Facebook has been working hard to come up with a reliant, profitable revenue stream for a while now, and part of that effort is their Paid Ad program.  For dealerships that use them well, paid ads on Facebook can be a great addition to your dealership’s online marketing program.  Here are some tips:

Target Well: Users provide so much personal information to Facebook that it is a great way to drill down to find the right people to show your ads to.  Facebook allows you to target by Interest, Family Status, Activities, Workplaces, etc. This allows your dealership to target users more specifically.

Grab Attention: Since most people aren't coming to Facebook to view ads, it's important that they are designed to be noticed.  Try a colored border, a bold, eye-catching design, and always include a call to action - you could even put this call to action in the image, but try to keep it under four words to avoid taking over the entire image.

Vary Ads: Users that see your ads often may start to tune them out, so freshen them up.  Try changing the colors/thickness of the border, changing the image completely, or if you're using text on the image, change the message used.

If your dealership isn't advertising on Facebook, talk to your online marketing provider if you need help getting started.  It can be very effective when done correctly, so take these tips into consideration, and start testing Facebook Paid Ads.

I've written a lot about the importance of having a mobile friendly auto dealership website given the increase in smart phone usage, but when your dealership sends emails, are you also taking mobile into consideration?

A recent study by Knotice, an on-demand marketing software and agency, shows that 36% of emails were opened on a mobile device (tablet & smartphones) during the first quarter of 2012. This is up from 27% in the fourth quarter of 2011.  If this pace continues, half of all consumers could be reading emails on their mobile devices by this time next year.

Just as you need to make sure that your website content is optimized for mobile phones, make sure your emails are compatible for mobile devices too. Provide a plain text option, or at the very least, add text/tags to images and videos so that users will know what they are even if they don't see them. 

Testing is huge here - so send your emails to yourself and others to look at on your mobile devices.  Make sure that you are able to track your email key performance metrics (opens, bounces, reads, clicks, visits, leads, etc) at the device level, so that you can see whether the changes and improvements that you make to your email campaigns are meeting your goals.

Since over a third of emails are already being read on mobile devices, shouldn't you at least make sure they look the way you want them to?

It seems as though Google continues to be more transparent than in the past, which is great for webmasters. At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco last week, I had the chance to take part in a Q&A with the famous Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team.  One of the attendees asked Matt about the Penguin update and what it meant going forward.  I’m paraphrasing Matt here, but he said that webmasters should expect Penguin updates to continue and to be "jarring" for a while.  Matt also specified that links would continue to be a primary factor in determining the ranking of a website.  I think that’s why Google is devoting so much time and resources to Penguin, which is in some respects an audit for the validity of links across the web.

The conversation continued on the Search Engine Roundtable blog post, where Matt clarified his comments about the continued release of the update. "We're still in the early stages of Penguin where the engineers are incorporating new signals and iterating to improve the algorithm. Because of that, expect the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact."  In other words, the Penguin update will continue to evolve and probably have a larger impact on websites as the updates are released.

In a further showing of transparency, Matt Cutts answered a question via Twitter that asked what webmasters could fix in order to avoid being caught off guard by future Penguin updates. Cutt's response? "...certainly links are a primary area to monitor. Been true all this year; expect to continue."

Knowing the focus of Penguin will continue to be on the links to and from your auto dealer website, make sure you talk to your dealer website provider.  Do they have a plan to deal with future updates?  How are they tracking which sites link to your website, and which sites you are linking to? It’s important to take the transparency Google shows and use it to put your site in the best situation possible to weather the future Penguin updates.

So you've created your dealership's Google+ Brand Page in preparation for the move from Google Places to Google Plus Local...but now what?  Here are some tips for optimizing your dealership's Google+ page:

Keep SEO in Mind: When putting information into the "About Us" tab, use relevant keywords. Also use these terms when adding content to your page to help search engines (especially Google) understand what your page is about.  Use "Recommended Links" to send traffic to your dealership's blog and other social media profiles.

Have Content Ready: Google recommends having 10-20 posts on your Google+ business page before you really start promoting it.  Recent posts is one of the things they use to judge the quality of your page, so having it full of content once people start visiting it will help.

Promote Your Page: Add a Google+ button everywhere you promote your other social media accounts. Allow your website visitors to +1 your inventory and dealership from your site.

Incorporate your +1's into AdWords: Google will pull your +1 count into your AdWords campaigns if you link them.  Within your AdWords account, click the Ad Extensions tab. Select "Social Extensions" from the "View" menu, and enter the URL to your Google+ page.  Talk to your dealer website provider or PPC vendor to get more information.

Make sure your dealership's Google+ page is optimized and ready for the combination of Google Places into Google Plus Local.

By now I'm sure you've heard about the new Google Webmaster Tools report that tells your dealership how many pages have indexed on your website over the last year.  Unfortunately the information on its own is a little vague, and can be difficult to fully use when taken on its own.  For example, a big segment of the data revolves around how many website pages are not selected for indexing.  What does that mean?  Google says that:

    “A URL can be not selected for indexing for many reasons including:

• It redirects to another page
• It has a rel=”canonical” to another page
• Our algorithms have detected that its contents are substantially similar to another URL and picked the other URL to represent the content.”

The information in this report can be used in many ways, but a couple that really stand out to me are:

1) When your dealership changes providers, hires an SEO company, or hires a content creation company--you can use the tool to watch how many more pages Google indexes over time

2) When you are writing content (or having content written on your behalf), like on a blog, you can see whether Google is indexing it (which content does get indexed, what doesn't, etc)

I think what is really important for dealerships to understand is that this report gives a lot of relevant, important information, but taken alone, can be overwhelming and misinterpreted.  Discuss this with your dealership’s website provider to help fully understand what it all means.

It's not often that Google announces when they are going to make changes to their algorithm in advance, but they did just that on Tuesday.

The latest update under the Panda name went into effect Tuesday night, Panda 3.9.  Panda was originally released in February 2011 as a way to remove low-quality content from Google's search results.

Google made this announcement via their Twitter account:

"New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. To put this Panda update into perspective here’s some context: goo.gl/huekf”

Your dealership can avoid being penalized by any of the Panda updates by making sure you have high-quality content on your auto dealer website.  This means that the information is relevant, up to date, and provides the info your customers are looking for.

If you are worried about how this update may be affecting your car dealership website, talk to your dealer website provider about their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and what they are doing to keep your site up to date.

Many of the dealers I talk to are extremely concerned about the conversion rate of their dealership website, and rightfully so.  Converting website traffic into leads should be a priority of everyone involved with your site, from your vendor to your Internet Manager to your GM.  One way to affect your conversion rate is by optimizing the contact forms you use to collect leads.

Reduce the Size: Keep the number of form fields to a minimum; only ask for what you absolutely need to follow up. Many people get overwhelmed when faced with providing a lot of personal information just to get some info about a car.

Design the Mobile Version First: Not only will this help ensure you have mobile-friendly forms on your mobile dealership website, but it helps you focus on keeping the form simple.

Reduce Friction: This could be as simple as making it clear which fields are required (even if it's all), using in-line validation to correct errors as they are made, or using ghost text to help users know what format they should use.

Make it as easy as possible for your dealership website visitors to submit a lead by simplifying lead forms.  If you have long, complicated contact forms, talk to your auto dealer website provider to see how you can simplify your forms and raise your conversion rate.

It's official!  Google has finally announced guidelines and recommendations on how to build mobile websites that work best for users and Google.

Google recommends building your mobile site with a responsive design approach.  This means that your mobile site uses the same URL as your main site, and serves the same HTML, but uses CSS to change how the page is shown on the device.  Google says this is best since one URL makes it easier on users and Google doesn't have to crawl multiple pages on different URLs.

Their second-best option?  Device-specific HTML.  This means that the same URL is used, but the mobile version serves different HTML and CSS depending on the device that is detected.

All of this is a little technical, so make sure you talk to your car dealership mobile website provider to see which approach they are taking.  You can read the full release from Google here: Recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites.

If you're doing the SEO for your own auto dealer website, it can be difficult to know where to focus your energy first. Here are the pages you should start optimizing first to get the most bang for your SEO efforts:

Main Navigation Pages: Your home page and those that have direct navigation from your home page (mainly your inventory) should be optimized since they are the ones potential customers are most likely to find.  Also, if people are linking to your site, they are probably linking to your homepage or inventory pages.  Back up these link "votes" by optimizing these pages to help their rank in search engine results.

Your Most Profitable Vehicle Pages: Help potential customers find the vehicles that bring in the most money for your dealership.  Optimizing your more expensive cars and trucks, as well as your service and parts department pages will help interested buyers find these dealership website pages first.

Your Best Performing Pages: Which of your website pages provide your dealership with the most leads, highest time on site, and lowest bounce rate?  Spend some time here to help interested customers find these pages in their search engine results

If you're using a third-party SEO company, or your car dealership website provider is responsible, make sure you ask them which pages they focus the most SEO effort and energy. While each of your dealership website pages need to be optimized for search engines, make sure your SEO provider is paying special attention to the pages that will ultimately help your dealership sell more cars.

Does your car dealership sell have more than one location?  If so, big news from Google Places.  In the past, it was difficult and cumbersome to create and manage more than one Places account.  To help their users, Google Places has created a new Bulk Listing Management Tool.

This new tool allows your dealership to edit one or more listing, search your listings (filtering by specific info or by listing with errors), and upload new listings from a data file or individually.

Google also created this video to help users become verified to bulk uploads.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F3i8w6TT1u8

Once your account is verified, the following video gives more information on how you can use the Google Places Bulk Listing Management Tool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ewLm2-nyRYI

If you don’t manage your Google Places account, check with the person or company (maybe your auto dealer website provider) that does to ensure everything is properly optimized.