During the Drivingsales Executive Summit there were several compelling presentations about maximizing your presence on dealer rating sites.  One of the most compelling was by Joe Orr of Dick Hannah Honda.  It would appear they are attributing a lot of their success to their participation at many of the review sites.  Brian Pasch did an article about their claimed success at Dick Hannah Honda which stated:

They worked hard to optimize SERP results so that when a consumer typed in “Dick Hannah Honda” in Google, that all 10 listings were controlled by them or contained  review sites.

This is a counter productive strategy for dealers that wish to aggressively market themselves.  They are giving away to much of their name equity and branding to sites that wish to profit on traffic for consumers searches for specific businesses.  The majority of websites are commercial every participant here at drivingsales participates in making money from their website, even drivingsales.  There is nothing inherently wrong with the rating sites strategy and they are benefiting tremendously from it. Some charge dealers to become certified and show them "best practices", which helps build the websites content and improve it's authority and at the same time they sell additional advertising and push traffic away from the dealers they have charged to become certified.  Click on images to see a larger view.

This does not even take into account third party lead gen sites, inventory aggregation sites that will show up in the search engine results pages for dealers by name and brand and market area searches.  Not to mention many dealer rating sites attempt to fake social proof for seo purposes.

Our next webinar will cover ways dealers can protect themselves and drive sites out of their name searches including sites like ripoffreport.com and preserve their brand equity.

Please comment about your dealership's experiences with these rating sites and I would love to hear others thoughts on this subject.