Google recently announced a new update to their search engine algorithm that puts a greater emphasis on recently published, fresh content. "This change...promotes fresher results...so that we provide users the most relevant answers to their queries," according to a Google spokesperson.

Regularly updated content has always been a positive ranking factor in SEO, but this announcement from Google makes it that much more important.

So how can your dealership use this change to help your dealer site rank better?

Individual Inventory Pages: Your inventory changes often, so why not use that to your advantage.  Having an inventory page for each vehicle not only gives your dealership more pages for Google to rank, but having new pages with relevant content will help your entire site rank higher.

Blog: Blogs have always been great for SEO purposes because of their optimized content and regular updates.  This update to Google's algorithm just makes them that much more important.  Make sure your auto dealer website has a blog within the dealership domain.  Update it regularly with posts about dealership news, the cars you sell, and driving tips in general.

Create Custom Pages: Ideally your dealership’s website provider has a flexible enough platform that you can create as many pages that specifically target your geographic markets, your inventory, and the relevant offers available from your manufacturer.  When you create custom pages, you want to be able to customize the title tags, the URL of the page, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and actual verbiage on the page.  Your goal should be to make sure that the words and phrases relevant to one of your target customers (like 2012 Nissan Leaf sale) are reflected throughout each of these areas of the page.  If you’re not sure exactly how to do this, reach out to the company that provides your dealership website, and have them help you.  If you’re not able to get help there, you can reach out to our team at DealerOn—we’re always interested in helping dealers improve their online presence.

Keeping your dealership website up to date will help ensure your dealer customers find the information they are looking for, as well as help your site rank well in Google's search engine results pages.

Rockville, MD--DealerOn, the premier auto dealer website provider, announces that two of their auto dealership customers have been awarded Dataium Website Performance Awards for October 2011.  Dataium uses various performance metrics collected from participating dealership websites to recognize auto dealerships and their website providers for their online performance.  Volkswagen of Lithia Springs was awarded the Auto Shopper Intensity (ASI) Award and Joe Cecconi’s Chrysler Complex received the Best Performance: Leads per Auto Shopper Award.

The ASI Award is Dataium’s proprietary index used to measure auto shopper engagement, enthusiasm, and intensity by tracking the lead to visitor, returning visitors, visitor to auto shopper conversion, and search to visitor ratios.  Volkswagen of Lithia Springs was given this award for October, showing that they were ranked within the top five in each of the measured categories.

Joe Cecconi’s Chrysler Complex was awarded the Best Performance: Leads per Auto Shopper.  This is given to the auto dealership website that has the highest percentage of leads submitted on their site per auto shopper.  This shows that their dealer website is able to convert those that visit their site into actual leads.

DealerOn, Inc., a leading online marketing company serving the retail automotive industry, provides online marketing solutions to auto dealer customers including car dealer websites, SEO, social media and online reputation management (including managed blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and press releases), paid search, and lead nurturing tools.

In addition to providing online marketing for auto dealers, DealerOn has pioneered the analytics-based marketing approach in the retail auto industry with their DealerOn Digital Marketing Dashboard. The Digital Dashboard helps to document the precise impact of their services for every new customer. Since creating this process in 2009, DealerOn has documented an average increase of over 200% in lead volume for their auto dealer clients.

By providing common, independent web metrics for all websites, Dataium is the first company to collect, translate, research, analyze, and report on shopper behavior across multiple automotive website platforms.  Dataium provides critical business intelligence and insight for their customers through the aggregation and analysis of consumer activity from across the Internet.

Google, in an effort to help small business ensure they have an effective mobile website, has launched "GoMo".  This website (http://www.howtogomo.com) lets users learn about why having a quality mobile site is important, test how your site looks in its mobile version, and find resources to help if your mobile site isn't quite up to par.

I really like the option to see how your current site looks in mobile.  From the homepage, click "See How Your Current Site Looks in Mobile", then "Test Your Site".  Enter the URL of your dealership website to see how mobile users will see it.  After answering a couple of questions about what you see, you'll get a report card of sorts that focuses on four potential mobile website hangups: Loading Speed, Images, Text, and Navigation.

The DealerOn auto dealer website I tested scored a 4 out of 4.  According to the site, the site I tested showed:

Loading Speed:  0.404 seconds.  The recommended loading time is 5 seconds.

Images: Images appeared properly

Text: Text is visible without pinching or zooming on the phone screen

Navigation: All links and buttons are thumb friendly

Check your dealership website to see how well it scores.  If you're not getting a Pass in each category, you need to talk to your mobile website provider to find out what can be done.

For the most part, search engine optimization (SEO) is a recognized necessity of running a successful auto dealer website.  Not just in the auto industry, but there are still some hold-outs that think building websites and content to be found by search engines is a little spammy.

According to Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam fighting team, his company does not consider SEO to be spam.  "We don't consider SEO to be spam," and SEO is a "valid way to help people find what they're looking for via search engines".  While he does denounce black hat SEO tactics, Cutts emphasizes that Google's goal is to return the best possible search results they can, and sites with quality SEO help them achieve that goal.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that SEO is spammy, direct them to this video, and then hopefully to your search engine optimized auto dealership website at the top of Google page 1.

The amount of "best practices" and "tips" involved with social media marketing can be overwhelming to say the least (and yes, I'm guilty of sharing my own).  In the spirit of KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid), here is a short list of Must-Do's for dealerships using social media as a part of their online marketing efforts:

Have a Plan: Before starting any marketing campaign, your dealership should have a plan.  When it comes to social media, make sure you consider (and answer) things like:

• What is your goal?
• Why are we investing time and resources into this particular social media site?
• Who are we trying to reach with this campaign?

Optimize: As with your auto dealer website, your social media efforts should have search engine optimization as a focus.  This not only means the content you post, but also your profiles.  Use keywords that your customers are using to search for your dealership online in your summary, backlink to your website with keywords, and make sure your contact information is accurate across all platforms.

Measure Everything You Can: At the very least, use Google Analytics to measure your efforts.  Your dealership should investigate the free and paid tools that are out there as well.  Some things you should be keeping track of:

• Engagement-How many people are interacting or sharing your content
• Conversions-You'll have to determine what this mean for your dealership; for example, is it clicks, shares, or comments?  Once you've established that, you can measure it.

Having videos on your auto dealer website has been shown to increase website leads, and when done with video search engine optimization (VSEO), helping your site climb the search engine result pages.  If your dealership has videos on your website, you should have those videos uploaded to your own dealership YouTube channel.

Here's why:

Popularity: YouTube is the world's largest video search engine (and the second largest search engine) and growing every single day.  People all over the world use it to find videos, so if someone searches for a vehicle that your dealership sells, don't you want a video from your dealership to show up?

Timing: Like most search engines, YouTube tends to give older entries a little extra edge when returning search results.  The sooner you create your channel and upload videos, the better.

Cost: YouTube is free.  Aside from the time cost of uploading (though it's possible your auto dealer website or video provider will do this for you), YouTube has no financial cost.  This means you get all of this exposure without an additional marketing cost.

Blended Search: Google, Bing and Yahoo are integrating mixed media (images, news, videos, etc) into their search engine result pages, so having your VSEO dealership videos on a separate domain can provide an additional link on Google’s results page for any search relevant to your dealership brand or your inventory.

While many dealers see press releases as a marketing strategy for larger companies, it can be (and is) a valuable and worthwhile strategy for auto dealerships as well.  It’s a great way to get news about your company out both locally and nationally.  Press releases can make their way into both local and national news sources, helping your dealership brand itself within the community, as well as show up more often and higher on the search engine result pages.

Here are some ways your dealership can get the most out of each press release you create:

Put in on your dealership website.  If you have a blog, this is a great place to add dealership news in the form of a press release.

Link back to your auto dealer website when fitting.  Some press release sites use no-follow or don’t allow links, but most local new sites and your own site should definitely use keyword-optimized anchor text to link back to your website.

Don’t assume local news websites will pick up the press release on their own–send it to them.  Make sure that you’re only sending press releases about newsworthy items, though, or your contacts will learn to quickly dismiss your future press releases.  Also, put links on your social media sites.

Press releases can be a great tool for search engine optimization when done properly.  Does anyone use press releases as a tool in their dealership to get out news or add to your search engine results?

It is so frustrating when trying to send a legitimate, valuable email to a customer (future or current), and have it be blocked by a spam filter.  While there are some auto dealers that do send emails that might be properly classified as spam, most dealers who have spam issues are sending real emails to real customers.  Their email campaigns are being inappropriately blocked by various spam filters.

Here are some tips to avoid the dreaded spam filter in your customer's email inbox:

Avoid Sending Spam-Like Emails (Obviously):  Using words like "Free" multiple times, having large images or tons of links are more likely to make your email be stopped by a spam filter.  Also, watch the ratio of text to images.  For example, try linking to your inventory instead of pasting images in the actual email.

Ask Customers to Add You to Address Book: When customers add you to their address book, your emails will get delivered to their inbox.  Add a line to your email signature or above your opt-out message that asks people to help ensure they get your emails by adding your email address to their address book.  This little step will go a long way.

Follow CAN-SPAM Guidelines: Following CAN-SPAM (which by law you should be doing anyway) will greatly reduce the chances your email gets flagged as spam.  This includes having an opt-out (that is honored), listing your physical location, and using an accurate subject line.  You can find more information on the FTC website.

The verdict on Google+ for personal use still seems to be out for many (myself included).  But according to Christian Oestlien, group product manager for social advertising at Google has said that they are “close to unveiling Google+ business profiles”.

Only Ford and GM have official profiles right now (interesting that they are both automotive brands).  Some businesses have created profiles, even though most sit blank; just so you know, there isn’t a limit to how many times a name can be used, so no need to claim your dealership’s name ahead of time.  I see this being a problem in the future.  Google+ will need a way to verify business accounts, much like Twitter and Google Places have, or I think they will lose out on some trust.

Will your dealership take another look at using Google+ once businesses are allowed?  What if Google+ ends up integrating with Google Places?

For those that use Google AdWords for your auto dealer website, this is big news.  After some testing in foreign markets, Google has announced that they are changing the algorithm used to determine the Quality Score of PPC ads to give landing page quality more weight.

According to Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team, Google wants their advertisers to focus on relevance and “choose a landing page…that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users.”

This algorithm change will “result in better quality experience for the users” and those ads with a high quality, relevant landing page will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction.

Now more than ever, your dealership can’t afford to ignore where you’re sending your PPC traffic.  Having a webpage that uses relevant keywords and gives users the content and experience that they are expecting from clicking on your ad will reduce the cost per click your dealership is paying.

Do you know where you’re sending your PPC traffic?