Your dealership customers aren't just using their mobile devices to find your car dealer website, they are also using them to read the emails you send.  A recent report from the marketing agency Knotice found that more than 27 percent of emails were opened on a mobile device during the second half of 2011.  This is a 36 percent gain from the end of 2010.

Not only does your dealership need to have a mobile website and marketing strategy in place, but you also need to make sure your emails can be read on mobile devices.  iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) make up over 22 percent of mobile email opens, compared to less than 5 percent for Android devices.  For this reason, make sure your dealership emails use a minimal amount of Flash, if any.  Also, if you are sending pictures or video, make sure they have alt text or tags that explain what the images are showing.

The study counted an email "opened" if images were downloaded, so keep in mind that these numbers may be lower than reality, since some devices don't download images by default.

Can your dealership afford to miss out on a quarter of your emails not being seen the way they were intended? Test the emails you are sending on a mobile device to make sure your message is getting across.

Google recently released an eBook (or playbook, as they call it): "The Mobile Playbook: The Busy Executive's Guide to Winning with Mobile".  For any dealership interested in mobile websites, mobile paid search, and how to expand your brand with mobile technology, this guide is extremely concise and helpful, answering the "5 crucial mobile questions that every business executive should be asking today".

Their playbook is broken up into the following sections:

• How does mobile change our value proposition?
• How does mobile impact our digital destinations?
• Is our organization adapting to mobile?
• How should our marketing adapt to mobile?
• How can we connect with our tablet audience?

What's great about this playbook is that it provides actual examples of companies that are succeeding at the various points they discuss, like mobile apps, an optimized mobile site, and determining what mobile users are looking for.  Also, Google lays out some action items your dealership can start working on right away, as well as some bigger picture questions designed to get your dealership thinking about mobile in general.

Considering that mobile continues to grow and shows no sign of slowing down (95% of smartphone users have searched for local info), I highly suggest every dealership take a look at this playbook and get a mobile strategy in place.  If you don't, ask your auto dealer mobile website provider to help guide you through the process.

I recently found a great article that discusses very specific things businesses should be doing to help their Google Places Listing improve its ranking.  Bizible, a start-up that makes local marketing software for businesses, conducted a pretty scientific attempt to determine how best to improve the rank of your Google Places Listing.

It is also interesting because his is the first time I've seen a distinction between Google Places Listings for integrated search results and Google Places Listings for non-integrated search results (searches occurring directly in Google Places).

Top Factors to Improve Ranking for Pages in Integrated Results

1. Have the category of your places page match a broader category than the search.  For example, if your dealership places page is Automotive, that is a broader category than a specific make which someone may search for.

2. Have the search category appear in the name of your business.  This is great for dealerships that have the city name and make in your dealer name.

3. Make sure your search category appears in the "at a glance" section.

Top Factors to Improve Ranking for Pages Not In Integrated Results

1. Have 5 or more Google reviews.

2. Have the location in the "at a glance" section

3. Have the category term in the Google review content.  Make sure your dealership business category is in the reviews left by your customers.

4. Put the category term in the business description.

5. Make sure your category term appears in the "at a glance" section.

A recent study by Marin, "State of Mobile Search Advertising in the US", shows that the percent of paid-search clicks from mobile devices is growing faster than expected, and if the trend continues, is expected to account for 25% of all paid-search clicks by Google by the end of the year.  This includes not only mobile phones but also tablet computers.

This is just another reason why your dealership needs to include Mobile Ads as a part of your PPC campaigns.  These ads can run in conjunction with your traditional PPC ads, but the copy, images, and even landing pages (which are a requirement) are designed and targeted towards users seeing your ads on mobile devices.  According to Google, customers that utilize mobile-only PPC ads can increase click-through rates by 11.5%.

While the percentage of mobile clicks continues to increase, the conversion rate is not as high as desktop PPC traffic.  However, the study focuses on traditional “conversion” and “leads” – online form submissions or online purchases.  Mobile searchers are on the go, so it's likely that the traditional conversions are not relevant for these consumers.  Instead of submitting a lead online, they are calling the business, or coming into the dealership or store.  In fact, brick-and-mortar stores that have ecommerce websites (so that they can conduct actual click-to-sale transactions online from their paid search advertising) receive $6 worth of OFFLINE, IN-STORE sales from their paid search spending for every $1 they receive in click-to-sale revenue online.  I can only imagine that this ratio would be higher than 600% when mobile PPC ads are taken into consideration.

Mobile usage, search, and pay-per-click are continuing to grow at extremely high rates.  Make sure your dealership’s online marketing campaigns are prepared and that your auto dealer website customers can find your dealership when and how they choose to do so.

While not every dealership is actively involved with social media, it's a form of connecting with potential customers that doesn't seem to be going away.  If your dealership is participating in social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc), try to avoid making these common mistakes.

Replacing Your Dealership Website with Social Media Profiles: Maintain both for optimal results.  When you put your energy and assets into another platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc), it becomes their intellectual property.  If they were to shut down, your dealership would be left without a web presence.  Make sure you maintain your auto dealer website as well as social media sites.

Expecting Instant Success: As with most (not all) forms of marketing, you won't see results overnight.  Social media marketing takes time to build relationships and grow your network.  Set goals and benchmarks to help measure success, but keep in mind that you may not hit them instantly.

Not Targeting Properly: Reaching out to people that aren't in your market area will most likely be a waste of time and effort.  Make sure the people you are targeting can be reasonably expected to do business with your dealership (avoid spam-bots and buying "Friends" from Bangladesh).

Too Much Marketing: People use social media to connect, whether that be with your business or with their friends. Make sure your profile has all of the relevant information, and that when you post specials and inventory, it is done with an informational spin, and not overly “salesy”.  Use your social media profiles as a way to add a human touch to your dealership, and to provide ways for potential customers to reach your store.  Too much marketing and they’ll be driven away.

Having a dealership YouTube channel is important for many reasons (as I touched on last year), but once your dealership has a channel, what do you do next?  Here are some tips and best practices to help your dealership’s YouTube channel get better search engine visibility:

Upload Regularly: Just like a blog, YouTube channels that are updated regularly will rank better than those that never are.  For this reason, if you have a lot of videos on your site or in your marketing collateral, upload a few per day to YouTube.

Encourage Interaction: If your videos have a voiceover or text, consider adding a call to action asking viewers to leave a comment, subscribe to your dealership’s channel, or like the video.  Interaction on your videos can help increase the likelihood they get ranked well.

Optimize Titles: The titles and tags on your videos should be treated like you do those on your car dealership website.  Tags help form the Related Videos shown, so keep that in mind when adding the 5-10 tags that give your video context.  Video titles should use keywords, but only when relevant.  Use it to describe your video.

These tips will help your dealership’s YouTube channel do better on the video portal’s internal search engine, as well as in Google’s blended search.

Most times, Google will make changes to their algorithm that either largely go unnoticed (meaning they only affect niche sites) or unannounced (your site will see SERP changes but won't necessarily know why).  On Tuesday, Google announced 40 changes to search quality they have made over the past month or so.

While many of these changes are pretty high level, some websites are taking a hit on their search engine results.

Some of the algorithm changes that could be affecting these sites down on the SERP are:

Improvements to Freshness - Google added "new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly."  I first wrote about this in November, but this update indicates it is a continued focus for the search engine.

Improved Local Results - A new system allows them to better "detect when both queries and documents are local to the user."

Panda Update - "This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web."

If you're seeing a change in how your auto dealer website is ranking in Google's search results, ask your car dealership website provider about the changes Google has recently made.  It's very possible that this latest round of changes could be affecting your site.

Title tags should be a part of the SEO strategy of every car dealership website.  Why?  Its contents not only provide the text for the blue-links shown on search engine result pages (meaning users use them to help decide whether or not to click onto your dealership’s site), but also tell search engines what each unique web page contains.

Many auto dealers leave this important SEO aspect up to their dealership website providers.  For those that choose to take a more proactive approach, here are some things you should consider:

Create an Accurate Description of the Page: The title tag for the page should reflect the text content that actually exists on the page, both for human and search engine purposes.  Besides, why would you want anyone landing on your vehicle details page if they weren’t interested in the vehicle merchandised in that content?  For a dealership, most pages should contain information about your dealership, your inventory, and the locations that you serve.

Use Brief, but Descriptive Titles: Google only shows the first 70 characters of your title tag, including spaces, in its results.  Search engines tend to give less value to the content in title tags the further away from the start of the tag the content.  70 characters isn’t a maximum length for the title tag, but know that, for SEO purposes, you may not see the same results, and there are decreasing returns for more keywords.

Avoid Filler Words: Why waste your limited title tag space with words like “the”, “and”, “but” or “or”?  Make sure your title tag still flows and makes sense, but remember that these filler words don’t add any SEO value, so use them sparingly.

Keep Them Unique: Each page on your site has unique content (or at least it should), so each page should have its own unique title tag.

It Needs To Make Sense: Title tags are a mix of SEO and describing the content on the page.  That means that keyword stuffing should absolutely not be done.  Both website visitors and search engine users will see this content, so make sure it accurately describes the content.

Title tags can be a great tool in your SEO campaign, when used properly.  Check with your website provider to make sure your dealership site is getting the full advantage of properly optimized title tags.

Google+ has been promoted lately by many in the SEO industry as a "must-do" for local businesses to help their search engine optimization efforts.  While an important tool for SEO moving forward, there are other areas your dealership can utilize to keep your search engine optimization on the cutting edge.

Here are a couple of additional things your car dealership should be keeping an eye on to keep your SEO efforts top-notch as the search landscape continues to change:

Monitor Your Best Referral Sites: Check your Google Analytics for the third party sites that are sending quality traffic to your site.  This means it is traffic that converts into leads, and eventually sales.  It could be local sites, social media portals, or even your third party lead providers.  Keep track of this information and nurture those sites (and your relationship with them).

Generate Quality Content: Good content is good content, regardless of which platform you put it on.  That means it's important to make the content your dealership produces "shareable" to other platforms.  One way this can be done is to make sure you have social media sharing buttons on your blog.  Also, create content with your SEO keywords in mind in case they do get shared and spread through the Internet.

Mobile Technology:  Mobile is big and getting bigger!  Its roughly 20% of a typical dealer’s traffic right now, and growing every month!  Find out what your consumers want by taking every opportunity to survey them -- ask for suggestions in your newsletters, converse with them via social media, and track the existing mobile traffic to your site through analytics.  Right now is the time to ensure your mobile site is properly search optimized so your dealership doesn't get left behind in the future.

Google+ is just one of many SEO extras your dealership should be focusing on moving forward.  Once your car dealer website is properly optimized, make sure your dealership or SEO provider is engaging search engines through as many mediums as possible.

While some dealerships are successful with their email marketing campaigns, it is a task that can easily fall to the back burner or be neglected.  When done correctly, email marketing is an effective way to stay in touch with existing customers, and build a relationship with potential car buyers. 

If your dealership has let your email marketing efforts go in recent years, here are some tips to refresh your campaigns and help keep them successful:

Add a Human Element: Make sure you email sounds as though an actual person wrote it.  Email users get so many automated messages as it is; put a personal touch and tone in yours to connect with your past, current, and future customers.

Send Often, but Relevant: If your dealership has relevant, quality information you want to get out to your customers, send it!  Worry less about frequency, and more about quality.

Design Matters: When was the last time you took a look at the design of your outgoing email marketing?  Is it branded well?  Pleasing to look at?  Devote some resources to making sure your email template matches your other branding for a consistent message, and that it looks good.

Essentially, put some effort in, and it will show.  Make your emails worthwhile to read, sound as though they were actually written by a person, and are pleasing to the eye.   If you’re going to use email marketing, integrate it into your car dealer online marketing plan. Remember, the goal of email marketing is to establish, develop, or maintain relationships, so send emails (and give it the time and effort) that reflect that goal.