The most basic marketing principals are being violated in this type search engine optimization. Consumers searching for a dealer by name do not want to see how some company worked to capture their click. Some consumers may go as far researching the company that the dealership has hired. Once they realize that they are the same people associated with Millennium Teleservices (more here) and Civic Development Group (more here) they may decide to look for another NJ Infiniti dealer.

When you are marketing for a client the last thing you want to do is steal traffic from them especailly for basic name searches.  When building links to a clients site it should be from an automotive centered website or directory style listing not your marketing site and if you do use their name in your marketing it should be done in such a way as to not optimize for the clients name just your services.

We are currently building up a blog farm with evergreen content to accentuate other link building activity for our clients.  Most of the content is about product updates and news from the manufacturers repurposed to show natural linking to the clients sites from the proper vertical.

Some are even claiming that the changes they are implementing will even be the death of search engine optimization as we know it.  This is true to an extent.  What these changes will accomplish is create a need to have more than one website as a marketing property to reach buyers at different points in the buying funnel in your marketing area.

In addition to their main website they will need additional properties to have total control of the search engines to become a dominator in their marketing areas. If executed properly dealers will be able to compete with manufactures sites for product searches. As a test I was able to win some great search terms that are generating national traffic and very localized traffic for automotive terms buyers use, generating 5-7 leads a day with around 20 clicks a day to ebay.com. Granted this site is not used for a dealer, it is geared to affiliate conversions and not much effort has been put into it.  You can contact me direct to get more info.  A good affiliate marketer does not give away his niches and I have given away to much now.

Even if not full developed dealers should own as many variations of their products with regional descriptions. IE:

• citybranddealer.com city-brand-dealer.com
• citymodeldealer.com city-model-dealer.com
• dealernamemarketareadealer.com dealername-market area-dealer.com

You could use these domains to create landing pages, blogs, product brochures and use them to provide others search benefits to your main website and drive traffic.

This coupled with maximizing local listings in the major search engines will provide more traffic than any PPC campaign can and attract targeted traffic if the additional assets are optimized for the correct point in the buying cycle.

The algorithmic changes that Google is making will not have near the impact on automotive SEO as it will on broader niches.  Personalized search for consumers will not disrupt the search engine results pages nowhere near as much as it would other sites competing for consumers clicks.

Consumers do not perform searches for car information anywhere near as much as the general web public search for other terms.  Let’s face it people only look for car information when they are close to making a decision on purchasing one, about every three years.  Personalized search will not even come into play in the automotive industry, for marketing purposes.  Where as localized search results will.

Additional web assets with correct local search engine local directory listings will be the big winner for car dealers in their search engine marketing efforts.  Still placing search engine optimization heads above PPC advertising and search engine marketing.