Most dealers have tried blogging at some point in the past. Some are still doing it today. Most dealers have failed at blogging. Some are still failing today. It's a trend that goes back to poor practices taught years ago that have somehow been perpetuated to the point that being like "most dealers" is a very bad thing.

Let's get all of the controversial points out of the way first. Blogging is NOT intended to create content that will rank in Google. I can hear the responses already being typed, but hear me out. Dealers should not want a blog post on their website to rank for important searches. That's where landing pages come into play. When people do a search for "2015 Toyota Camry Oregon" they are not trying to find a blog post about Toyota Camrys in the northwest. They're looking for inventory so you should be driving them to either a landing page that helps them get to the inventory or you should be driving them to the inventory itself.

You can and should, howver, blog about how the 2015 Toyota Camry Hybrid gets 680 miles on a single tank of gas. Within that blog post (which is not intended to rank on search engines for any important keywords) you can link to the inventory or landing pages that you do want to rank for important Camry keywords. This internal authoritative linking practice isn't just the most relevant way to do things from a search engine optimization perspective. It also happens to be the way that Google and Bing want you to improve your website through blogging.

A landing page has pertinent information for buyers and therefore is intended to rank for important search terms. A blog post has interesting, up-to-date news and opinions about thngs and is not intended to rank for car buying search terms. It can rank for things such as "Connecting Bluetooth in a 2015 Toyota Camry" but not for the buying terms.

Landing pages help convert. Blog posts help inform. They're both crucial for successfully driving shoppers to your website and must be used together. Alone, neither can be very effective for SEO.

There's another component. Just because you blog about something doesn't mean people are going to read it. It's for this reason that we tie in social media promotions and campaigns very closely with SEO. It's why the most successful at either search or social are almost always effective at both simultaneously. Search and social are tied together by content.

If you get exposure for your blog posts through social media, it helps the target pages such as landing pages or inventory to rank better. I could end up rambling about the entire strategy for several blog posts but I hope you get the basic point.

Now for the non-controversial stuff. Stop blogging with SEO in mind. Blog with readers in mind. Blog with the intention of bringing real value in the form of information, entertainment, or both through your blog posts and they will be much more successful. I think that few would be willing to deny this.

You're the expert. You're the authority about your particular brand in the local area. Help those who aren't authorities, namely the people who own or who want to own one of your vehicles. That's the point of blogging. When done in unison with landing pages and social media, blogging can be an incredible tool.

If you blog like the majority of dealers and vendors in our industry, you might be able to drive some traffic but it's not going to generate anything meaningful (such as a sale).

This is one of those blog posts that my team will probably hate. I can already hear them. "Stop giving away our secrets!" As I've posted before, there really should be no such thing as secret sauce in automotive digital marketing, so I'm going to share our recipe.

There are three key ingredients to a proper automotive SEO awesomesauce. You can taste for these ingredients in what you're doing today as well as in the presentations you hear from other vendors as they try to sell you SEO. If you taste it, you're on the right track. If you're missing any of these ingredients, it's time to find a better sauce.

1. Focus on Driving Great Traffic

There are many ways to send traffic to your website. We look at social media, for example, as a way to attract shoppers to your website using dark posts and shopper data, but that traffic is great, not prime. Don't get me wrong - many of the visitors that come through proper social media advertising are ready to buy a car, but they're brought there aggressively rather than passively.

Most dealers don't like to think of search traffic as passive, but that's what makes it so valuable. It's not that the traffic itself is passive. It's that the techniques are passive. No matter how well optimized you are or how much money you throw into PPC, you still have to wait for your customers to actually do the search. With many forms of advertising like social, banners, and Pandora, you're aggressively driving traffic even though they weren't necessarily in "buying mode" when they came across the ad.

People who search for important keywords relevant to buying a car are doing so because they're in buying mode. Anyone can optimize a site to drive traffic, but focusing on the keywords that are certain to be searched for when people are hot to make a purchase is the sort of traffic that you should be attacking with your SEO.

2. Focus on Driving them to Great Pages

I remember a debate I had with an SEO company a couple of years ago. We were challenging the pages they were creating for our shared client. The pages were loaded with content and had a little button half way down the page that linked to inventory. I asked them how this page was going to help convert the visitors to leads or sales and their response was something to the effect of, "that's not our job."

Incorrect. It is your job. It's not just about driving traffic to any old page that can be optimized with content. That traffic has to convert in some form or fashion. There's an old notion that if you send people to a page, they can always click on inventory when they get there. I've seen the statistics. It doesn't work.

Pages that are not designed to either generate a lead or clearly direct people to a page that can generate a lead is nearly worthless regardless of how well it's optimized. The stats are clear. People will go to the page from a search term like "New Honda Accord Houston" because that page has plenty of content about the topic, but if the page is designed specifically for optimization and does nothing to compel action, the people who visit it don't see what they want so they bounce.

Pages must be optimized and they must convert or push the traffic to a page that does. If that's not a core philosophy in your SEO sauce, you might as well pour Prego all over your website. It'll be just as effective at generating leads.

3. Traffic Should be Going Up Year Over Year

There are always factors that come into play that affect traffic, but any good SEO company today can drive more organic traffic. The market is in a good place. If you're not seeing significant year-over-year increases in organic search traffic, something's not working.

I bring this one up even though it should be a no-brainer because we ran across someone who was pitching against us the other day. They were pointing out several keywords that we weren't ranked at the top for and using that as an example of how our SEO was bad. Some of the keywords were relevant. Most were worthless.

When we pulled up analytics and showed a huge increase in year-over-year organic traffic, the conversation ended quickly.

There's a reason that around 300 companies in the automotive industry offer SEO. It's not because it's easy. It's because it's easy to sell and hard for dealers to quantify. If you apply these three keys to your SEO checking, you'll know that you've got a great sauce.

We have had the blessing of only "blacklisting" a couple of website providers since we started doing SEO for dealers in 2013. Now, there's a chance we'll need to blacklist some more thanks to Google finalizing its "mobile-friendly" algorithm update.

More and more traffic going to dealership websites is on mobile devices because more people use their phones and tablets as their primary (often only) method of going online. The mobile-friendly update only affects those searching on mobile devices (for now) so some dealers have challenges and they don't even know it based upon no loss in rankings on desktop searches.

They'll see it in their traffic numbers.

In essence, the update is designed to push websites lower in mobile searches if they do not play well with mobile devices. There are a handful of things that can cause this such as small fonts, small buttons, Flash components, or basically anything that is not conducive to delivering a great mobile experience.

It's page by page, meaning that having a page that's flawed will not necessarily tank the whole site. This is good because it makes it easier to fix but it's bad because it makes it harder to identify. You need to check many of your pages, particularly inventory, video pages, and specials, using Google's mobile-friendly test tool.

This is separate from Google's 1:1 mobile:desktop search component which favors websites with pages that load on any type of device. A website can be 1:1 compliant and not be mobile-friendly; visa versa is true as well.

Thankfully, most website providers have been making the move to mobile for some time and most dealers don't have to worry, but some do. This is one of those things that can truly affect business. If you find that your website is not mobile-friendly, it's time to make a change very soon.

The word "begone" is such a funny word. It has a powerful meaning but is so rarely used outside of board games and exocisms. We're going to use it today, mostly because it fits in nicely with the topic of discussion.

As fate would have it, one of our team members was picked for jury duty. While he is fulfilling his civil responsibility as a citizen of this wonderful country, I'm filling in for him on the social side. It's good to roll your sleeves up and get to work sometimes (which is why I believe even general managers should take ups every now and then) just to get a feel for what's happening in the trenches.

Facebook is all about momentum, which is why I normally do not like our posts to run over others. Conversely, I don't like other people's posts to run over ours. Collaboration is an important key to a strong social media strategy that takes some thigns from the dealership and some content that we create, so we like to time everything out to maximize things.

Today, I had a post that the dealer ran over with their own post. It turned out to be an awesome one. I had worked really hard on our post, sifting through images and finding the four perfect pictures of a 1959 Chevrolet Apache. It was a great post and we were running ads to it for exposure. Then, the dealership posted a picture of happy customers who bought two Camaros. As proud as I was of the one I posted, his live shot of real buyers and their twin Camaros was 100% better.

I was run over and I loved it!

The most important aspect of any vendor/dealer relationship is communication. In some cases, this manifests in the form of collaboration. In a true collaboration, there are no egos involved. It's all about the end goal of helping to sell more cars.

It's not what "they" do versus what "I" do to make things happen. It's all about what "we" are doing together. Ego has no place in collaboration if it's going to be effective.

When you have two people who have combined for over two decades of working with automotive website providers, you would think that they the company they would build together would be another website provider. It wasn't. There's a reason for this.

Search and social are the marketing venues we chose to pursue for one big reason: minimal parody. Car dealers have seen products and services come and go where there seems to be very little difference between one player and another. That's not the case in either search marketing or social media marketing. Sure, there are similarities between products, but the results delivered by one company can be completely different from the results delivered by another. That's not the case in other areas such as website marketing where switching from one to another normally yields only a minor difference in results.

There's another reason that we chose these venues. They're tied in very nicely together. The activities that are associated with proper search engine marketing are often complimentary to those in social media and visa versa. In fact, we often find that dealers can kill more than one bird with a single stone. That stone normally comes in the form of content.

When dealers or vendors separate out content into its individual goals, it doesn't always work as intended. For example, you could build a landing page that works properly for PPC, but it isn't easy to optimize and it can't achieve great results on social media. You can build great content that is socially sharable, but it doesn't rank for the right keywords organically and it can't be a target for PPC.

When you take these and other factors into account when building a piece of content, you'll find that the end result is often better than it would have been had you built different pages for each discipline. This is because the flow of benefits crosses over. This is the part where they're tied in and it's the part that I'll (hopefully) explain in detail here.

Social media is a part of the SEO puzzle despite what Google reps have said in the past. The numbers do not lie. When a page performs well on social media, it tends to rank better on search. Conversely, when a page has a high social caliber and it ranks well in search, it gets more visitors and thus more opportunities for people to share it.

Then, you bring PPC into the equation. The core of PPC is in driving action, which means that a proper landing page for paid search should get the visitor to do something. Call. Fill out a form. Visit the dealership. Something.

The second part of PPC is Quality Score. To achieve a higher quality score, a page must contain relevant content for the keywords it's target. This should sound familiar to anyone who studies SEO because search engine optimization calls for the same ideas. In other words, a proper PPC landing page should be easily optimized as well without having to do much to it.

Two birds. One stone.

Now that we understand why search and social are so closely tied together, let's talk about how they're different. I'll go into more details about this in a future post, but the basic concept is this: intent.

Search is passive. No matter how well optimized you are or how much money you're spending on paid search, you still have to wait for the shopper to initiate the search. They are actively in the market and are searching for you.

Social is aggressive. It puts the message in front of shoppers in the venues they visit the most during their day. It's much more like television that search in that they're going to these social media sites without an intention of finding a car. That's why it's so important to have the cars find them. They aren't actively pursuing anything at that moment, but when a relevant message is placed in front of a current car shopper, they're willing to leave the casual task of checking social media in order to pursue the more important task of finding their next vehicle.

To say that search and social go hand-in-hand is not exactly true. They're different aspects of marketing that play in the same field. Understanding how to make them sing together is the key to finding the right marketing harmony.

As we work with more and more dealers, we're starting to see some trends in the way that digital marketing is being handled. In some cases, dealers aren't fully aware of everything they're supposed to be getting from their vendor partners. This can be challenging because most vendors that we've seen over the years will only give you what you expect from them.

Part of my responsibilities with Dealer Authority is to make certain that promises are kept, not just by us (that's the easy part) but also by other vendors we have to work with on behalf of the dealers. A case in point happened last week when had to hound a website provider for a demonstration of their new product. One would think that keeping a current client happy would be the top priority, but after a couple of scheduled meetings postponed and a dealer wondering what was going on, we finally made contact. The strange thing is that the new platform they showed us seems to be a great improvement but the bad taste they left in the dealer's mouth by not making it happen more quickly might lead them to having us find them a new website provider.

There are many reasons that a dealer isn't certain about what their providers are actually providing. Sometimes, it's just turnover; a new internet manager can have a challenge getting to know everyone that their predecessor had established for the dealership. Sometimes, it's just a matter of having a fluid and accurate process for monitoring their vendor partners. This is what I want to addess here with some tips I've accumulated over the last couple of years.

• Know Everything in the Contract: This can be an Excel spreadsheet, it can be tied into a full-blown project management systemt, or anywhere in between. You should be able to go to one place and find out how much you're spending (broken down by components), how long the contract lasts, what the cancellation requirements are, and most importantly what all is entailed with everything you're getting. This last part is where we often find the biggest gap. We've worked with dealers who, upon closer inspection of the contract, were not receiving everything they were promised in the initial agreement.
• Schedule Monthly Meetings with Everyone Together: When going over results and adjusting strategy, it can be very useful to have all parties on the phone at the same time. We were on a call Friday with String Automotive who facilitated a meeting with the dealer, the website provider, the PPC provider, the SEO company, and the social media company to devise an attack strategy for this coming month. These calls are crucial to make sure that if we're trying to impove sales of a specific vehicle in a specific zip code, that we're able to all be lockstep in our strategy and implementation. Brainstorming together works well which is why we really appreciate all that String does to make this happen.
• Force Vendors to Keep You in Mind with New Developments: I've worked for several vendors since leaving the retail side of the car business and one thing seems to be universal: the new stuff goes to new clients. It's not fair. You should never have to hear about the latest development by a vendor by reading a press release. In our world, the squeaky wheel really does get the grease, so make sure they don't forget to give you the real stuff. When negotiating new contracts, remember to include a clause about it. You want the new stuff. You don't want to be a guinea pig, but you want the stuff that the new clients are getting.
• Keep a Record of Every Interaction: Just as you log every call and email into a CRM when talking to your customers, so do the vendors. They know every communication. You should, too. It can be tedious without an appropriate process, but if you have a CRM that you like, you can treat your vendors like your customers. Just make sure they're separated.

Every day, we're forced to hold other vendors accountable for our clients. This is great if you have us, but if you're doing it on your own, I hope that these little tips will help you make the most out of your digital marketing.

Over the years, I've grown used to having debates. Sometimes, people will oppose my perspectives for the sake of debate. Other times, they will truly feel like things that I recommend are truly wrong. This piece will likely fall into the latter category.

It's ironic that I often tell dealers not to use social media for the sake of branding. Don't get me wrong - it's a great branding tool. However, if you utilize the right strategies and truly promote concepts on social media that will help you sell more cars, the branding will happen as a result. In other words, branding is a side effect of great social media, not a goal behind most campaigns.

The reason it's ironic is because of the content marketing premise I'm about to divulge. When comparing search and social in regards to content, most would assume that social media is the place where content can be used for branding and organic search is not really a branding tool per se. My view is the opposite. There are distinct advantages to branding through organic search that propel aggressive dealerships ahead of the competition.

Our industry always tends to view search as purely designed to drive business-relevant traffic. Every piece of content should be geared towards sales, service or any of the other important search terms that shoppers will type. This is all true to an extent, though not 100%. An aggressive strategy includes content designed to position the dealership in a positive light within the community and to take advantage of that through search.

This article cannot be long enough to go into sufficient detail about the strategy, so I'll resort to examples. Let's say your dealership supports a local charity. Building a page about that charity and optimizing it to rank for keywords associated to the charity can help in three ways:

• It helps the charity itself by giving it exposure on a new channel.
• Website visitors can see the page and get an understanding of how the dealership is involved in the community.
• In search, the branding associated with ranking for keywords associated with the charity can get you positive PR.

As I've written in the past, it's not about bragging. You're not simply tooting your dealership's horn. By doing it with the right heart, you're continuing to help the charity and allowing the dealership to act as the community leader that it should be.

Let's look at another example. Let's say you have a locational branding challenge. People outside of your city know generally where you are, but aren't aware of your exact location. If you happen to be close to a place known by the generally community, posting content about that place can help you gain associating by proximity. In other words, you can be known as "the Hyundai dealership by the mall," for example.

Final example: local car shows. It kills me when I see that a dealership is supporting or even hosting local automotive events and they have no content on their website about it. Sure, they might have a banner that leads to a page with a couple of paragraphs and contact form, but the page often doesn't rank about a participant's Flickr post, let alone close to the top for searches about the event. This is not acceptable.

There are those who will disagree and I'll happily discuss it here on Driving Sales or directly if you'd prefer.

There's a difference between posting irrelevant content and posting content with a valid business purpose even if it's not directly associated with the dealership. It's an advanced strategy that should only be applied by those who have all of their basics covered, but if that's you, chances are you could benefit from this type of strategy.

We all have our favorite idioms about leadership and managing. The image attached to this story works along the theme that establishes most forms of the debate. A leader can help his or her company have greater success than a "boss".

This is all great and I totally feel like this is an important concept that needs to be followed in the automotive industry, but today I want to discuss the trenches. Company culture doesn't always flow from top to bottom. In fact, the car business is one where the personality of the people who perform the day-to-day duties at the dealership or at the vendor's office can have a humongous impact on how the company performs and how the customers perceive them.

After all, it's the sales team, the service advisers, and the customer service representatives who are actually hands-on with customers and clients. They're also the ones who are interacting with each other more often than when the company "leaders" are on the floor barking orders, lifting morale, checking quality, or establishing directives.

In other words, the real leaders in the car business are, well, everyone. Unlike the hierarchy that permeates through most industries, ours is one that is much more controlled by individuals at every level of the business. It's for this reason that company culture must be strong across the board.

The keys to establishing a proper customer culture can be broken down into multiple categories, but there are three primary points of success (or failure) that we all must remember:

• Hiring - As anyone reading this already knows, hiring the right people is a ProTip that can be said in all industries. As anyone reading this also knows, ours is an industry where finding the right people can be challenging. We have a client who doesn't like posting a staff page on their website because it's an invitation to competitors to try to poach talent. We've had members of our own team approached by bigger vendors who want to take our people. It's for this reason that the path to success always starts with hiring the right car people.
• Training - The number one reason for failure within any company is a lack of proper training. This person might know exactly what to do, but if that person is not properly trained to do it, they will never reach their proper level of success (and neither will the company). Thankfully, if you're reading this, you already understand the value of training that companies like Driving Sales offers, even if only in the form of best practices and great conferences.
• Accountability - If you hold people accountable, you must be held accountable yourself. That's a creed amongst leaders that we hold near and dear at our company and it's something that we strongly recommend to both dealers and vendors. If a customer walks onto the lot and doesn't buy, there was no individual who "lost the sale" for the dealership. The managers, sales people, service people, and everyone else who had an opportunity to touch that potential customer participated in missing the sale in some form or fashion. The same holds true on the vendor side. If one person drops the ball, we all have a responsibility to jump on it. A fumble is a fumble and it always hurts, but if you can recover quickly and hop on the ball, at least you didn't lose possession. I know it's not football season but you get the picture.

The car business is not about best practices. It's not about processes or procedures. It's not even about the cars, really. At the end of the day, the car business is driven by people. Take care of yours and do what you can to empower everyone around you regardless of your position.

Company culture does not just flow down from the top. It flows up, down, sideways, diagonal, and can improve or not based upon the actions of every individual Choose wisely.

Every time I think the cat is out of the bag, I talk to enough dealers and vendors to convince me that it's still only a small percentage. As a vendor, this makes me happy. As a car guy, this makes me a little sad.

Dark post advertising on social media has such a high verifiable return on investment that it's amazing how few are utilizing it. Then again, I've seen a good number of dark post campaigns that were simply not handled well enough to be powerful that were built by both dealers and vendors. I'll go into the full details in a future post, but since this post is going up right before Easter, it's best to simply touch on the basics.

"Dark posts" are unpublished posts on Facebook and advertised posts on Twitter. They do not appear on the public pages or profiles, but they do appear in the targeted news feeds and timelines of the target audiences. This is what makes them so powerful. There's nothing better than targeting in-market shoppers for your brand with messages intended to drive them directly to the inventory on your website.

Isn't that what digital advertising is really all about?

There is a bandwagon that is preparing to roll out. This bandwagon will include many of the top current vendors. New vendors will pop up because of the opportunities that dark posts bring to the table. It will start rolling in weeks or months, not years. Will your dealership be on it?

If you get ahead of the bandwagon, a couple of good things will happen. You'll be able to take advantage fo the market before it gets saturated. More importantly, your experience and established history will give you the edge over competitors.

Knowing what I've seen in the industry over the past two decades, I would predict that around 20% of dealers will be using dark posts by this time next year. The following year, it will likely be over 50% depending on what changes are made between now and then.

Anybody who tells you they can predict the future of the internet is a fool, so let me add my disclaimer: I could definitely be totally wrong. The only I have to go by is experience and trends. Don't take my word for it, though. Research dark posts for yourself (or simply wait until my post next week that goes into more details).

Some dealers hop on the bandwagon when it comes around. Others get the head start before the bandwagon even forms. Where will you be when the race begins?

I learned something very important this week. Everyone who has the automotive industry in their blood is a "car guy". It has nothing to do with your gender. In the 21st century, most gender roles are meaningless, even in our industry.

We've had the pleasure of hiring two of the best car guys in the industry in the past year. Last year (almost to the day) we hired Subi Ghosh to run marketing. Since then, she's brought so much more to the table that we promoted her to Executive Vice President and positioned her to represent us at NADA as well as upcoming conferences like Digital Dealer, Insight15, Innovative Dealer Summit, and the Women in Automotive Conference for which she is on the board.

This week, we hired Christine Robertson, an automotive eCommerce veteran who has helped propel Checkered Flag Auto Group to new heights over the last 8 years. She is already making an impact on our clients and will be heavily featured as a thought-leader within our company and for the industry.

All of this has reaffirmed something I've felt strongly about for the last year. Vendors need to hire car guys. These two superstars have brought more insight to the company and to our dealers than any marketing guru or digital expert from outside the industry ever could. Dealership experience is meaningful. It's so much easier to teach SEO or content marketing to a car guy than to teach the car business to an SEO expert.

Today's leaders at the dealerships can do so much more today than ever before. The market is much more complex. It's no longer a matter of throwing out liner ads in the newspaper and trying to get people in the door when taking phone ups. The sales process begins on the internet. Some people call it research, but the reality is that they're starting to actually initiate the purchase before they ever step foot on the lot.

Something that Subi, Christine, and other members of our team have taught me is that this industry is loaded with incredible talent that can and should be harnessed at every level. Vendors should be looking at talented dealership personnel to fill their job openings. Dealers should be taking full advantage of the talent at their store in ways that are much broader than just a few years ago.

We live in interesting times and we exist in an exceptional industry. I've learned so much over the last year and a half and I felt the need to share it. Go car guys!