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 -

These wordpress based site will be mini sites that can be tailored to what ever the marketing push the dealer is running or around specific models.  With the current changes in process with Google’s Universal Search the static aberrations created by others micros site vendors will no longer be able to have the search engine relevance they once enjoyed.  It will take regularly updated content to win or they will have to rely on dealer search engine marketing or automotive pay per click for traffic.

The automotive online marketing space is about to be turned on it’s head.  Will these sites help dealers reach more people via the search engine without spending a to of money?  I seem to think they will.

We will use that format to create pages fro every vehicle in the Frod line up over the comming two or three months and learn from the mistakes as we go.  One thing I do not like how that page was created is that it was created as a page and not as a post and I did not have all of the archetcture in place when it was published.  As time goes on it will not matter though.

Eventually this blog site will be an authority site for every thing Ford related.  I do not particularly like the domain it is on but that can be overcome with a strong enough automotive search engine optimization tooling and process.  What is good is a blog can serve more than one purpose as time goes on and once the content base is built it will ranks for thousands of keywords.

Certain types of promotions can be delivered faster and more effectively than using a two or three page microsite, especially limited time promotions like Nissan Delivers or Ford Employee Pricing Plus.  Promoting limited time promotions on the web would be better served using a publishing platform so your marketing collateral could be archived and as new promotions roll out you can add them to the home page of your site.

If you are looking to drive credit leads using landing pages at places squidoo.com will provide free traffic and search engine optimization benefit and the cost is very cheap.  I have a few squidoo lenses delivering daily leads through lead aggregation services and they rank very well for terms related to Tulsa bad credit car loans and Jacksonville buy here pay here car lots.

Because static content can fall out of favor with the search engines you can also use blogs to drive traffic to your main site or lead generation property.  This will allow you to rank for more keywords faster and offer multiple points of entry and dominate localized search terms.  This blog about New Jersey bad credit car loans is ranking for over 500 keywords in less than 60 days and drives an incredible amount of targeted traffic in a geographic area.

Using unbranded dealer micro sites to generate leads for a car dealer does have benefit if you have an outlet to dispose of leads that are not in your market area.  Most dealers do not wish to make this type of investment of time to facilitate this or really understand how it works.  Having model specific microsites that rank nationally really have very little value especially if they are unbranded unless you have a way to dispose of these additional leads.  A car dealer would be better off to have a multi page secondary website that ranks in competitive market areas to drive email leads and phone calls and deliver a branding message.

Before making a huge investment you need to explore all of your options and look for the most cost effective ways to deliver additional leads.   You can have very sticky content created on a regular basis that does not require a dealer to invest in search engine marketing and own the search engine result pages using very evergreen search engine optimization techniques.

If you would like a no cost consultation please give me a call at 912-266-1629

Using a CMS style mini site to push promotions or specific models and tying all of those levels of content together and having the ability to archive contnet will provide far greater value for long term SEO benefit and relevence.

Because most models and more specifically year models of vehicles come and go.  Where as a well optimized page on a domain with other layers of content can give your mini site a permanent shelf life.  For example I created a simple landing page targeting buyers in looking for a 2009 Mustang Shelby in Brunswick that has multiple calls to action and is tied in with other content about Brunswick car dealers.

The site itself is not designed specifically for a particular dealer.  It is geared towards affiliate conversions but once the traffic is monitored for a period of time it will show how well a multiple page mini site can benefit for local search traffic versus a simple one or two page automotive micro site.

Single landing page sites can be accomplished using other platforms or at very low cost.  Where as a multifaceted CMS system can be designed for set up for client management or direct marketing management at a cost that provides greater roi for the dealer.

After reviewing the traffic stats for a site that is number one for Nissan delivers in google it really shows how little value there is for a Nissan dealer in Victoria Texas to have this property. They would be better served to have a site set up on something like wordpress that can create multiple landing pages and go after a larger range of keywords such as local search terms in addition to promotions.

Graph showing how worthless the Nissan delivers search term is for a Nissan dealer in Victoria Texas.

The goal is noble but useless. If you notice the spike during the second week of the month it looks like there was some other promotion that drove traffic via the search engines and then it tapers off to around 10 hits a day. I am not sure what the purpose of the site will be when the current promotion ends but it looks like it only had a one week life span.

Chances are this post will get in the serps for Nissan delivers search terms and really shows the power of wordpress for a dealer micro sites. I am working on developing a theme that will allow dealers to leverage its power.