Some of DealerOn's car dealer website customers are incorporating QR codes on their sites, though it remains a technology that’s still maturing.  While others in the industry have debated the benefits of using QR codes as a part of your dealership’s marketing strategy, I wanted to share some tips for running a QR Code campaign if your dealership is going to test this technology.

Before you start any marketing campaign, including one using QR codes, it is essential that your dealership lays out your goals.  What are the business or marketing objectives you hope to accomplish with the QR code campaign?  For example, are you looking to increase your email list or increase traffic on your mobile website?  If you don't determine what you're hoping to accomplish, you won't be able to tell whether or not the campaign is successful.

Make sure you test your QR code extensively.  If someone tries to use your code and it doesn't work, it's similar to someone trying to click a broken link on your website.  That user isn't likely to seek out that information elsewhere on your site...they will just move on to the next dealership.  Make sure your codes are big enough, and have enough "clean" space around them.  Test them where they will appear (on a window sticker, for example) to help ensure they can be read in the environment that your customers will be scanning them.

Link the QR codes to a mobile landing page.  I've written about the importance of having mobile dealership websites before, but when you know people have to use their mobile phones to scan QR codes, it doesn't make any sense to send them to a traditional website page.  These are just some basic best practices for QR codes.  Have you used any other standard processes that you’d recommend for QR Code Marketing campaigns?

One of the difficult parts of maintaining a successful social media marketing campaign is attracting the "right" people and getting your customers and prospects to interact with your dealership online.  While this won't solve all of these problems, being able to find your dealership contacts in social media accounts is a start.

There is a pretty simple way to find your dealership contacts in social media sites like Twitter that I found while reading SEOptimise, an SEO blog from England.

First, export your customer list into a CSV file.  Below is an example of how to do this from Constant Contact. Since you'll only need names and email addresses, go ahead and delete all of the other fields.  Also, make sure you delete those with no email address.

Using a Gmail account, import this CSV file.  If you create a separate group for these contacts, they will be easier to manage.

Now, log into your social media accounts (like Twitter) and search for contacts using Gmail.

How does your dealership help ensure you connect with your customers and prospects through your social media accounts?

Until now, Facebook has allowed advertisers on their platform to target users based on age, sex, interests and location (country, state, and city).  In order to drill down even further, Facebook now allows users to target their ads by zip code as well.

When creating your Facebook ad, just add the zip codes that you would like to target.  Unlike Google AdWords, you can't use a radius to target further, so make sure that you are including any zip codes from which your dealership could draw customers.

This is especially helpful for dealerships either in or near large cities. For example, if your dealership is located south of a major city, it may make sense for you to only target those in the southern zip codes of that city.  For dealerships in cities like Los Angeles or New York, targeting your ads by zip code, instead of broadcasting to the entire city, could save a lot of money and help bring in customers more likely to buy.

This refinement will also allow your ad to appear more often.  For example, if before your ad was being shown to everyone between the ages of 25-34 in Washington DC, and you can now limit that to show to those in one or two city zip codes, the average number of times your ad shows during your campaign should increase.  Your ad will be shown more times to a smaller, more targeted group of people.

As a side note, some data firms are noting that there may be discrepancies in the number of users Facebook is showing in each zip code when compared to census data.  According to XA.net CEO Rob Leathern, this issue isn’t exclusive to Facebook and should get more and more accurate as geographic, IP, and user reported data gets sorted and more refined.

Does your dealership use Facebook ads?  If so, are you going to test the ability to target by zip code to increase ROI?

Yesterday, our very own Amir Rezvani, VP of Performance at DealerOn, had the opportunity to lead a webinar with ResponseLogix.  For those that couldn't make the webinar, I wanted to share some of the highlights from his presentation and provide a link to the slides and audio as well.

Amir provided a quick overview of how a dealer can immediately generate more leads, more appointments, and sell more cars without increasing the size of the internet team or increasing their marketing spend.  He also provided his thoughts on what areas of your online marketing to focus on first to generate the highest return on your time and resources.

First, the design of a dealership's website.  The homepage should be clean and relevant.  Since most people read left to right, top to bottom, make sure you have an inventory search box in the top left corner.  Your specials should obvious and readily accessible on your homepage as many shoppers are looking for this information.

Dealers should also consider the length of their contact forms.  If it's not information that your dealership needs to initiate a conversation with that customer, is it necessary?  Also, having incentives on your site has been shown to greatly increase conversion rates, so that is another option.

Amir then focused on how a dealer can get more organic search traffic to their conversion rate-optimized website.  He discussed some free website and SEO tools (due to time, he only got to some of these during the actual presentation) that a dealer can use to diagnose how well their website is performing:

1. Websitegrader.com
2. Rank Check Plug-in (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/)
3. DealerRankChecker.com

He also provided some tactics that a dealer can use to improve their SEO based on the keywords when they have opportunity to do so. 

Amir really put on a great presentation (I know, I’m probably biased), and had a great time interacting with everyone who attended.  If you weren’t able to participate live, I hope you take some time to watch or listen to the video here.  In October Amir will be speaking at Digital Dealer in Las Vegas with Jeff Kershner on how you can Double your Internet Department's Profit in 2012, so please add that to your schedule while there.

Thank you again to ResponseLogix and everyone who was able to join Amir on the webinar.

I've been seeing the Google +1 button appearing on more and more websites since it was released a few months ago.  Recently, I've even seen it as an option for paid search ads.

If I perform a search while signed into my Google account, the +1 button appears as a part of the actual PPC ad.

This seems to be the exact same thing as giving users the ability to "Like" an ad in Facebook.  However, Facebook is built around the idea of social sharing.  You would "Like" an ad because of the brand or product it represents, knowing that your friends will see that you are a fan.  It seems like a shortcut of sorts for Facebook users wanting to share that they “like” something without having to leave the page they are on and track down the actual business page.

I’m not sure if many people use Google's search engine in the same way.  Personally, I use it to find information, not to recommend a company/brand/product to my social circle.  If I were to click the +1 next to a PPC ad, my Google contacts would see that notation if they performed a similar search while also signed in.  Also, Google will show the +1 when the clickthrough URL for the ad matches a website that one of your friends has “+1”’ed. 

Google makes it clear that the +1 button does have an impact on your organic rankings, regardless of whether they come from a PPC ad or your organic listing.  As long as the URL of your PPC ad matches the URL of the organic listing, +1’s will show on both results.  The company also notes that while +1’s will affect your organic search ranking, they will not change Quality Score or ad ranking.  However, the most important component of Quality Score is Click-Through Rate (CTR) and I suspect that the primary reason that Google is testing this functionality in PPC ads is that they believe (as I do) that when a user sees a +1 from a trusted source, they will be more likely to click on the ad—increasing CTR, Quality Score, and Google’s ad revenue.

What do you think?  Is Google trying to make +1 just like the Facebook Like button, or is there real value/usage for people clicking the +1 button on a PPC ad?

There are many reasons why your search engine rankings can drop, and unfortunately, many times car dealers are at the mercy of Google and the other search engines.  Google is earnest in their mission to provide the most relevant content to  their customers, so they provide tips and suggestions for how content providers can rank highly for their relevant terms.  Below are some things that could cause your car dealership website to be penalized or ranked lower by Google.  One incredibly valuable resource to keep tabs on your site’s Google performance and any Google-related website problems is Google’s Webmaster Tools. 

Paid Links: While you can sometimes get away with buying back links to your site, it's generally frowned upon.  Buying in bulk and paying for a link from a website with a high Page Rank will make you more likely to get caught and penalized by Google. 

Back Links: While back links are a big part of SEO, they can also lead to penalties.  For example, having multiple links on your site in the wrong language, hiding links, and adding a large amount of back links to your site in a short period of time will all alert Google that perhaps these aren't legitimate links.

Content: Google's Panda update to their algorithm put additional focus on having quality, relevant content on your website.  This should be the goal of every site looking to achieve a high ranking.  Things like having low quality content, content pulled from other sites (duplicate content) and content that can't be easily read by humans can lead to Google ranking penalties.  I have seen some of our customers’ competitors apparently get either temporarily black-listed or harshly penalized for having text hidden in an expandable text box.

Website Issues: If you block search engines robots from reading your site, you won't get ranked.  Also, if many pages on your site have duplicate page titles and descriptions (for instance if each vehicle in your inventory doesn’t have its own unique page with unique title tag, URL, description, and content) Google won’t be able to rank each one individually.  Best practices are to have a dynamic XML Sitemap that reflects the content on your site.  Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to check that Google is downloading your Sitemap without issue.

Google seems to be everywhere lately, especially with their introduction of +1 and Google Plus.  Many people have so many different aspects of their life integrated into the search engine (email, social network, search engine, calendar, document management, etc) that sometimes it is hard to remember how we ever got along without it.

Most estimates put Google's search market share between 65% and 70%, but I have seen estimates as high as 80-90%, which is closer to where it is in other countries.  Knowing the market share of different search engines can be helpful when planning your marketing strategies.  For example, with the recent changes Google has made to their review pages, knowing the percentage of market share Google has could help your dealership decide how to adjust your review strategy.   Based on the data I’ve seen, there is Google, and then everyone else is perhaps 20-25% of the market.  Therefore, any search engine marketing strategy has to revolve around Google to make it worth your while.

Judging by your sites’ search engine traffic data (Google vs. Yahoo vs. Bing vs. others), what would your estimate be of Google’s search market share?  How have you used the amount of market share Google has to determine your dealership’s marketing plans?

One of the SEO sites that I frequently read (www.searchengineland.com) has a VERY interesting post by a  reader, LebSEO Design's Wissam Dandan.  He has found examples of Google Adwords ads appearing at the bottom of the page for some searches.

No one on our search team at DealerOn has come across these examples yet, and  judging by the information I've seen on other SEO industry blogs, it’s a fairly limited test, since not many searchers are.

This could have interesting implications to PPC buys if Google decides to keep this test as a permanent feature.  I haven’t seen anything about how Google would report on the placement for ads that run at the bottom of a results page. 

This could be a positive for dealers using PPC as a marketing strategy. If your ads were previously being pushed to page 2, they may now be on the bottom of page 1. 

I wonder how Google will incorporate these ad positions into their “Position Preference” targeting.    It is entirely possible that ads would be more effective on a Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) basis when they’re at the bottom of the page.  Potentially you could target your campaigns to reach users that had scrolled through the organic results to the bottom of the page, most likely not finding what they were looking for.  This could be very interesting and a huge campaign management changer for PPC providers.

What are your thoughts on how this might impact your Google Adwords campaigns?

It is almost hard to comprehend how fast mobile Internet usage is growing.  According to Google, more smartphones were sold last year than PCs.  It's predicted that 50% of Americans will have a smartphone by the end of the year and that there will be 10 billion mobile Internet devices in 2012, up from the 2 billion that are activated today.  A child is more likely to own a cell phone than a book!

How is that going to impact the car buying experience and your online strategy?  With 51% of mobile car shoppers using search engines to research their next vehicle purchase, it's extremely important that your dealership has a well-optimized mobile site and a well thought-out mobile marketing strategy.  One tactic your dealership may want to consider is using Google Mobile Ads to target mobile web users with pay per click (PPC) ads.

In addition to the regular PPC ads that you’re running (which can be viewed by mobile users on full-browser devices), you can use the Google Mobile Ads to target mobile phone customers who don’t have full-browsers on their smartphones.  Google has reported that advertisers using a mobile-only AdWords campaign, designed to target mobile customers who don’t have full-browser devices, can increase click-through rates by 11.5%. 

Mobile Ads also allow you to have a separate keyword list than your normal AdWords campaigns, so you can tailor your keyword lists to the shorter keywords this type of mobile web searchers tend to use.  Remember that if you’re going to run mobile ads on Google, you have to use a mobile website landing page—it’s not just a best practice, it’s a requirement.

Has anyone adopted any mobile strategies that they’ve found to be particularly effective or any that have proven not to be?

The process of maximizing the amount of traffic and leads that your website generates from Google can be daunting.  Here are some basic things that our SEO team at DealerOn recommends focusing on if you are either changing website providers, contracting with a SEO or PPC vendor, or simply taking the pulse of the performance of your site and marketing efforts.

Determine Which Keywords You Should be Targeting – Working with your vendors, develop a list of which keywords your dealership is targeting and which ones you should be targeting.  Make sure to analyze your web analytics so that you don’t miss any important keywords that are already generating traffic and leads.  Also, use available free resources (see my post on Free Online Tools for dealers) that can provide further keyword discovery (including Google’s Keyword Tool, Spyfu, Compete.com).

Determine Your Baseline – After you have your keyword lists, you should develop a historical baseline for your list.  For each important keyword, track traffic volumes and website lead volumes.  Ideally, you should also run a dealership SEO report card every quarter or so.  If you’re going to hire a company to drive traffic to your website, either via SEO or PPC, you should know your starting point so you can measure the value that your vendor is providing in incremental traffic and leads.

Use Website Analytics - Search engine rankings are worthless if they don’t translate into traffic, so make sure you know which keywords are actually driving traffic to your site.  Compare this list with your targeted keywords to see how effective/worthwhile your efforts are and have been.  For example, if you're ranked #1 for a keyword but that keyword isn't driving any traffic to your site, it's time to rethink your strategy.

Check PPC Landing Pages and Micro-Sites - Even though you may not think of these sites as part of your SEO strategy, they should be.  While maintaining a focus on conversion, make sure any content and the structure of the page is done with SEO in mind, even if the primary reason you’ve created the content is not organic search.

Meet with Vendors – You may have several parties (website provider, PPC provider, SEO vendor, digital agency, etc) involved with your search engine strategies.  You should have periodic reviews with all of them (even have group meetings together) about how you can continue to improve and evolve your search marketing efforts.  Doing your research beforehand allows you to work with, and push, your vendors to get the most value possible for your dealership.

What other tips do you have for someone that wants to take a fresh look at the SEO efforts on their car dealership website?  Where did you start on your site?