In an era where cybersecurity threats loom larger than ever, protecting your dealership is not just about safeguarding data—it's about securing your future. "Securing Your Dealership’s Future: The Comply.Law Cybersecurity & Compliance Guide" is your comprehensive webinar that delves deep into the cybersecurity and compliance challenges faced by the automotive retail industry today.

Join Bart Wilson and industry experts as they uncover the latest cybersecurity strategies, compliance protocols, and best practices designed to shield your dealership from cyber threats and regulatory fines. From understanding the landscape of cybersecurity in automotive retail to implementing a culture of compliance within your team, this guide is tailored to navigate the complexities of today's digital threats.



We sat down. with Greg Gifford from SearchLab Digital and discussed the current state of search. We talk about AI's Revolutionary Role in SEO: and xplore how AI innovations, particularly Google's SGE, are reshaping SEO approaches for automotive websites. We also discuss mastering SEO adaptations and Greg shares strategic insights for dealerships aiming to excel in SEO amidst the AI evolution. Our conversation turned to the need for dealers to elevate their content quality and answering customer questions.

How is Google’s generative AI progressing?

So the big thing with Google AI. There was a public beta test for SGE, which stands for Search Generative Experience, and this was out in the fall and everybody freaked out because there's all kinds of companies out there saying this is going to remove 60% of traffic and people are already out there at SEO conferences talking about how you optimize for SGE, which is complete fearmongering and B.S.

If you studied SGI pretty in-depth while it was out, it changed every day. It was literally a public experiment for Google. Google released SGE because Bing released the ChatGPT powered being search results and Google didn't want to lose market share, so it tried the same thing. What you have to realize though, Google is going to be very cautious and kind of avoid doing SGI as long as it can because anything Google does to screw with the search results screws with Google's revenue. If Google starts serving up SGE, there's not really a lot of space for ads and ad revenue drops precipitously very quickly. So personally, I don't have the tinfoil hat on that everyone else has about AI and search. I think it's still a bit further away. 

The thing that will matter for dealers, though, is finally, hopefully people will be forced to create better content on their website because for so long we've had horrible content on dealership websites from SEO vendors who are churning out horrible content just for the sake of churning out content. I think this could potentially force people to finally have content that's helpful to customers instead of content that targets Google.

Automotive may not be affected as much by generative AI.

The other thing is how do we really know it's 50 or 60%? Those are the big numbers that get thrown around. But how do people really know that? Because there's no way to test this in the real world and know that this is the amount of traffic that goes away. 

Plus, I think we're a little bit isolated in automotive. People tend to do a lot more research before buying a car than before buying other things because cars are one of the most expensive purchases you're going to make in your life. You do a lot of research. You look at a lot of photos, you're looking at reviews, you're looking at the dealership site. 

The sites that are more likely to be hit by any sort of a release with AI type search results are the sites that are just providing a quick answer to a question where, sure, everyone's going to say, I want somebody to come to my website to get that answer. But as a customer, as a user of a search engine, do you really need to go to a website to get an answer like what does the MPG of the Ridgeline truck? No, you don't need to go to Google for that. Or what's the towing capacity of the 2024 F-150? You don't need to go to a website for that.

That means all those really crappy blog posts go away from all those crappy SEO providers that are writing blog posts on what the towing capacity of the 2024 F-150 is, and they write 300 words of B.S. when all you need to know is the couple a word answer of what that is. Websites that exist to give simple answers like that, I think those are going to go the way of the dinosaur.

I think dealership websites are still here for a long time, at least in the foreseeable future, because people need to go somewhere to get that research, and you can't go to Google and ask, (I'm in Dallas and I always use Ford as an example) you can't be in Dallas and say, I want to buy an F-150 and it tells you where to go because there's 20 dealerships in town that are all within driving distance. There's still a need there in a lot of cases to go to a website and get a more in-depth answer than a single few word answer. So I feel like we'll be a little bit isolated from that. But I mean, nobody really knows what's going to happen with this AI stuff, so who knows?

How important is solid content in SEO today?

If AI is writing content based off of crappy content that's been written in the past, it's going to be crappy content. Obviously AI is going to get really smart really fast and we could go down a whole rabbit hole talking about future predictions there.

But for now, AI can't just write content that's passable for most websites. You're going to have to have some sort of human editing in there to fix it before it's ready for public consumption. But at some point that's coming and AI is going to be able to write passable content for a lot of stuff. 

But it's not going to be able to come up with the content strategy. It's not going to be able to figure out the right things. Eventually, sure. I mean, we're probably 20 to 50 years away from nobody needs to work anymore because AI and robots are going to do everything for us, but we're not talking about 20 years away. We're not going to right now. And right now, especially with the core update. The March core update that Google is rolling out right now revolves around the quality of content and how that content answers questions. It's definitely a play by Google to combat some of the really crappy AI content. A lot of crappy content has been thrown up over the last six months to a year. But Google's really trying to move in a direction to reward that content that really answers the questions your potential customers have. I think that's where a lot of dealers miss out because they're not reading the content that's on their site. They're hiring an SEO vendor to just create content, or they're writing their own crappy content based on what they see on the competition sites, and they're not thinking about writing content that's answering the questions that their customers are going to have and providing helpful experiences to their potential customers. You know, look at all the pop ups that everybody has. 

Everybody's like, let's put on all these pop ups. I was talking to a dealership last week that when you hit the home page of the website, you had to click four times to get rid of all the chat pop ups and other pop ups on the screen before you could even read anything. And I'm like, Guys, are you even thinking about this? What would you do if you were a customer and you land on the website? They're like, we closed them all. We wouldn't even read them. And I'm like, Yeah, so why do you have them there? And they're like, Well, you know, our owner thinks that it's going to convert. I'm like, Ask your owner what he would do if he came to this website. He wouldn't click them either. So it's hopefully going to cause a shift in the way that dealers think about their websites and they stop thinking of it as just a place to have cars listed and they start thinking of it as this is a place to answer potential customers questions so that those customers decide to call.

How would you define quality content?

If you are doing a Google search and you wanted to know the towing capacity of the 2024 F-150, do you need to go to a website to get that and read hundreds of words of crap? Or do you just need to know the towing capacity is 3500 lbs or whatever it is, right? You just need to know what the towing capacity is. If that's the specific question you entered to Google, you don't need to go to a website. If you were like wondering what day St Patrick's Day was and you're like, What day is St Patrick's Day? You don't need to go to a website to see that. Google can give you that information.

So dealers need to think to the more complex questions that customers have, like, you know, maybe on a on a Bronco. Okay, what does 3500 lbs towing capacity actually mean? You could tow these things. What are the other questions people are going to ask? What's the difference between the Ford and the Chevy truck? What are the benefits between one or the other?

Why should you buy from this Ford dealership and not the other Ford dealership that's 5 minutes up the street? What can you do with this truck? How are we going to take care of you after you bought it? In SEO terms, it's short tail versus long tail. The short answer, one little one or two word queries, that's not where you need to be thinking. You need to be thinking to the longer tail stuff of the buyer journey, because if someone's asking what the towing capacity is of a truck, that doesn't mean they're necessarily ready to buy or going to buy right now. That's early funnel or even mid funnel questions. Most dealers are only writing extreme bottom of funnel questions, so dealers are going to need to start thinking about what's that whole journey between "I think I want to buy a new car and this is the car I want to buy." There's a lot that happens between those two points and that's what they need to be writing content about.

Quality content answers customer questions.

I saw a post on a dealership site the other day. We were talking to a group that had a lot of Ford dealers in it, and they had a post on one page that was "How powerful is the new 2024 Ford Lightning Truck?" That was the title of the blog post. And then it was a picture of the truck and it was like, Hey, we've got new Lightning Store stock, Lightning's in stock. Click this link to check them out. What's the point? It wasn't even 100 words. The title of the blog post is How Powerful Is the New Lightning?, which means people want to go and read about what's the charging capacity like? How far can you get on a single charge highway versus city versus towing? How long does it take to charge? What kind of towing capacity do you have? What are the cool internal features? That's something that answers how powerful this truck is. Putting up "How powerful is this truck?" And then just having a link to your inventory that doesn't answer the question that you are trying to answer. 

Dealers have to stop thinking about. I need to create content that gets me a lead right now because that's not the direction things are going. The content that gets you a lead right now, that's your VDP. You don't have other content that gets you leads right now other than fixed ops content, obviously. But for sales related content, what's going to sell you the car is the VDP. You don't need to create all this other crap you've been creating. Instead, create that early to mid funnel stuff that's talking about why you should buy this car, what the different features are of this car, how this car compares to other things, why moms like SUVs better than minivans or whatever that would be and create this more informative content that helps guide a customer down the path to know what they want to buy and know that they want to buy it from you. Instead of writing these crappy posts that are like "learn more about the new Jeep Wrangler." Why would Google display your crappy 350 word blog post about the 2024 Jeep Wrangler that doesn't even have a paragraph of helpful information? And it's all about how your dealership rules and you've got a shiny new showroom and people should come buy from you. That's not the question you're answering. And if someone is looking for general high level information about the new 2024 Jeep Wrangler, guess what the Jeep website is?

What's going to get displayed? Not your dealership website. So don't write that content unless you're pairing that with the social strategy and you're creating that content because that's your landing page for a social campaign. Okay, then you're okay. But if it's just a pure SEO play, that type of content isn't going to work in the new world.

How important is Google Business Profile today?

It's actually a dealership's home page now because anyone looking for the dealership by name, they're going to see the business profile and a lot of information on that business before they get to the website or if they find them in a Google map search or they show in the map pack with the map and the three results, and a properly optimized and well optimized profile lets you show up in those map searches more often.

It's really important to have one that's optimized correctly and hardly any dealers optimize them the right way because the dealers don't know how to do it the right way. The vast majority of vendors out there don't know how to do it the right way either, because automotive SEO is this kind of incestuous pool. Everyone just does the same stuff that they've always been doing because that's what they see everybody else doing, and nobody's really hopped out of that little pond to go look at the ocean of SEO instead and learn based on how we know or how people have figured out the algorithm works instead of just going, "well, I know it looks at keywords and it's important, and that's what we've been doing for 20 years, so let's just keep doing that."

I think this is going to really kind of affect what dealers have out there as options. I think some of these SEO companies are going to be struggling a lot in the next year or two because those outdated strategies that they've been offering for years just aren't going to work anymore.

What industry is doing SEO content right?

Though it's not exactly a 1 to 1 ratio, I think probably personal injury attorneys in North America are the most knowledgeable and the most aggressive with their SEO strategies. But a lot of the things that you would do as an attorney you couldn't do as a dealer. And there are things that dealers are able to do, specifically with their business profiles, that lawyers aren't able to do. So there really isn't an industry where you can go, just go do it exactly like that. 

It's more about, you know, I go to a couple, you know, I speak at a lot of conferences outside of automotive, and that's why I was in Australia. That's why I'm going to Europe. And every once in a while I'll see a marketing team at a digital marketing conference that's not an SEO conference. I had a really great conversation with five or six people from the Leith team at a conference in one of the Carolinas. I think it was North Carolina. I don't even remember it was last fall, but I was really surprised and I was like, Hey, nice job, guys. You're going to a conference that's not an automotive conference to learn more about SEO because you're not really going to learn that much about SEO at an automotive conference. And they've got their own internal team that handles stuff so it makes sense to do that. And I've seen I go to MozCon in Seattle every summer and I've seen some dealer groups that will send their teams there, but I think that only makes sense as something to do if you're a group and you've got your own internal marketing team that's handling your marketing because if you're an individual rooftop or just a rooftop that's part of a group but the group kind of lets the dealers operate independently and they don't have their own internal team, I don't know if it makes as much sense to send your marketing person off to some SEO conference to learn more SEO because you don't have anybody on staff doing SEO. That marketing director's job is to do to coordinate all the vendors for SEO and PPC and traditional and offline and video and social and all these other things, so I don't know if that's going to be as effective either. The one thing I would say, though, is there are a lot of conferences out there that you can buy virtual tickets to now or you can buy the video package so you don't have to go attend the conference. Pubcon is a really great conference, has been around for a long time to teach dealer or that that is specifically focused on SEO and PPC. brightonSEO is my favorite conference series in the world and it happens twice a year in on the south coast of the UK, but they have now brought over a U.S. version, and so in November they're going to do the second year of brightonSEO U.S. version in San Diego. That one's a great one. MozCon is pretty good. You've got SMX, which is all virtual now, which makes it easy for dealers to attend. And then you got a lot of regional things. You've got Engage in Portland. So anything on the West Coast that's a smaller, more intimate show, that's digital marketing focus. Salt Lake City has their own, Dallas has their own called State of Search. Minneapolis has one called MN search. So there's a lot of different smaller local conferences that dealers might be able to find that wouldn't be as expensive and are probably only a day or two and maybe not even going to require it would require travel.

I always encourage dealers that want to learn more to break out of of automotive and go learn real SEO at an SEO conference.

What questions should a dealer be asking an SEO vendor?

I've got a whole like marketing document that we put out at conferences that is literally this. It's what questions do you ask when you're trying to choose a new vendor and Australian jetlag kicking my butt.

You definitely want to ask what is the ratio? Well, ask first: Do they have a typical agency set up or a boutique set up? Those are the two different ways that any marketing agency is going to be set up and a typical agency set up means that there are teams of different people that will do different tasks, like some writers, some coders, some technical optimizers.

But you want to ask, are they set up like that or are they set up like a boutique agency where one person is going to do everything for you? You also need to find out, are you going to be interfacing and dealing with an account manager that doesn't actually do the work? Or do you talk directly to the person that does the work, because that's obviously a much better conversation and a much better approach to customer service when you let them talk to the people that are doing the work. You definitely want to find out what the ratio is. I mean, it's easy when it's one person doing everything for you, but even if it's an agency set up, you can say, what's the average number of dealers each individual person has to work with?

So you take somebody off the content team. What's the average number of dealers every month that that person is writing content for? And there's a lot of providers in automotive where that number is 65 plus, and there's one really major. I don't know if I can name names, but like the biggest provider out there, owned by a company with three letters in the name, their SEO team is responsible for dealing with 100 plus dealers per month. There's only 160 hours in the month, and one of those hours is the phone call that you get. So you're getting 20 or 30 minutes of work outside of that time. That's a really big indicator right off the bat of how much time are they going to actually be spending for the money that you're paying. 

I would also ask what are the actual deliverables around what that provider is giving you on a monthly basis, because a lot of them use kind of shady language and they'll say, well, you'll get up to four pieces of content, but a couple of months in, you don't even get a piece of content at all and they start to give you a bunch of B.S. about, well, we had some more important things to do over here this month, so we didn't do content, but we'll get back to it because at a minimum you need content every month.

You got to make sure that your provider is doing link building and make sure they're doing link building the right way, because having links from other websites pointed to your website is a really big signal to Google. Because Google's using its local algorithm to return results related to dealerships, that means they need to be doing local link building. So getting links from local businesses and local websites and not just going out and filling out forms on directory sites. 

Your Google business profile should definitely be included with what they do. You want to make sure that they're like, We talked about a minute ago, writing the right kind of content that really answers questions and isn't just simple one word answers. Make sure that business profile is fully optimized. Make sure they're doing everything with it. And you really should make sure that reputation management is included as part of the SEO service. And that's a really big shot for a lot of dealers when I say that, because in automotive reputation management is a separate service and it's a separate vendor and a separate toolset from what you're doing with SEO, because reviews are really important and I'm not saying they're not, but reviews are so important and they're a massive part of Google's local algorithm that if you're talking about showing up in the map pack or Google Maps, they're like the second most important signal, the second heaviest signal, so having an SEO strategy that doesn't include reviews and reputation management is severely lacking, and it doesn't mean, hey, I'm okay if I use this vendor that does everything but reviews because I'm using another review vendor too, because it needs to be a cohesive strategy all together in one place. So also you want to make sure that they're not outsourcing stuff overseas. 

You would definitely ask them, are they using AI to write content? And if so, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But find out, are they using human editing on top of that or are they just using ad aid to write the content and posting it? Because if they're not using human editing, that's going to get you in trouble.

What are your thoughts on GA4?

It's definitely different. I think it's better. A lot of people are freaking out because the interface is different. Sure. Any time something changes that you've had for a long time, you're going to freak out. 

But the underlying reason that they changed it is old analytics didn't measure things correctly for the way that people use the internet and apps today. New GA4 for which really is just Google Analytics at this point. The new version of Google Analytics measures things correctly and measures them in a way that isn't going to be broken any more, so you get a more realistic view of what's going on and you have the ability to go in and really dial in and do some things that you couldn't do before. So I think it's awesome. I just think it's a humongous learning curve because it is so different and it doesn't have all those prepackaged reports that everybody loves.

But I think it's a good product. It's still evolving. There's stuff getting added to it. I've got several friends that are big speakers as well and they talk about GA4 all the time and they love it. And I've talked to them and they've kind of swung me in the direction from going in. This sucks, it's new. I just don't even care because like, I don't need it in this role anymore, so I'm just not going to learn it. Now I'm actually kind of wanting to learn it and take some courses on it because you can do some really cool stuff with it.

SearchLab Digital upcoming study.

We're about to release our two year study. We spent two years studying several thousand dealership business profiles. Basically we ran Ford dealers Chevy dealer, Jeep dealer, Kia dealer, something else Dealer, and used car dealer in 14 different markets. And when you see the map pack, you see the map and the three results and then you can click a button to view more results or more places or more locations, whatever that button says, that takes you to what's called the local finder page, and that's the map pack but beyond the top three, it's everything that matches your query. 

We looked at positions one through 20 for all of those cities, for all of those brands for two years. And once we took out all the department listings that were showing up and anything that was showing up, that was like some other business that picked a bad category and we're just looking at actual dealership profiles, we ended up with over 2700 profiles. This study is basically meant to use data to prove what works with SEO and what doesn't. 

For at least ten years or so, any time you're reading anything about automotive SEO or seeing somebody present about automotive SEO at a conference, including me, it's been somebody up on stage saying, Here's how this stuff works, do this, do this, do this, do this. And you have to trust that that person knows what they're talking about and is giving you good advice. And most likely they are because they're on stage at an event, but you don't really know if this stuff works for you or not. So I wanted to take a different approach to SEO and do a study to say, "Look, these are all the best practices that everybody says will affect your visibility in search results. Do the numbers actually match in reality?" 

I didn't want to go down the super math nerdy, like let's get statistical relevance and say specifically which factors weigh more than others, because it's way too complex. I wasn't trying to do that. I was just trying to prove, "Hey, look, everybody says that primary category is more important than anything else, so if we're looking at primary category, do the guys that ranked number one have a better category selection than the guys at number ten? If the data backs that up and says yes, well then that's probably true. And then, you should have all ten categories filled out if you're a car dealer because there's more than ten categories that apply.

The guys at number one versus the guys at number ten, did the guys at number one have more categories filled out? Guess what they did? Review scores. If you have a higher review score, should that help? Guess what it does. So a lot of these factors that everyone has said is best practice. You have to trust it, now we can actually prove that this stuff is legitimate. I'd like this is really important stuff. So hopefully now that that we're going to be I'm trying to get this finished up by the end of this month, to have it written up and on the blog, but it may move into April. But now that we'll publish this study, I think it's kind of a new approach to automotive SEO where you're now looking at, okay, here's data that shows me I need to do these things, not just here's a list of 25 things I need to do at a conference, and I go home and at three or four of them. Now, this data shows you all of these things are important. Go do these things.

Join hosts J.D. Mixon and Bart Wilson on the Driving Sales Defining Leadership podcast, brought to you by DrivingSales.com, as they explore the transformative power of leadership and coaching in the automotive industry. In this insightful episode, they are joined by Sean Kelley, CEO of CarMotivators (CarMotivators.com) and best-selling author, known for his dynamic approach to leadership and coaching within the automotive sector.

Delve into Sean's unique journey from a U.S. Army Special Operations combat veteran to a pivotal figure in the automotive world, where his military experiences shape his leadership and coaching philosophies. Discover how Sean's transition into the automotive industry led to groundbreaking sales strategies and leadership techniques that have propelled dealerships to new heights.

This episode is a must-listen for automotive professionals seeking to enhance their leadership skills, foster a culture of coaching, and drive exceptional team performance. Whether you're a manager aiming to inspire your team, or an executive striving for business growth, Sean's insights and the experiences shared by J.D. and Bart offer valuable lessons on the impact of effective leadership and coaching.

Like it or not, we are all in the fast lane of technological progression. And in all facets of our operations, the automotive industry is increasingly utilizing large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. These AI models, proficient in myriad tasks from drafting technical documents to crafting marketing content, offer undeniable efficiency. However, in this AI-driven landscape, we must pause and consider the potential implications on the lifeblood of our industry: human creativity.

LLMs, like ChatGPT, learn by processing vast amounts of internet text data. As of now, with a majority of content being human-generated, these models reflect a wide array of ideas and creative expressions. However, as LLMs take the wheel in content generation, we risk driving into a 'silo effect', where AI-produced content becomes the primary input for future AI. This self-reinforcing loop could limit the influx of new ideas and perspectives.

Picture an assembly line where AI creates and learns from its own blueprints. Despite the apparent efficiency, it lacks the innovative spark that, at this time, is unique to human ingenuity. Pioneering advancements in the automotive industry, from Henry Ford's assembly line to the EV revolution, were ignited by human creativity and the courage to challenge the status quo.

Remember that AI, despite its capabilities, cannot currently innovate in the way humans can. It can simulate creativity, but it cannot conceive a groundbreaking design or a paradigm shift - characteristics that have propelled the automotive industry forward.

Given these concerns, my understanding of the current state of LLMs and their role in our industry, we must advocate for a balanced co-existence of AI-generated and human-generated content. The evolution of our industry, from anti-lock braking systems to autonomous vehicles, is a testament to human ingenuity pushing boundaries. This diversity of human thought must continue to fuel our creative engine.

This understanding, however, is rooted in today's context of LLMs. AI technology is evolving rapidly, and we must stay vigilant to keep pace with these developments. We need to encourage responsible AI use, understand the limitations of this technology, and push for government oversight to safeguard against misuse by malicious actors.

To all my friends and associates in the auto industry, let's engage in a dialogue about the interplay of LLMs and human creativity. How can we ensure that our human creativity remains in the driver's seat amidst the surge of AI innovations? Your perspectives could navigate the course of AI's role in our industry.

As we race ahead with AI, let's remember that it is our creative and innovative potential that truly drives progress. Let's not be mere passengers; instead, let's continue to steer, ensuring our AI tools serve us and foster our journey toward unending evolution and improvement. Without thoughtful oversight, the alternative could look more like the movie “idiocracy” than we care to imagine. 

And if ChatGPT asks, tell them Bart Wilson made me write this post. I don’t want ChatGPT mad at me! 😂