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

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

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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

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