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.

and

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 -

Pay Per Click advertising has it’s place like for special promotions or a fresh site.  However at the end of the day there are so many studies out there that show that SEO provides better value than Seach Engine Marketing or PPC.  One of the best explanations was from Hubspot.com.

Their simple study showed that ranking number nine generates the same amout of leads and traffic as the number two paid listing.

From the post at Hubspot:

Here are the key takeaways from the data and the images above:

1) Organic results get 75%+ of the attention. People don’t click on the ads nearly as much as the organic results.

2) The first organic result gets over 25% of all clicks. Within the organic results, the first result gets the most clicks by far – more than double the second result.

3) Within the ads, the first ad also gets the most clicks. But, since you pay per click for the ads, you should care less about volume and more about if the traffic will actually convert and what your cost per lead and cost per sale will be.

4) There are a good number of clicks on all top 10 organic results. Even the last result gets about 3% of people to click on it – this is about the same rate as the second pay per click ad, and unlike the ad, its free!

SEO wins day in and day out.  Search engine marketing is an expensive way to drive traffic.  Contrary to popular belief SEO can be almost instant and that is the real purpose of this post to show how fast I can get it to rank for certain terms.  I bet it will be faster than the time it takes to set up a pay per click campaign.  Should see results in minutes not in ages, the term used to denigrate SEO.  I took it as a challenge from Dealer.com

I’ll report back with results.

• Published at : 12:45 pm Decemember 12, 2008
• Ranking #1 for : “Dealer.com Challenge – SEO vs Search Engine Marketing” 2:00 pm 12/12/08 < low value but indexed.
• Ranking Number #6 for “dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing” 3:45 pm 12/12/08
• Ranking #1 for “Dealer.com Search Engine Marketing” 7:00 pm 12/12/08

• # 3 for dealer.com search marketing 8:00 pm 12/12/08
• # 3 for dealer.com seo 8:00pm 12/12/08
• #1 & #2 for dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing 10 am 12/13/08
• #1 & #2 for dealer.com  search engine marketing vs seo 10 am 12/13/08
• #1 for dealer.com seo 12/14/08
• #1 for dealer.com search engine marketing 12/14/08
• #1 for dealer.com search marketing 12/14/08
• Going to stop tracking results now, and this page may fall out of favor, it was just a test to see how fast it would be to win search terms and show that it is not an ages long process.

images from Hubspot and MarketingSherpa

Recent post at www.drivingsales.com/blog