Automotive website providers have had a license to steal for the last decade and as 2008 rolls to a close I wish to make my predictions for the New Year and share some examples of how to hold your provider accountable.

Some recent activity in the automotive blogosphere and my personal interactions  have brought some things to light that need to be shared as they relate to holding car dealer website providers accountable:

Another consultant shared his dealer clients interactions with Cobalt customer support where they claimed ownership of his search engine optimization efforts.  To me it appears to be reactionary retaliation when the dealer realized they were not getting the seo services that they were paying Cobalt for and they, Cobalt, was trying to save face and denigrate the consultants work.  He posted this at automotivedigitalmarketing.com and drivingsales.com, drivingsales removed the vendor name and I did another post about this automotive social networking issue.

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Personally I have contacted BZ Results customer support to add a form capture to a page built on their platform and was told under no certian circumstances that it could not be done in less than 72 hours and there was no one that could tell me how to get their native form code in less than the same time frame.  This was for a dealer group that spends over $100,000 per year with BZ Results.  I even leveraged my network with top level contacts to no avail, my contact tried but I kept winding up on the wrong path.

In the first example if Cobalt would of been providing value for the fees they were changing the dealer for their search engine optimization services they would not of had to respond in a reactionary way to try and cover their tracks.  In my interactions with BZ Results if they would of been my website provider they would of been fired on the spot just as an employee that I pay $100,000 a year would of been when I was told it would take three days to fulfill a simple request.

Dealers have been force fed this for years now and with all of the education being delivered to them they are starting to see through it.  Some things you can do to to insure you receive value for your car dealer website spend or to use during your research for a web site provider:

• Is your traffic increasing – While dealership website traffic is also affected by many variables but your search engine traffic should be increasing relative to market conditions if it is properly optimized.
• How many other same franchise dealers in your market area do they represent?  If they represent even one how can they represent you without a conflict of interest?  You need to ask them if they will give you an exclusive in your marketing area before buying from them.
• Other than design what are the cost? Design is cheap and CMS licensing should be as well.  That is all you are really paying for.  Hosting costs are more of a nuisance than an expense.
• How many other on same server? – With dedicated server cost available for less than $600 a year you should be on your own server with your own IP address not a server crammed full of other dealer’s websites.

I predict over the next year the current dealer website offerings will see a drastic overhaul.  Here are some changes that I feel like will take place because car dealers will demand it and other market influences will dictate:

• Long multi-year contracts will disappear – Dealers will look for design services on various CMS platforms and push their cost down.  With a full fledged highly custom design and content running in <$3000 range and hosting as described above.
• Dealers will need to leverage multiple online properties to win on the search engine optimization front with the current changes being made in search engine algorithms.  Dealer micro sites and mini sites will have more value if implemented properly.
• Mass deindexing of some providers platforms by Google. – Dealer.com and Vinsolutions platforms spam the search engines with individual inventory listings without taking the steps to remove these listings from the search engine results pages.  This goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines.  Both platforms have a very distinguishable footprint which means they will be easy for Google’s search engineers to detect and ban.  I know that one of these providers are in the que for a manual review by Google based on another post I did about Indexed Car Dealer Inventory.
• Small website providers will flourish and the big providers will lose market share because they can not adapt fast enough to meet the ever changing algorithm changes marketing paradigms.
• Automotive websites will become publishing platforms versus static content with just a few customizable pages.

Please feel free to add your coments and predictions -