When it comes to content marketing, there are topics that are thought of as easy to promote and others that are harder to promote. Smartphones are an example of a topic that might be thought of as easy to promote while pest control is on the harder end of the spectrum.

So if you’re forced to work on a topic deemed difficult, or one where there aren’t many examples to build upon or inspiration to be had, how do you deal with it?

Well, you have to get creative. Those who can take a “tough” or “boring” topic and make it interesting will be able to take that experience and be even better at creating content for popular and easy topics down the road.

To get started, you just have to ask yourself one simple question:

How Can I Make This Fun and Interesting?

If you’ve already been sitting at your computer asking yourself, “How can I create fun and interesting content that promotes pest control?” and come up with nothing, you may not be digging deep enough for ideas.

Oftentimes, we get stuck doing things a certain way, which prevents us from seeing the answers right in front of us. For content writers, this generally means getting out of your comfort zone of simple ideas and looking for ways to make something completely different.

Here are three simple steps to making that happen: 

• Find a way to connect people to your topic
• Use current events/popular culture to create a fun angle
• Utilize images and video

Finding Ways to Connect People to Your Topic

The success of your content boils down to how you’re able to connect your audience with the topic at hand. It doesn’t matter how big your budget is or how popular the topic; if you can’t bridge a connection that compels your audience to share or any kind of action, you’ve failed.

Thinking about pest control, it’s actually not hard to get people to connect to it. It’s likely everyone has dealt with some kind of bug or rodent problem in their home in the past, so we can all relate to the need for pest control.

But our content doesn’t need to actually promote pest control directly, it simply has to relate to it. With that in mind, you could create a list called The 10 Scariest Bugs You Wouldn’t Want to Find in Your Home.

With pictures, detailed descriptions, origins, and other information, you can create something people will want to share.

When trying to connect your audience with your topic, think long and hard about this example and how you can apply it to your own work.

Using Current Events or Popular Culture to Create Fun Angles

Current events and popular culture always strike a cord with people. If you can utilize them to get your message across, you’ll have a better shot at drawing people in with your content.

Sticking with our pest control example, what would be a simple way to connect something from popular culture with our “boring” topic?

Well, superheroes are now ingrained in our popular culture, so that’s a good place to start. You could have fun with an article called How Batman Deals With Rodents in Wayne Manor.

As an exercise, try to come up with a similar example and then execute it. Share it on as many sites as possible, reach out to blogs that link to offbeat content, and put some promotional dollars behind it on sites like Facebook and StumbleUpon.

Use Images and Video to Make Your Content More Compelling

Images and video are extremely powerful tools in your fight for compelling content. They keep people engaged, supplement your written content, and help increase a visitor’s time on your site.

When creating content like how-tos and lists, be sure each item has a dedicated image. These not only help break up content for better reading, but will make your content more enjoyable overall.

Videos also help break up content, but their main purpose is to help you explain something in a more visual and interesting way than just written text.

For instance, The 10 Scariest Bugs You Wouldn’t Want to Find in Your Home post we talked about in the first section could become even better with videos to supplement your pictures, descriptions, and other information.

Take a look at how you’re creating content today and look for ways to better incorporate images and video.

Final Note: Work on Improving Quality, Not Producing More and More Content

One of the biggest problems with content today is that there’s just so much of it out there. In order to stand out from the crowd, you need to stop thinking about producing more content and think about improving the quality instead.

This has been said time and time again, so I realize you might think that statement is worthless. Hear me out with this one simple tip: Put more time into your content. If you’re just producing content to see what sticks, how are you supposed to add value to your users’ experience?

Instead of thinking about ways you can cut corners to do more, start thinking about ways you can add more value to your content. If this means talking with your boss or client about a revised strategy, create a proposal and schedule a meeting to discuss it.

With as much competition as there is online, the only way you’re going to stand out is by constantly out doing them with high quality content.

This post was originally written by Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

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Digital marketing can be extremely tedious when you add up the time that many tasks take to complete. On top of big projects like audits, copywriting, and promotional work, smaller tasks can add stress to days otherwise occupied by fulfilling work. 

Finding ways to get tedious tasks done faster, such as using digital marketing tools, will save you from that stress and give you more time to concentrate on creative projects that drive results.

Whether you work in-house at a business, or manage many different clients for an agency, here are four examples of digital marketing takes you can automate.

Social Media Scheduling

Managing a business's social media activity might not be the most time-consuming task on your to-do list, but if you're not taking advantage of scheduling tools, you might be wasting time.

To improve your efficiency, use HootSuite or Buffer to avoid having to copy/paste messages that are going across multiple social networks. These tools allow you to sync up accounts and schedule posts with one simple action.

And if you want to go the extra mile, try to set time aside to schedule at least a week's worth of social media content out at a time. This way you don't have to rush to fit it into your daily routine, you can create even better content, and you're better able to concentrate on other tasks afterward.

Reputation Management

While online reputation management is still in its early days, businesses do need to be taking advantage of their ability to monitor and respond to online reviews, feedback, and other comments.

Online reviews are where people turn before making purchasing decisions, so it's important to take a proactive approach to managing what they find out about your business.

A study from Bazaarvoice reports that shoppers who see a business's response to a negative review are 116% more likely to make a purchase. That means five minutes of your time now could make a huge difference in sales later.

By using a review management service like ReviewPush, you can gather most of the major review sources into one place to make monitoring and responding a breeze.

Site Reports

For SEOs, reporting results can mean a lot of digging through analytics and time spent in Excel. But with the help of automated reports, which come as a part of services like Raven Tools, you can let software create those, and have them automatically emailed to any number of people.

So if you meet with your boss or client each month, you can set the report to be sent to them ahead of time in order to give them a chance to look it over and familiarize themselves with recent developments.

Once you set it up, you don't have to worry about it moving forward.

Citation Research

Successful local SEO campaigns rely a lot on citations. Finding new sources and editing outdated or incorrect listings, however, can take a lot of time if you're just doing searches for your business name, address, and phone number in hopes of uncovering everything.

Instead of going at it alone, sign up for WhiteSpark's Local Citation Finder. It allows you to quickly find listings that feature the information you provide so you can discover which sites have the right information, which sites have the wrong information, and which sites you need to create a listing on.

You can also do research on your competition to find out how well your citation profile is in comparison. That's also a great way to discover sites they've secured listings on that might have otherwise slipped through the cracks.

What are some of the tools you're using to automate your digital marketing tasks? Is there a certain task you're struggling with? Leave a comment below!

Written by: Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

SEO is a complicated practice, especially if you're just starting in 2015. Things have changed a lot in the past 10 years, making it more difficult than ever for small businesses to compete against businesses with large marketing budgets. But as one of the most important parts of a business's digital marketing strategy, you can't ignore SEO.

Content is easily one of the best ways for businesses to take control of their rankings and build up authority with Google and other search engines. It's the simplest strategy, but it's also one of the most effective.

Let's explore the three reasons why your business should be serious about the content it's producing if your goal is to improve search rankings.

Great Content Attracts Links

Links make the web go round. They tell search engines how your site relates to other sites, what your site is about, and lets them know which pages on your site are the most important.

By creating great content, you'll naturally attract links from sites that want to provide their users with the best information possible. If you're just writing content to rank for a set of keywords, you're only going to see minimal results at best.

If you concentrate on providing value to visitors instead of pure SEO benefits, your work will always pay off.

Content Length Can Affect Rankings

A study by serpIQ showed that the more content a page had, the better it ranked.

Think about the content that's on your site now. Is it more fluff than substance? Is it ranking? Could it rank better?

If you're dealing with more fluff than substance, lack of rankings, or being outranked by your competition, you absolutely need to beef up your content. Not only do you need to add more content to your existing pages, but you need a schedule and strategy in place for the creation of new content.

Google Rewards Quality Content (and Punishes Low Quality)

Google wants you to create quality content. They've said it time after time, but for most businesses it doesn't seem to sink in. The search engine's Panda update cracked down on sites that used thin content, which can mean content that adds no value, recycled content with minor edits, or duplicate content .

But what qualifies as quality content?

Quality is obviously subjective, but from a search engine's perspective, quality content means the content is relevant to the target topic and user data shows they think it's valuable.

If users are clicking back to search results after just 5 seconds on your site, that tells Google that the content didn't provide them with what they were looking for or was just plain irrelevant to the original query. CTR and time on site are two of Google's biggest quality signals.  

Bonus Infographic: 10 Reasons Why You Need SEO to Gain More Business

Written by: Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

While a blog is a great place to talk about your business and build valuable search engine authority, it can also help you gain a loyal following of customers and admirers that will help you grow.

A blog builds trust with customers, allowing people to better connect with your business. That does not come overnight, and may not come at all, but there's a formula for successful blogging that can help you tackle this new, powerful type of marketing.

One example of a business that embraces blogging and content marketing is Moz. The software company has no sales staff, puts an extreme emphasis on content and community, and provides truly in-depth industry reports for free. Through all of that, they've built a huge following and have been able to consistently grow Moz as a business because of it.

Sure, Moz has always been a unique company, but there's nothing stopping your business from following in their footsteps.

Want in on their secret formula? Keep reading.

Be Honest and Helpful

When a lot of businesses start blogging, they seem to think that means they need to literally blog about their business. The problem there? Nobody cares about what's going on with your business unless you're one of the world's largest companies or you give them good reason to care. I don't say that to be mean, but it's an absolute truth.

So how do you get people to care about your business? Be selfless.

Give out information like candy on Halloween. But instead of giving out crap from an assorted bag like all of the other houses, give out full-size candy. I bet you'd remember who gave you that and immediately forget about everybody else, right?

It's the same way with content. We visit sites like Moz, QuickSprout, Buffer, and CopyBlogger regularly because we can count on their content being honest and helpful. In case you weren't following the analogy, those sites give out full-size candy.

Create a Schedule and Stick to It

If you're going to blog, you need to do it regularly. If you let your audience know when you'll have new content (whether directly or indirectly), there's a greater chance that they'll become return visitors.

The only thing you have to do is hold up your end of the bargain and more and more readers will return each time you create new content.

And you don't have to post every single day to be successful, but you do need to deliver great content. When creating your posting schedule, think of how long you need to craft those great posts so you don't feel rushed or overworked.

Create Regular Features/Columns

An easy way to start your blog off on the right foot is to create regular features or columns to encourage readers to come back for similar stories. Moz's Whiteboard Friday is a great example of this, and provides Moz with tons of consistent traffic, links (like the one here), and general buzz about their digital marketing knowledge.

Think of a way you could implement a regular feature into your blog while providing entertainment for your readers. You can always change it up as you and your business evolve; the key is to get started!

Be Extremely Active on Social Media

On both your personal and business accounts, it's important to be extremely active when you're trying to grow your blog's audience. Follow and connect with influential bloggers, be a cool source for industry news, and give people a reason to follow your business.

It's also important to note that you can buy exposure on social media to help throw these efforts into overdrive. With ads that can target only the type of consumer you want to attract, allocating some of your online ad spend to social media is an extremely effective method to grow your business's blog.

Conclusion

The goal for your business's blog is to attract people that will allow you to market to them. By providing them with something of value for their clicks and time, they'll give you permission to be a business without running for the hills.

Written by Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

One of the things that makes SEO so important is that it connects your dealership with people who already interested in buying a car or who need some type of service. Unlike advertising, in which you hope someone hears, sees, or reads your name enough that when they need a car they'll come see you, SEO finds the people that are ready now. You don't go looking for them through ad campaigns, which get expensive quickly, they find you.

Now, SEO is extremely complicated, and it's only getting more complicated as search engines become more intelligent. But it's also one of the most necessary boxes to check under your list of marketing initiatives. It has the ability to naturally grow organic organic traffic, which will  generate more interest and leads to help you grow your business over time.

Not creating content is one of the biggest flaws in most dealerships' marketing strategy, and in this post we’ll take a look at a simple way your team can tackle the complicated field of SEO through content marketing.

The Content Marketing Sales Funnel

The graphic above gives you a great idea of how you can create content that helps to generate traffic, interest, and leads for a more successful dealership.

Traffic Generators

Traffic generators work just as you might think they would: they drive traffic! We're talking about blog posts, infographics, and videos that are easy to digest and have a wide target audience. These should be based around topics that are relevant to your dealership, such as Chevy if you sell Chevys or Ford if you sell Fords.

Have fun with these posts. Lists like "10 Ways to Know You're a True Chevy Guy" or "The 5 Most Insane Camaros You'll Ever See" are crafted to be entertaining and get users to engage. Plain and simply: the goal here is to create content that begs to be clicked.

You can mix in local-related news items as well, but try to reserve those only for stories that are likely to be shared by locals once promoted to social media. The more time you spend talking about the main topics related to your business, the more authority you'll gain in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

Interest Generators

To build interest in your dealership, its inventory, and its services, we'll graduate from traffic generators to interest generators. This type of content is meant to reel potential customers in with topical guides, how-tos, and tips to make their lives easier and you a great source of information.

A great example would be "How to Change Your Oil at Home." You might think this is the opposite of the type of content you should be writing, but the reason you want to do it this way is simple: it's not pushy. No one's going to see "Why You Should Always Go to the Dealership for Oil Changes" and not think the information is skewed to favor your opinion as a dealership.

Today's consumers are savvy and don't want to be sold. Instead, they want to be informed. And now you might be asking how you're going to sell anything at all with this method. Here's how:

Using the "How to Change Your Oil at Home" example, we'll leave a nice call to action at the end. Something along the lines of:

"Changing your oil at home is a great way to save money if you don't mind getting your hands dirty. If you think this isn't for you, below is a coupon for a discount on an oil change at XYZ Motors."

And of course, add a nice, noticeable button that says "Print Coupon" below that last bit of text. You want to link that to a page that allows the user to easily print their coupon.

Using interest generators, you can sell without selling by simply being genuinely helpful.  

Lead Generators

The most important part of a successful content strategy is your lead generating pages. While traffic and interest generating content is also important, they can only be as effective as your lead generators. These include product landing pages for individual models, pages for services like car maintenance, model comparisons, and even reports about vehicle safety and performance.

It's worth noting that your team should also spend a lot more time on each individual piece of content that will work as a lead generator. These pages should be longform, and go above and beyond what's expected from a normal piece of content.

To know if you're truly outdoing your competition, take a look at their pages and see if yours do a better job of not only presenting information but actually answering questions as well.

How to Bring it All Together

These three types of content are brought together through internal linking to give search engines a better idea of how they relate. The ultimate goal is to prop up your lead generators with supporting content (traffic and interest generators) to show search engines that those are really important pages.

With proper keyword targeting and quality content, you'll see your traffic, interest, and leads start to grow more than ever before.

Have questions or worries about content? Let’s hear them below!

Written by Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

On Wikimotive's blog earlier this week, we talked about not letting the idea of producing sub-par content get in the way of starting content efforts for your dealership's SEO strategy. This boils down to a simple idea: your content will suck at first , and that's OK.

One of the most difficult parts of getting started, however, is actually coming up with ideas for blogs or other site content. To help you jumpstart these efforts, I've listed three of the absolute easiest ways to find great topics to get you used to generating great ideas for content.

Take a Good, Hard Look at Your Inventory and Services

For dealerships, your inventory and services present a million and one ideas for relevant blog and site content. If you're a Chevy store, you have 16 different consumer models to talk about--all with their own unique features, history, and news.

To quickly get inspiration for original blog posts, write down the name of each model your dealership sells new and each service you provide (such as oil changes, tires, and brakes). Can you think of two ideas for each vehicle/service?

It doesn't matter how simple they may be, write them down. As I said before, your content will suck at first. The key here is to get used to writing about these topics so you can make progress and create higher quality content each day.

Use Current Events as Jumping Off Points

Using that same model list, take the first model, such as "2015 Chevrolet Corvette," and put that into the search bar on Google News.

One of the big Corvette-related stories recently was how incredibly fast it is for the price. Your dealership could write a blog post called "5 Supercars the 2015 Corvette Z06 Beats in Speed and Price" and include the vehicles listed in some of the news reports about the Z06's speed.

In your list, this is an example of how you can keep notes on these model-specific blog ideas:

• 2015 Chevrolet Corvette --> 2015 Z06 Goes 0-60 in 2.95 seconds --> Original Blog Post: 5 Supercars the 2015 Corvette Z06 Beats in Speed and Price

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For services, things aren't as simple, but here's an example of how you can take a broad topic and narrow it down into something you can rank for:

• Oil Change --> Consequences of not getting regular oil changes --> Original Blog Post: Parts You Might Have to Replace if You Don't Get Regular Oil Changes

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Put a New Spin on an Established Idea

Coming up with 100% original blog posts is difficult when millions and millions of others have been at it daily for years. But instead of trying to reinvent the wheel completely, make an established idea better by putting your own spin on it.

For instance, there have been plenty of "Best Cars of All Time" related blog posts written since the Internet became a thing. So writing another, while updated for recent times, wouldn't be the end of the world, why do that when you can use it as a stepping stone instead?

Sticking with the Chevy store example, here's the progression from old idea to new spin:

• Best Cars of All Time --> Best Chevy Cars of All Time --> Original Blog Post: The 5 Most Revolutionary Chevy Vehicles of the 20th Century

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Idea generation does take a lot of time at the onset, which is not something you can escape from. But once you understand how to efficiently search for and develop ideas, you'll be able to cut down on time spent planning while coming up with bigger and better ideas.

Written by Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

By now, most dealers know they need some type of SEO strategy to stay competitive online. But what exactly goes into that?

Website Optimization? Yes.

Linkbuilding? You betcha.

Content? Without a doubt!

While you've heard of these terms and how important they are, do you really know the details of what really makes them work for your dealership? If not, how are you going to hold your SEO or full-service digital marketing company accountable?

Here are the SEO strategy twists most digital marketing vendors don't want you to know.

Fresh, Quality, Purposeful Content is an Absolute Necessity

Your website provider or digital marketing company may say they're creating content for your dealership's website, but was that a one-time deal or are they staying consistent? If not, you can kiss any hope of ROI down the toilet.

The four most important things Google looks for in content are purpose, quality, freshness, and consistency.

• Purpose: What problem does this content solve? Is the information beneficial to your site's users? If you can't answer either, you're dealing with content without a purpose. Consider that the web's "Rebel Without a Cause."

• Quality: More than just good writing, quality content is about organization, depth, and overall presentation. This includes proper fact-checking, readability, and relevant imagery.

• Freshness: Google loves to know that your website is keeping up with the times. By publishing content about recent industry news and other developments, you're establishing yourself as a valuable source of information.

• Consistency: Quantity is not as important as it once was for content, but consistency still matters greatly. Going hand-in-hand with freshness, consistent content creation (accompanied by purpose and quality) is what helps drives more and more organic traffic to dealership websites.

Great content strategies also establishes purpose with already-purposeful and quality content. Tying together existing content on your dealership's site, relationships between different pages are built, allowing your dealership to gather more authority from search engines for the keywords car buyers in your area use to find dealerships.

Successful Linkbuilding Strategies Now Mimic Content Strategies

Like content, linkbuilding used to be all about quantity. The more links, the better. Forget source, context, or anything about the end user's experience, we just want to rank #1.

Of course, SEO has evolved to favor quality over quantity, as Google and other search engines made adjustments to encourage sites to consider user experience in their digital marketing efforts.

An effective linkbuilding strategy now focuses on targeting relevant sites with relevant content, and building links consistently over time instead of all at once. This means car dealers need to seek out authoritative sites related to the automotive industry, not random directories that accept any and every link.

Search engines understand the context of links and if you can earn relevant links on quality, trusted sites in your industry, they'll pass more authority to your site in return.

Website Optimization is More Than Just Design and Content Adjustments

Google wants to send its users to fast websites. If your dealership's site isn't fast enough for users, they'll click the back button and click through to one of your competitors.

Not only will that help them, as they gain another visit, it will eventually hurt your overall rankings. The more users click back to search results from your dealership's site, the more Google will associate your site with low-quality results. Soon enough, you'll be pushed out in favor of sites that are deemed more worthy of top ranks.

Hold your website vendor accountable in this situation by requesting an audit of your site's speed compared to your major competitors. And while you're at it, do one yourself using tools like Pingdom's Website Speed Test and .

They're likely not going to tell you that their competitors are building faster websites, and they're certainly not likely to spend the time and resources necessary to fix your site's issues.

Written by Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

When I started doing SEO and social media for dealers, the one thing that really worried me was how often dealers are being outranked in search engines by third-party listing sites like Autotrader, Cars.com, CarGurus, and Edmunds.

After all, these are sites that make more money from dealers by essentially outmarketing them. What's worse is many of these sites use dealers' money to invest in ad campaigns that actually demonize dealers. The goal being to get customers to skip dealer websites and window shopping, in order to make even more money off of their dealer partners.

And because people are using the web more and more for research, more third-party listing sites are popping up to claim an even bigger piece of the pie from dealers.

From a business perspective, it doesn't sound so bad: You pay a highly-trafficked, tech-heavy site to list your inventory and receive leads in order to sell more cars. Unfortunately, customers that use third-party listing sites tend to be the most difficult to close. As someone who's used CarGurus and TrueCar to research prices and inventory in my area, I can speak from personal experience.

In fact, despite submitting information to dealerships, I ended up buying a completely different car than I was initially researching, and from a completely different dealership. And yet, I received countless emails and phone calls from BDC and sales representatives trying to get me to come in. I got the feeling they chased a lot of leads from third-party sites without much success

Consistent, Quality Leads Come from Your Website

I'm sure you've all heard this before, but it's something I feel a lot of dealers are missing out on because the results can't be seen overnight. The highest quality leads always come from your website! So the goal of any dealership in 2015 and beyond should be to grow your own traffic by investing in things that get customers to your website.

When Wikimotive brings on an SEO client, we look for areas where a dealer can grow quickly and where the most value is. Whether you already employ an SEO company or have an internal team, those are the two most important focuses to have in order to drive more traffic to your website and increase organic leads.

Organic Traffic is Consistent and Grows with the Web

When you create content that drives traffic to your website and build links that helps your site rise through the ranks, you're not just buying time from your SEO company. By doing more for your dealership's site, you're investing in it and helping it grow. You need to have a consistent content strategy to maintain and develop new rankings, but they'll stay fairly consistent, and more often than not, traffic will grow naturally over time.

As Google and other search engines get more and more intelligent, dealerships and other businesses have an opportunity to claim rankings that may have otherwise been difficult to take from high-authority third-party listing sites.

So the big question is, do you want to continue chasing down customers or do you want them to come to you?

Written by Mark Frost, Director of Content at Wikimotive

Dealers, there’s something fishy going on with the major automotive website providers. Problems that affect search results are popping up left and right, but no one is willing to accept responsibility and fix the issues. Instead, there’s a brick wall of “Aw shucks, that’s the way things are. Guess you’ll have to deal with it.”

And I know what you’re thinking, but these are not isolated events with one rotten website provider. These issues are occurring with almost all providers in the industry.

I’m going to share a couple of my recent experiences, and I want to hear about the issues that your companies and dealers have faced when asking providers to fix problems with their systems.

Example #1: Shifting Blame and Unaware Managers

After a dealership came to Wikimotive with rapidly decreasing traffic, we did an aggressive audit of their site and discovered a number of red flags that could be causing issues with Google.

But as we took these issues directly to the provider, we were told the pages that were raising the red flags were created by someone at the dealership or a third party. However, with a simple Google search, we were able to discover that to be entirely untrue. Because if someone had written that content exclusively, we wouldn’t have a problem with it in the first place. This, on the other hand, is a big problem:

The response to this, and another inquiry regarding duplicate content from the provider’s SEO MANAGER ,was essentially “Yeah, there’s some duplicate content, but until Google says that’s a problem, we’re not willing to change.”

Um, pretty sure they’ve said it before. And every professional SEO company agrees that small changes, such as location–which is standard practice for many website providers–can still cause a page to be labeled a duplicate in Google’s eyes.

Specifically, Moz advises site owners to steer clear of this type of activity:

“Duplicate content anywhere on your site, but especially on city landing pages. Yes this includes recycling a few keywords here and there to make it look different. You can get away with this for a while, but odds are, Google will catch you and it won’t be fun.” 

What kind of business admits having issues to a client and then refuses to look into a solution? The kind that thinks that it’s in the position of power, as opposed to the paying customer.

Are you mad yet? 

You should be! Because until you go through and audit your site or any of your clients’ sites, you don’t know the full extent of the damages.

Think about it like this: If you were building a house and a building inspector told you there were multiple code violations you needed to fix before construction could continue, what would you expect your contractor to say? Probably that they’d fix the issues immediately, and for free of charge, right? Of course! That’s the job you paid them to do, and they messed up! But, what would you do if instead of offering to fix things, they blamed you and fought with the building inspector on the existence of building codes.

That’s what we’re dealing with here, people.

Example #2: Consistent Ball Dropping

When you can actually get a provider to agree to fix something, you come up against an entirely different set of problems. Because if there’s one thing automotive website providers are good at, it’s dragging their feet and leaving a job half-done.

Now, we all can appreciate what it’s like to run a business–and software that powers hundreds, sometimes thousands of websites is no doubt extremely complicated–but when things seem to consistently be delayed months at a time, something’s got to give.

No, seriously. It’s that bad. 

We gave a time-sensitive job to one provider in order to clean up a newer client’s website. The client came to us after discovering a manual web spam penalty by Google, entrusting us to help them work through the issue. Here’s the list we gave our new client’s provider:

• 259 pages to be deleted
• Redirect or fix a number of duplicate pages (which they duplicate by default, I might add)
• Make certain sitemap is compliant with Google’s guidelines

And here’s what was “completed” about two months later:

• 24 pages disallowed in robots.txt — which does not have the desired effect
• 235 untouched, yet-to-be-deleted pages
• No redirects or fixes to duplicate pages
• Sitemap still not compliant with Google

What happened?

They assured us multiple times throughout those two months that they were “working” on the issues. But what we really got was a bunch of talk to get us to shut up and go away.

Imagine you bring your car to a dealership to fix an issue and you end up having to leave it over night. The next morning you call to get a status update and they tell you they’re working on it. Not unreasonable, they could be really busy. But what happens if it’s not done the next day or the day after that? You start getting really pissed off!

I mean, really: Calling your provider regularly for two months and getting nothing but “We’re working on it, okay” is anything but okay! We all know that dealerships can’t get away with this type of crappy support and service, so why do the businesses that assist us get away with it time and time again?

Where’s the Outrage?

These are only a couple of examples of the major incompetency that runs rampant at many of the major automotive website providers. In researching similar issues for this blog post, I came across many instances in which dealer website managers dealt with some of the most mind-blowing issues.

The most ridiculous story was from an internet manager who had a list of issues with a particular website provider. The one that stands out the most, though, was the fact that this provider had listed the wrong “Contact Us” number when they originally set the site up.

Don’t worry, it gets worse.

It would be somewhat understandable if someone accidentally entered a wrong digit–and instead of getting their dealership you got the pizza place across town–but the provider had entered the number for a completely different dealership onto their site.

Yes, it gets even worse than that. 

It took five requests and three months for the provider to make ONE LITTLE FIX. So for three months, visitors for their site were greeted by another dealership, which means leads and revenue were flushed down the toiled thanks to a provider that doesn’t hold itself accountable.

If that had happened on my watch, heads would have rolled.

Start Holding Providers Accountable

So what’s the problem here? After dealing with an SEO Manager who doesn’t think duplicate content is an issue and issues that never get resolved, I’ve come to the conclusion that website providers in the automotive industry simply aren’t used to being held accountable, and it’s time that changed.

What does this mean for me as a dealer or manager?

If you haven’t already directly dealt with issues getting your provider to do things right, it’s likely you’re either lucky or your site has yet to be audited in order to uncover the problems plaguing most dealership websites.

With a site audit, you’ll gain a better understanding how website providers are giving you a product that is doing harm to your search engine authority, as well as overall business, the second it goes live.

Do you agree that most major website providers suck at doing their job? Had a horrible experience with a provider you want to share?

Whether you agree or disagree with this post, let's discuss these issues within the industry in the comments below.