PUREDEALER | Automotive Internet Marketing | SEO | PPC | Custom Dealer Websites

Automotive Website Link Building and SEO

Posted on 24. Feb, 2009 by admin.

Continue Reading

Checklist for Internet Marketing Success for Dealers

Posted on 03. Feb, 2009 by admin.

Use this Automotive Internet marketing “cheat sheet” to see how your dealership is performing on the Internet. Are you conquering all of these areas and performing automotive internet marketing as well as your competitors? Although success or failure in these areas could imply that you need improvement, it does necessarily mean you are not an expert in your marketing area since so many other businesses and dealerships are failing to execute even a small portion of these requirements.

We built this simple checklist and refine it as needed to determine the “health” of a dealership’s website or marketing efforts. Many car dealers feel they have everything handled, or have concquered all that is available online but the truth of the matter is they usually have much to learn or are not succeeding in one area or several.

Take a look through the following and rate yourself, or we can perform a rating for you.

Automotive Internet Marketing Success Checklist

New Vehicle Marketing Checklist:

• Google search displays client franchise with state name (Chevrolet dealer NJ)
• Google search displays client franchise with County name (Honda dealer Bergen County, NJ)
• New Vehicles Featured on website Homepage
• Google Search displays  ad to dealer’s website for a model name (Honda Civic)

Used Vehicle Marketing Checklist:

• 90% of their Used cars on Craiglist:
• Preowned Vehicles Featured on website Homepage
• Preowned Specials are on dealer website
• Google Search displays link to website for used, franchise, state (certified Honda Delaware)
• Google Search displays ad to dealers website for used model search (used Ford)

Automotive Brand and Reputation Marketing Checklist

• Client’s name is found in #1 position on Google
• Dealer Rater /Rip Off report is not on Google page one
• Negative reviews not found on Google page one
• Is your business listed in all yellow page directories? Yellowpages.com, yellowbot.com, superpages.com, local.com, etc

Online Marketing Link Checklist:

• Site has dozens of pages indexed in Google: example, search site:mainlinehonda.com

Dealer Website Marketing Checklist:

• Internet Savings coupon on site
• Current Ad on site
• Video player on site with compelling video or youtube video
• New Car Specials on Site
• Used Car Specials On Site
• Service Coupons on site

If one of several of these areas are lacking then you may be missing out on some great conversions of traffic into leads. When you are looking for an Automotive Internet Marketing expert, make sure they are looking at all of these areas. If not, contact PureDealer at 609 977 5050

Continue Reading

Craigslist Automotive Marketing Video

Posted on 01. Feb, 2009 by admin.

Please view a great Craigslist Automotive Marketing video and learn how many visitors, phone calls, and emails that you can gain from doing Craigslist the “right way”. Sell more cars and eliminate third party lead providers and other vendors. Some of our dealers have saved thousands over autotrader and cars.com marketing budget.

Continue Reading

Coffee is for Closers!

Posted on 28. Jan, 2009 by admin.

Not safe for kids, but very funny and sometimes not so far from some of the meetings I have witnessed.

Continue Reading

Think Small for your Automotive Marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Posted on 31. Dec, 2008 by admin.

The big automotive marketing companies think big, act big, make big deals with the manufacturers. Major marketing contracts are negotiated on the manufacturers (dealership’s?) behalf and the best automotive website and marketing solutions are chosen based on some factors that occur behind closed doors without dealership involvement, intervention, or say in the matter.

However, when the big marketing company represents YOU and also ALL of your local competitors, who benefits the most? How does the Internet, Google, the manufacturer, and this big automotive internet marketing company decide who will rank #1 on Google for “Honda New Jersey” or “Houston Honda Dealer”? You paid your money just like the other 10 guys in your market, but why is the other guy beating you in the search results when you have made the same investment, paid the same bill, to the same manufacturer or vendor?

Who will get the #1 spot? Will it be the big Chevy dealer or the little Chevy dealer who wins in Google? Is money a factor, luck, favoritism? Is it first in first on top?

Well, some of these questions can be put aside because here are some good points to ask the “big web developers” or “largest automotive marketing firms” in the US when they ask for your business…

A few questions to ask the Large automotive marketing companies

1) How do you get me ranked higher than my competitor, when we both use the same exact site and SEO?

2) Am I allowed to choose the phrases I want to win in the search engines and if so what exactly will you do to ensure that I get there, and how much will it cost?

3) What comes for free and what is extra, regarding search engine optimization and SEO-based keywords?

4) What can I do, and what tools are at my disposal to self-manage my destiny on the Internet or has my fate already been decided when you signed the deal with automotive-marketing-company.com?

These are some tough questions that will make the big guys squirm because they really, truly have no alternative but to dodge the question or provide you with some lip service. “You’ve always been my favorite, you’re the best, we will get you #1 for what you need”, etc etc”. Just sign here on the dotted line… They are hoping you do not check, forget about it, or in a few months will let you know they are working on it, hoping to buy more time. Chances are good that your personal account rep will have left within 6 months anyway so all feelings of the sweet whisperings will slowly turn into a feeling of rage.

The Benefits of a smaller automotive marketing company are large:

1) We serve you, the client and do not have major conflicts of interest like the 500 pound gorillas do.

2) We can hand-craft a marketing plan that matches your exact needs to sell the cars you want to sell.

3) We move fast, have no red tape to cut through, and are on the forefront of the most current marketing techniques because we use them for ourselves. We talk the talk and walk the walk.

4) We do not have to cater to the manufacturers and limit your website, microsites, pay per click marketing, or automotive Search engine optimization to specific demands (unless co-op is involved of course)

Picture yourself for a moment inside a supermarket, in front of the ice cream freezer. There are 40 choices but the flavor is only vanilla. Who determines which vanilla ice cream container is placed in front? When you choose a major automotive web site marketer who also handles 39 other dealers in your DMA, what is the likelihood that you will be the ice cream in the front of the freezer?

Continue Reading

Top 5 pay per click marketing optimization techniques

Posted on 29. Dec, 2008 by admin.

We have posted some incredible pay per click (PPC) numbers for our clients. Before we give 5 good tips on how to maximize your automotive internet marketing, there are a few things you need to have prepared in order to measure the results. You need good analytics and a lot of time. That’s really it. If you work hard, you can get some results that look like this:

Chevy dealer automotive marketing sample

If you spend some time look at your bounce rate, exit pages, new visitor ratio, and keyword list, you can quickly match that up to your keyword and PPC budget to help your dealership spend less per click and get more for your money. The top 5 list below already assumes you have run a campaign and have some background knowledge on search marketing. It also takes into account that you have a Google adwords or similar campaign that has run for a month or so.

How to get more from your automotive pay per click budget:

1. Review your keywords in your Analytics and remove those with very high bounce rates. If you are getting click after click on some top automotive phrases and still get a high bounce rate, then remove that keyword to give other keywords a chance to run. Some people will argue that a high bounce rate is indiciative that the dealership’s phone is ringing. This is possible so make sure to track every sales call to see if you can find trends. There are more advanced methods to track to phone conversion but we will save that for another article.
2. Remove the keywords that are not converting. Do you have a decent bounce rate but they are not visiting any pages or filling out any forms? Remove it. There are usually some great hidden automotive keywords in your Adwords PPC account that have not had the chance to run that may convert better. Sometimes long keyphrases are good, sometimes they are not. There is no hard and fast rule that can be applied to all automotive advertsing online.
3. Change your ads constantly. Testing testing testing is what marketing is all about. If you are not testing your ads or automotive copy then you are not maximizing your results. Just a few simple changes to your car copy or price of a vehicle in the small text ad can cause your automotive click through rate or CTR to skyrocket. We have a small handbook that we just may release to the automotive public on how to get the best click rates. Remember the phrase price sells cars? Well that often works with “price makes clicks” as well. A word of caution: Deceptive ads can cause high bounce rates, plus the fact that it’s just shady.
4. Group your keywords into proper campaigns and make everything match. If you are marketing Hondas and trying to get clicks on Civics, Accords, and used Honda’s, then setup a campaign for each. You can subdivide further, but this will enable you to match the keywords to the ad copy to the destination web address which Google just loves when you are trying to sell more cars online. Google wants more clicks and will reward you will a high quality score, which leads to item 5.
5. Fix your Adwords quality score. What is Quality Score you ask? In a nutshell, Google reads your keywords, campaigns, url, and destination page along with several other things including your relevancy and CTR, and gives your keyword a “Poor, OK, or GREAT” score. The Greater the score, the less you pay per click and the more relevant the results to the customer. You want the car buyer that is seeking a used Honda Civic to see your used Civic ad, and be brought to a used Civic webpage filled with relevant offers. Google likes when you do that, make Google happy and pay less.

How is this for conversion rates? This does NOT even take into account the phone calls this dealer received from the online marketing or pay per click campaign we performed for them.

automotive marketing conversion rates

There are many other tactics and techniques but let’s talk results. I challenge any automotive marketing expert or PPC specialist or so called automotive internet marketing company to beat these numbers:

Conversion Rates: Over 30% conversion rates on some keywords (you want more of these and less of the rest)

Bounce Rates: We have some clients receiving bounce rates in the single digits. What this means is that the shoppers are clicking around your website, microsite, or your ad. You want a low bounce rate. See graphic below for a real dealer from the past 30 days.

automotive marketing bounce rate

Continue Reading

Automotive Internet Marketing Plan

Posted on 16. Dec, 2008 by admin.

automotiveinternetmarketingplan

Putting an Internet marketing plan of action into effect can help your car dealership or business survive through that hard times and prosper in the good. However, this is one of the most difficult strategies to master. It takes a lot of foresight, planning, and also requires buy-in from everyone from the dealership owner down to Internet Sales managers and staff.

There are many things to manage including the ongoing battle between Internet budget and traditional budget, where the money is spent, and how much will be done by dealership staff versus being outsourced. Obviously all of the media comes into play as well as the message- what is your offering and where do you make the offer- on third party automotive lead sites or on your own site?

Decisions needs to be made on who the Internet marketing plan revolves around- the Internet department, the dealership, or the 3rd party lead provider.

PureDealer can help you through this process. Depending on the size of your dealership, staffing, even location and brands that you sell, we take all of this into account when helping you with your marketing ideas and planning. Contact us for more details on how we can help you with your Automotive Internet Marketing plan.

Continue Reading

Custom Dealer Website- Mainline Honda

Posted on 14. Dec, 2008 by admin.

PureDealer offers some fantastic custom dealer websites and below is an example of a great dealer site that has more bang for the buck. The bounce rate on this site is extremely low because of the amount of deals and great offers that this dealership puts on the website. With just a few clicks, the homepage becomes an automotive marketing powerhouse.

Continue Reading

Automotive Internet Marketing with Bad Data

Posted on 13. Dec, 2008 by admin.

Last week we discovered that one of our automotive search marketing dealers was making decisions on how to spend their internet marketing money off of bad website Analytic data. We do not handle the website, but we help them review their analytics and uncover the piles of waste and reallocate that to the proper areas. After months of question and answer Pure dealer.com discovered that this major web company was counting all website management and setup time as part of the site visitation, page visit, bounce rate, and page views. This may sound like a small thing, but the data was off by nearly half since it accounted for the entire time that this developer spent setting up and configuring the website.

When you are trying to determine where you automotive marketing internet investment should go, you need to track it and rely on good data. The fact that the data was based off of a web providers “home grown” version of Google Analytics was enough for us to smell something fishy from day one.

This web provider also took credit for all automotive pay per click traffic we generated and renamed it “Organic” which is a very deceiving tactic, although they will not admit it. Requests for raw log files to analyze the data have gone unanswered. They also did not properly track the search engine optimization we did nor recognize the sources of traffic that we know were brought to specific pages on the dealer’s website.

It’s tough enough being a car dealer right now without having your automotive internet marketing arm fighting against your dealer website provider. Do yourself a favor and get an unbiased Analytic tool in your site like Google Analytics.

We have put this into dealer.com websites as well as bzresults websites, tkcarsites, and numerous others or have been given access to read what is already in some of these sites.

Take charge of your advertising budget and do not get bullied by providers that refuse to comply. We would be happy to give you free advise on your statistics and your marketing budget. Give us a call and bring your marketing and advertising to a new level.

Continue Reading

Dealer.com Search Marketing Challenge Article

Posted on 12. Dec, 2008 by admin.

I recently followed an article written on a blog site by a popular blogger and SEO consultant regarding the merits of dealer.com and search marketing versus pay per click and search optimization. Many automotive marketing experts do not realize how quickly a blog post or search content can be picked up on the Internet.

The lesson that this blogger was teaching was to try to prove that dealer.com search engine marketing did not spend enough focus on search optimization and spent more efforts on pay per click or SEM. Pure Dealer.com agrees that good SEO can beat PPC any day of the week, and sometimes it takes a long time and some dedicated marketing efforts to win the search engine battle.

Then again, did dealer.com speak too soon when they opened up a public challenge to test the power of search marketing? Dealer.com is a very well respected company that has experience huge growth and obviously is well versed on how to market themselves so I guess that Google will decide who wins this battle.

If you google “dealer.com search marketing” or “dealer.com search engine marketing” we will all know the answers to that question.

Here is the full repost of the article, with recognition to the author and full post here:

Search engine marketing is a great way to generate immediate traffic.  What is often overlooked by by car dealers is the real value of a well optimized site and an aggressive SEO campaign.  A recent post I did about dealership web traffic I referenced another post from Dealer.com on Drivingsales.com and feel that it was misconstrued based on the replies by Dealer.com.

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

Continue Reading