at the end of the year. According to a 2018 Google Consumer Survey, 1.5 million plan to or are considering purchasing around Black Friday or a Year End sales event. There are 9 million Google searches alone for sales, deals, and incentives around Black Friday and Year End sales. There’s an opportunity in there somewhere, and here’s what your dealership needs to do to increase its chances of getting it!

Start off by capturing buyers in their online search process. Spikes in Search Demand increase towards the end of the year, so we suggest you optimize your offers, incentives and sales automotive searches for these eager shoppers.

You’ll also want to increase budgets against Ready-to-Buy campaigns. Don’t forget to re-engage shoppers looking for other deals by increasing your bid to win previously-expressed intent. This can be low-hanging fruit, so don’t miss an opportunity to re-market to potential customers who have already spent time on your dealership’s page.

Maximize your messages to make it relevant to the season. For example, instead of just putting “Jeep Cherokee Deals” put “Jeep Cherokee Year End Deals & Offers” or maybe “Ford F-150 Black Friday Deals.” You want to appear when people search “Best Year End SUV sales,” continuing the Jeep example from earlier.

One other important advertising medium is video. As time goes on, it’s getting harder and harder to reach in-market auto shoppers with TV ads, since the average daily time spent watching TV for adults has been decreasing annually. According to Google’s Internal Research, theaverage daily time spent watching live tv has decreased from 4 hours and 32 minutes in 2012 to 3 hours and 32 minutes in 2017.That leaves online video as the next biggest channel, no pun intended. You need to take advantage of YouTube, since it reaches more people in the US on mobile alone than any TV network! In fact, Google’s own research shows that 92.4% of the U.S. population who plan to buy a vehicle in the next 6 months will get on YouTube and look at videos during the process. Check out these stats:

1. 56% could be convinced to buy a vehicle without a test drive with a 360-degree online video
    
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3. 7 out of 10 get purchase-relevant information from online video
    
4. YouTube CPPs are 28% cheaper then TV CPPs
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And don’t forget about YouTube’s TrueView, where you pay only for actual views of your content. And if you remember from our blog about Google’s recent updates, TrueView has two modes: Reach and Action.

• TrueView for Reach allows your dealership to run ads that viewers can skip after 5 seconds. If they skip the ad, and aren’t interested, then you don’t pay. If they continue to view the ad, then you do.
• TrueView for Action is still being fully rolled out to dealers, but Google has integrated clickable banner ads into the video ads, and you can choose to display them in the middle or the end of the video. (Google has promised to roll out embedded forms as an option, but it’s not here yet.)

SEO Wish List

We’ve established that online traffic picks up during the holiday season, especially for car buyers. So how can your dealership start driving some of that organic search traffic back to your website? Here are some quick & easy ways to win SEO during the holidays:

Keep Your Hours Updated: Always make sure to keep your dealership’s hours of operation up to date on GMB, i.e. closing early on Christmas eve, etc. You don’t want to create inconsistency, because that can create a baduser experience.

Link building: Consider making your dealership a drop-off site for a canned food drive, headquarters for a toy drive, or a place for the kiddos to meet Santa. You can use that to get good PR and links from related local sites and organizations.

Video additions:You should think about adding video to your site to attract viewers, as mentioned above. If you do this, make sure you’ve got event tracking added to each video, so you can see how long people are watching, when they’re pausing, etc. This way you can track the metrics and success of the content.

Don’t be dismayed by dips: Despite Black Friday, end-of-year traffic can vary depending on when Christmas and New Year’s fall during the week; so don’t be too worried if you see a slight dip in traffic in Q4. To better optimize for specific queries, use Google trends to see when patterns emerge during the holidays and create some content to target those trends.

Don’t abuse the holiday:Don’t just slap Santa on a graphic thinking you’ll convert more leads due to holiday interest. Sharing something useful like a winter tires special can be more effective than putting jolly old Saint Nick on a banner.

Last week I wrote a post about Google Local Portal in Portland, available on DealerOn’s blog.  If you’ve already read it, you might have seen mention of Google's new service for businesses: Google Offers.  Google Offers appears to be similar to Groupon and other discount offering services -- it allows you, as a small business owner, to get your business "in front of thousands of customers in your area looking for amazing deals on the best places to eat, shop and play."

Google hasn’t given too much detail, but they have setup a group of "Google Offers specialists" to call or email.  They will "ask all the right questions about your business to help create an attractive offer that is best for you".  Then, as with similar services, an offer will be emailed to subscribers in your area.

It's unclear whether or not these Offers will be integrated into regular Google Local search or their integrated search results pages.  I can't imagine that these Offer icons won't begin to show on maps and next to Places search results in the near future, but I can't find an example of that anywhere.  Feel free to add a link in comments if you are able to.

Here are the cities that have Offers, and those that are coming soon:

Also, Google has produced videos aimed both at businesses and consumers.  Links below.

Google Offers for Businesses
Google Offers for Consumers

Want to sign up?  Click this link to have Google contact you to participate in Google Offers BETA.

There has been some discussion on whether or not using these deal sites can be a successful endeavor for auto dealerships.  To me, unless they integrate fully with Google search results, Google Offers is just another Groupon.  Do you think Google Offers will be any different from Groupon and others?

Last week I wrote a post about Google Local Portal in Portland, available on DealerOn’s blog.  If you’ve already read it, you might have seen mention of Google's new service for businesses: Google Offers.  Google Offers appears to be similar to Groupon and other discount offering services -- it allows you, as a small business owner, to get your business "in front of thousands of customers in your area looking for amazing deals on the best places to eat, shop and play."

Google hasn’t given too much detail, but they have setup a group of "Google Offers specialists" to call or email.  They will "ask all the right questions about your business to help create an attractive offer that is best for you".  Then, as with similar services, an offer will be emailed to subscribers in your area.

It's unclear whether or not these Offers will be integrated into regular Google Local search or their integrated search results pages.  I can't imagine that these Offer icons won't begin to show on maps and next to Places search results in the near future, but I can't find an example of that anywhere.  Feel free to add a link in comments if you are able to.

Here are the cities that have Offers, and those that are coming soon:

Also, Google has produced videos aimed both at businesses and consumers.  Links below.

Google Offers for Businesses
Google Offers for Consumers

Want to sign up?  Click this link to have Google contact you to participate in Google Offers BETA.

There has been some discussion on whether or not using these deal sites can be a successful endeavor for auto dealerships.  To me, unless they integrate fully with Google search results, Google Offers is just another Groupon.  Do you think Google Offers will be any different from Groupon and others?