As an industry, we have advanced to the point that many dealers are really starting to take advantage of social media, particularly Facebook. I've been doing audits of both KPA and non-KPA dealers in preparation for a big announcement next month and the results were surprising in both directions.

The first surprise was in how many dealers are not only "getting it" but have advanced to start doing some things I had never seen before. Mind you that I spend more of my waking hours engulfed in search and social than I do in the "real world" (being married to a loving wife who makes sure I don't forget to eat or shower is a blessing), so when I come across such freshness being used by dealers, it's very encouraging.

The second surprise is when I come across the very basics getting missed. In an effort to fix that, here's a quick list of some of the mistakes I found in my adventures. The fact that these aren't getting done means that someone needs to wear a dunce cap: ME! It seems that I have done the industry a disservice by not making sure that these types of mistakes were completely eliminated.

• - Use a custom Facebook URL. If you have enough Likes (it's been a while but I believe the minimum is 25) then you can change your page URL one time to something unique. Go to facebook.com/username/ as the admin and change it. Keep in mind that dots and capital letters are important, but they all redirect. In other words, if you type in facebook.com/tkcarsites it will still take you to facebook.com/TK.Carsites. Choose wisely - you only get one shot without major hassle. Make it branded - don't try to do an SEO play here.
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• - Post daily. I cannot stress this enough. Use tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to schedule posts for your days off. EdgeRank is important for how high your posts show up on users' walls and breaks from posting will push your EdgeRank down.
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• - Be professional. I know that Facebook is about fun and sharing, but be mindful of what you're posting. I saw way too many inappropriate pictures, many of which were actually branded with the dealers' logo on them. Your dealership is a business. Don't try to be "one of the guys" by posting scantilly-clad women or funny-but-offensive images.
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• - Reply, darn it! If someone takes the time to ask a real question on your wall or in one of your posts, answer them. I actually saw a post about a special where someone asked the dealer in a comment whether their certified preowned vehicles came with a better warranty than regular used cars. Two days later the same person replied to her own comment by saying, "Nevermind, XXXXXXX at XXXXXXXXXX answered my question and sold me a car today. Thanks anyway!"
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• - Diversify. Your Facebook page shouldn't be a one-trick-pony. While it's great to post testimonials, for example, don't let them be the only thing on your page, especially if you're only getting two or three a month.
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• - Interact with other pages. This one might not be a Facebook basic, but it's easy and works for those who are active. Your page can like other pages. When you like other pages, you can interact with them and post on their walls. This is great locally as you can get some branding and publicity to a different audience by posting on their walls. Don't spam, but if it's appropriate then go for it. For example, if you're having Stan's BBQ bringing smokers to your big tent sale, you should definitely post a thank you on their page, conveniently posted the day before. "Thank you Stan for being the grill master at tomorrow's big tent sale at XXXXXXXX Motors! Can't wait to give away some of your amazing ribs!"

These weren't the only things I found, but they were definitely the ones that stood out. Facebook and social media in general is really starting to emerge as an ROI based form of marketing and communication. Dealers are making strides and it's a wonderful thing.

Just don't forget the basics.

At the Automotive Boot Camp last week, I had the pleasure of going over analytics with a dealer who was at a loss for why they weren't getting more traffic to their website. One of the first things I noticed was that the website looked good on Internet Explorer and Firefox but had errors in Google Chrome and failed to display properly at all in Opera and Safari.

"As long as it works in Internet Explorer, we're fine," the dealer told me. "Our area is not tech-savvy and almost everyone we know uses Internet Explorer."

I was aghast. I literally didn't know what to say. I thought these days were behind us.

I was wrong.

It doesn't matter where your dealership is. People are using the internet. They know how to use the internet. Even if they don't, someone in their family does and has helped them know the basics.

Internet Explorer is still big, but check your stats before thinking that "everyone is using it." Last week, Chrome overtook IE as the most used browser in the world. Even in North America which is still IE-heavy, it only accounts for around 40% of the non-mobile web traffic.

Do you want to reach 40%? How about 90%, assuming your website works in IE, FF, and Chrome?

Why not go for 100%?

The story ended well. We looked at his analytics and he was partially correct: a high 44% of his visitors were using IE. It wasn't the number he was thinking and it opened his eyes to the importance cross-browser website performance. Have you looked at your numbers lately?

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Find +JD Rucker on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

In April, 2012, Google began rolling out major changes to their search algorithm. The update, known as "Penguin", had dramatic effects on many of the searches that people do on a regular basis. In the automotive industry, the effects were felt by thousands of dealers. Some moved up if they had quality SEO practices being employed on their sites. As a result, others moved down.

This graphic goes into a little detail about the philosophies that dealers and their search partners should employ to take advantage of the changes. Penguin is a good thing. It helps to level the playing field for those who want to do better and gives those willing to be exceptional the ability to fly to the top.

Click to enlarge.

From time to time, storms collide to form a "perfect storm", a convergence of forces that creates something more powerful than the sum of its parts. This is not one of those times, but it certainly was a blast doing an "ask the experts" webinar about search engine optimization with Gary May and Eric Miltsch.

When you get an hour to spare, a good way to spend it would be to listen to this webinar.

I was having a discussion with our founder over the best ways to separate the good from the bad SEO providers in the automotive industry when I realized that very few (VERY few) vendors presented all three components to help dealers make a decision about who to choose. There are three major components that a savvy dealer will want to look at when comparing vendors.

The first one is arguably the most common but still very important. Requisites are "Things that are necessary for the achievement of a specified end." In the field of search engine optimization, knowing what it takes to achieve the goal of higher rankings for the right keywords is essential to success.

SEO is both a science and an art. While there are definitely techniques that can be used and repeated to help towards that end, it's necessary to apply creative thinking during nearly every aspect of the SEO process. It's not simply a robotic experience. Here are the four primary requisites that every SEO vendor should be focused on in 2012 and beyond:

• * High-quality, unique content on the site. For years it has been hammered into the automotive consiousness that "content is king" but one of the components that is rarely discussed is that not all content is created equal. It's not about keyword stuffing. It's not about feeding news articles onto your site or automating content through "spinning" tools that generates tons of pages. Not anymore. Today and going forward both Google and Bing are able to recognize high-quality content and reward it over automated content on your websites.
• * Inbound links from relevant, trusted sources. This is the big one that is currently being addressed by both Google and Bing. It isn't just a sheer numbers game anymore. More is good, but higher-quality is even better. Is the vendor sending links from hundreds, even thousands of low-quality sites? If so, they're not being as effective as they could be if they were generating organic links from trusted sources.
• * Application of "Social Signals" on content pages of the site. Social media has been pushed onto the car business as a golden ticket to success. Whether it is or not is up for debate, but one thing that is clear about social is that it can dramatically affect search results when applied properly. This isn't about putting up buttons on every page. It's about building the trust factor from other humans on content pages on your site that Google and Bing will read as "quality and trusted content." Social media is their way of crowdsourcing the quality of their results.
• * Proper keyword research. This can never be discussed enough. The best optimization practices in the world are wasted if the target keywords are poor. Going for the right keywords is the absolute first step to search success.

The second and third portions of sifting through automotive SEO providers are published on other networks. I hope that we can go around the whole circle of the three major automotive social networks to provide real understanding to dealers around the nation.

This video talks about all three:

Over the next couple of weeks I will be going into more detail about how social media is utilized as an SEO tool for car dealers. We will go over some of the various components that we've been "playing with" over the last couple of years (and ramping up tremendously in the last few months) that have yielded some incredible results. This will be a Driving Sales exclusive.

Google and Bing have both acknowledged their use of social signals in their search algorithms. This is different than the sheer link-building aspect of social media. Social links are viewed very differently than standard website links. Twitter, for example, uses the "nofollow" attribute on their links and shrinks them. Two years ago, this made them relatively-worthless from an SEO perspective. Today, there are ways to use Twitter to push your pages over the threshold and achieve better rankings for individual pages and the entire domain in general.

That's just Twitter, and it's not the most important social site anymore when it comes to search rankings. I'll go much more in-depth here on Driving Sales about how they work and what you can do to improve your search rankings as a result, but in the meantime please check out this infographic by CMO that breaks down how some of the biggest social networks can be used for SEO and other things.

Click to enlarge.

This is a topic that has been covered many times before. Often I see blogs get started but eventually abandoned or automated with scraped content from other sites. I'm going to take another stab at this, only this time I'm making my plea in video format.

Below you'll see the first video in the series, "Driving the Point Home" where I go "off the cuff" on various topics pertaining to automotive internet marketing. We already have several videos recorded and will be posting them from time to time on Driving Sales.

There are 4 primary reasons but be sure to pay closest attention to the last one. I don't know how else to convey how important it is to have a humanized component in the dealership's marketing strategy. Hopefully, this will be enough to spark some creative juices and the gumption necessary to stay consistent with blogging.

Google takes a lot of heat in the tech world for being too powerful, potentially evil, and undoubtably ambitious. It comes with the territory; rarely can a company attain the level of complete domination within an industry the way that Google has owned search for years.

Bing is still valid as is Yahoo by default, but the reality is that the general population trusts Google results as an authority. Everyone has had seemingly-impossible-to-answer questions that have been instantly, almost magically answered by the Big G.

It's for this reason that ranking near the top for competitor cities is one of the highest value SEO goals a dealer and their SEO vendor can have. It's a core to KPA SEO. Here's why:

Let's say you have a competitor in Jaredville 30 miles to the north. The city is medium sized but the Miltsch Auto Group has the market cornered and they have the only Ford point in Jaredville. Just about everyone in town knows about Miltsch Ford.

When people want to buy a vehicle or have their Ford serviced, chances are they're going to search Google for "Miltsch Ford" or "Miltsch Auto Group". Those people aren't your targets. It's the people who do the search for "Jaredville Ford" or "Jaredville Ford Dealers" that you want.

Why? Because since they know all about Miltsch and may have even done business with them in the past, when they go to Google to search for "Jaredville Ford", they're looking for an alternative. They're looking for you or whatever dealer is ranked near the top for that search.

People trust Google's opinion and we ask it all the time without noticing. If you're in the top 5 (preferably #2, of course) for the terms "Jaredville Ford" and "Jaredville Ford Dealers" you have an opportunity to not only sell more cars but to also keep a deal from going to your competitor.

Defend your own backyard as much as possible. Once you're set in your own city, start going after your competitors. It's this type of strategy that will separate you from the other dealers in the area and can have a dramatic affect on your numbers as well as their numbers.

Last week at SXSW, we had the privilege of seeing some of the latest and greatest in search and social that was, quite frankly, a whirlwind of knowledge that we rarely experience at conferences. There's normally a good amount of information at conferences but the sheer bulk of usable data pertinent to the automotive industry made me wish at times that we brought more than 4 KPA people down to Austin.

With that said, there were tons of tidbits of data that I will be sharing over the coming weeks, but one of the most important came during Danny Sullivan's talk with Google's Matt Cutts and Bing's Duane Forrester. They covered so many points that it will require multiple blog posts to bring to light, but one reinforcement piece that struck me was the passion behind all three of these search giants when discussing 301 redirects.

In the automotive industry, it's hard to get vendors to create 301 redirects especially when converting from one website platform to another. The URL-naming-conventions from one provider to another differ greatly and changes can often lead to hundreds, even thousands of broken links. In the automotive industry, we very rarely notice them because it has become a standard amongst most vendors to create a custom-404 which either redirects to the homepage (example) or calls up a set page (example) such as inventory to present regardless of what the URL string was.

This is fine, but it's a bandaid. According to all three on the panel, getting your vendor to put in a 301-redirect when changes to a website are made is akin to asking someone for permission to cross the street. It's a no-brainer. It has to be done, particularly in an industry that is so reliant on search engine traffic.

We'll be discussing more of our takeaways from SXSW in the coming weeks, but cleaning up the basics will put your dealership website on the right track to success.

One of my favorite activities when searching for quality content on the internet is to go to Pinterest to find videos, images, and infographics worth sharing. One in particular stood out this morning and I explored this infographic heartily. Once done, I went back to see who to attribute; lo and behold, it was Driving Sales' new Director of Product Strategy Eric Miltsch who popped it up on my Pinterest stream!

In this graphic, the timeline, trends, terms, and tidbits come to life and show us where the industry has been. Knowing where we came from can help guide our future and as the automotive SEO world continues to grow and advance, having this historical understanding can be an amazing reference.

Click to enlarge.

(Via: Killer Infographics)