A proper Content Management System (CMS) has been called by many experts the most important component of internet marketing in the automotive industry in 2013 Having a strong one can be the difference between getting true exposure online and missing out due to the competitors having a stronger presence.

Through KPA Connect, dealers are empowered to make changes to the content and substance of their website. There’s no need to wait for a phone call or an email reply. While our customers service is always there when needed to assist in any way, our dealers are able to make nearly any important change on their own if they choose to. It’s not a requirement; customer service will never turn away a request and tell you to do it yourself, but it’s nice to have the option to be completely independent if you want.

More importantly, Connect gives dealers unprecedented power to add content to their websites at will. Quick, easy, and up instantly, the content dealers can create on KPA Connect will give them the advantage they need in this competitive world.

Tuesday, January 8th, we will be holding a live demonstration of the product. If you miss it, don’t worry – the link below will still have the recorded version as well.

Check it out today!

KPA Connect Product Demonstration

If you’re like most dealers, you’re not completely satisfied with your rankings on Google and Bing. You’ve hired an SEO vendor or upgraded your website package to include SEO, but for some reason your competitors are still ranked higher than you for the important keywords.

What many do not realize is that SEO is like a restaurant burger. There’s your standard Big Mac that most are selling. Sure, there are plenty who buy them, but most would not say that it’s the best burger available. Then, there’s the next tier like Five Guys or In ‘n Out Burgers. Better than a Big Mac and easy to pick up on the way home from work, but it’s not as good as it could be.

Then, there are the two best types. There’s the one that’s hot of the grill, your grill, made just the way you like it. Sometimes, we simply don’t have the time or the resources to do it ourselves, so we go to a nice sit-down restaurant and have one of their special burgers. Either way, it’s much better than what you could have gotten through a drive thru.

That’s what KPA Elite SEO is all about. Sure, it’s more expensive, but you get what you pay for. It’s not a $2.29 Big Mac. It’s a full $10 burger cooked to perfection, seasoned appropriately, and brought to your table with the sole purpose of helping your dealership rank above your competitors to get more traffic to your website.

With all of the analogies out of the way (I’m getting hungry), let’s look at the product itself:

Product Demo: KPA SEO – The Most Powerful Search Marketing in the Auto Industry. Period. from KPA – DealerWebinars.com on Vimeo.

Let’s face it. Websites are becoming a commodity in the automotive world. Most quality website vendors are putting out solutions that are good enough to work well. Few are coming up with innovations that can differentiate them, and those differences are relatively small in the whole scheme of things. The difference between a good and a great website is minimal when translating it to increased sales.

The reason for this is that consumers are becoming increasingly impatient when in car shopping mode. It’s not that they don’t spend as much time doing it as before. It’s that they are doing most of their research on websites other than a dealer’s site and only visiting when they’re ready to look at live vehicles. At that point, they’re going straight to inventory or specials and deciding from there whether to consider doing business with a dealership or not. If you have the right inventory items that they’re considering, a bad website isn’t going to keep them from contacting you. Conversely, if you don’t have the vehicles they’re seeking, an amazing website isn’t going to coax them into doing business with you.

Websites are websites. Some are better than others and have strong conversion tools, but the real arena through which dealers can move the needle is in the quality of their digital marketing efforts. One of those efforts, search engine marketing, is arguably the greatest opportunity for advancement because it translates into more visitors, more leads, and potentially more sales when done right.

The biggest challenge that dealers with OEM-mandated search marketing products face is in defining competition. From the OEM’s perspective, a Ford dealer’s competition is the Chevy dealer down the block and the Honda dealer around the corner. They want search exposure that can take sales from the other brands. This is a good and noble cause, but unfortunately it’s not the most practical target for individual dealers and dealer groups.

From the perspective of the Ford dealership itself, their primary competition isn’t the Chevy dealer and the Honda dealer but rather the other Ford dealers in the area. It’s how they’re graded; we all see reports every month that tell us how we’re doing against other dealerships in the area that sell the same brands. It is for this reason that OEM-mandated search marketing, as affordable as it is, simply isn’t the best way to improve sales. At the dealership level, the lowest hanging fruit for increased business is by taking sales from the real competition, namely the other Ford store a few miles away.

As mentioned, there is one advantage to the OEM-mandated search marketing: it’s cheaper. It’s often paid for in whole or in part and can act as a check box on your marketing. “Yep, we’re doing SEO and PPC. The OEM is taking care of that for us.”

Unfortunately, that’s really the only advantage. It’s designed in most cases to keep every dealership inside their own little box. Reaching outside of the direct market area is a no-no for companies that work for the OEMs. In fact, they’re goal is to keep the boxes neat and tidy.

When the search marketing is focused at the dealership level, it’s a completely different strategy. The goals have changed; it’s not that a Ford dealer doesn’t want to take market share from a Chevy dealer, but that’s a heck of a lot harder than taking a deal from the Ford dealer down the road. Let’s say there’s a dealer in a small town a few miles from you. They’re the only Ford dealer in that town. Everyone in town knows them. When they want to do business with that dealership, they’ll search for the dealership by name.

Consumers who search for the dealership by city are looking for an alternative. They know about Bob Ricky’s Toyota in the heart of town. If they do a search for “Somewhereville Toyota Dealers” or “Toyota Dealers Near Somewhereville”, you’ll want your dealership to pop up. People that do searches like that are trying to find someone else from which to buy their Toyota. If they wanted to buy from Bob Ricky’s Toyota, they would have searched for “Bob Ricky’s Toyota”. They didn’t. They want someone else. They want you. If you’re ranked for that search, there’s a good chance they’ll check out your website to see if they can do business with you instead of Bob Ricky.

Unfortunately, the OEM-mandated search marketing products aren’t designed to help in this regard. In many ways, they’re designed to prevent this from happening.

If your goal is to beat the competition, your competition, then don’t look to the OEM’s search marketing company. Don’t just check off the search marketing box and call it a day. Explore your options and see if there’s a way to improve your search marketing to focus on helping your dealership the best way you can, by being aggressive and getting your dealership in as many relevant searches as possible.

Related articles

• Social Media Reputation: Picking the Power Accounts at Your Dealership
• Should car dealers focus on technical expertise instead of price and gimmicks?
• Social Media Reputation: The Key to Seach and Social in 2013 and Beyond – Part I
• Social Media Reputation: Picking the Power Accounts at Your Dealership
• Facebook Currently Offering Best Practices Download For Car Dealerships

Every few months, marketers around the blogosphere start the next batch of chants that search engine optimization is dying or dead. It’s like clockwork; Google makes a change, their pages rank poorly, they declare that the party’s over. I think I’ve written about the topic at least once a year since 2008.

The chants are starting again and I’m here to tell you that, as usual, they are premature. I’m not so naive as to make a statement like “SEO will never die,” but the thought that the death is here is silly. It’s not dead. It has changed. It changes frequently – perhaps more frequently in recent months – but it’s not dead yet. In fact, those who are doing the right things are finding that their rankings are actually improving.

Why They Always Pronounce it Dead

Since the dawn of SEO, there have been tricks that work for a short period of time. We’ve always taken the stance that anything that smells like a “trick” will not last and should be dismissed. This concept has helped us to stay on top of our searches and the keywords of our clients.

For example, 2007 saw a major increase in the effectiveness of social news and social bookmarking links. It was almost too easy – if you submitted a piece of content to Digg, it would rank for easy keywords within a few hours and for tougher keywords in a few days. Smart marketers refused to play this game knowing that Google would catch on and instead learned to use sites like Digg and Reddit to drive real SEO juice by posting powerful content and exposing it to the social news world. This still applies today for many sites, though they are fading quickly from relevance (except Reddit, which is growing).

Any time one of these tricks stops working, the SEOpocalypse is declared.

The most recent change that has everyone up in arms is the devaluing of automated links. Footer links, sidebar links, link farms – Google and Bing both have found ways to not only discredit these links but to make them harmful when done too much. SEO is dead… for those who couldn’t keep up with these changes.

Why SEO isn’t Dead

Thankfully, smart marketers did not participate in the automated link-building programs. Personally, I’m shocked it took as long as it did for Google and Bing to figure it out. There was a time in late 2011 that I was starting to doubt my choice of not having our SEO team get in on the link-automation trend. I was getting questioned by some within the company because the path we chose, one of unique content and contextual link generation, was much more expensive to operate than the automated ways.

The corner was finally turned with the Penguin update and subsequent tweaks and my choices were vindicated.

Today, content is no longer a tool for SEO. It is an overarching concept that includes SEO as part of its mandate. In other words, the tool is now the goal and the goals of SEO, reputation, branding, and social media marketing all revolve around quality content.

When you’re out there reading about the marketing trends of 2013, take note of those who are pulling away from social media or SEO and those who are pushing forward. This is easy for me to say since it’s the direction that my company is heading, but it happens to be the truth. Quality content that people can enjoy, proper link-building and social signal practices that revolve around this content, and social media marketing that doesn’t rely on funny cat pictures – these are the real trends that will drive proper marketing in 2013.

One of the most important components of a successful dealership Facebook page is pictures of happy customers. More dealers are doing it every day and they are seeing the results in improved engagement through likes, shares, and comments.

However, the increasing trend is also making it harder to stand out. With more of these pictures hitting Facebook on a regular basis, it’s important to try to make your pictures more interesting than the happy-customer-pictures of the dealership down the block. It’s easy once you know some of the types of photos that you should take and avoid the “guy and girl in front of the vehicle they just bought” pictures.

Last month, we covered the 5 Facebook Customer Photo Types That Aren’t Totally Boring. In it, we gave examples from one dealership Facebook page that is doing it right. As we mentioned:

The problem is that the pictures of happy customers are often about as boring as a picture can be. There’s a customer standing in front of their new car. Sure, they look happy, but is it going to get anyone’s attention? Is it going to get comments from local prospects, even the friends of the person who is in the picture?

Check out those 5 image types on Dealer Bar.

There’s a big, fat lie in the automotive industry that has been circulating for years. The idea that many hold onto is that conversion rate is the most important number when trying to determine the quality of a website. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here’s a fact – the worse your search marketing is, both for SEO and PPC, the higher your conversion rate is going to be. This cannot be disputed. If buyers are only able to find your dealership on search if they’re typing in your name, that means that the only people visiting your website are already inclined to consider doing business with you. Searches for you by name will always yield the highest conversion rates from the visitors.

As your search marketing expands and you start bringing in people from a more diverse range of searches, the traffic goes up, the total number of leads go up, but the conversion rate drops. Total number of leads, however, go up. It’s very simple once you understand the dynamic.

Let’s say you’re currently getting the majority of your search traffic from a variation of your name. Look at your analytics to see if this is the case. With the majority of your traffic coming from searches for your name, the math may look like this:

• Traffic from Search: 5,000
• Conversion Rate: 10%
• Total Leads: 500

Now, as you improve your search marketing and expand your reach, your traffic can go up. Let’s say you improve your SEO and start ranking in not just your city and for you name, but in other cities as well. Let’s say you’re outside of a metro area and through proper search marketing you’re able to reach into this market and expose your inventory to a wider range of buyers. Your traffic will go up, but because these visitors didn’t find you by name and since they’re probably further away from your dealership, the rate for these visitors drops in half. You may get 1000 extra visitors at a 5% conversion rate, yielding 50 more leads. You haven’t hurt your ranking for searches of your name, so the original 5,000 visitors are still intact. Now, the numbers look like this:

• Traffic from Search: 6,000
• Conversion Rate: 9.2%
• Total Leads: 550

Many would have you believe that the drop from 10% conversion rate to 9.2% conversion rate is a bad thing, but the important number to note is that the total number of leads went up as a result.

Your goal as a dealer is to sell more cars. It’s mathematically inefficient to extend your search reach and as a result your conversion rate goes down. However, the number to focus upon for your website is total conversions. How many leads are you getting? How many sales are you generating from these leads? This is the bottom line that truly affects the success of your website and your business.

Conversion rate is a great indicator that can help you make tweaks and adjustments to your current site, but look at your traffic trends when considering conversion rate fluctuations. Improved conversion rate can be good, but if it’s associated with a drop in traffic, you should look at your search rankings and the keywords driving traffic to determine if there’s an underlying negative that’s making the numbers look good. Conversely, if your rate goes down, see if there’s a correlating increase in traffic.

Get more leads that convert to more sales. That’s the end goal. Don’t get lost in the numbers that some are throwing out at you.

This is Part 3 in a 5 part series. Read Part 2 here.

By now, you should have an understanding of the importance of having an individual – preferably the owner, general manager, or someone else of authority at the dealership – as the “face” and “voice” of the dealership on social media. People like to talk to people, not brands, and when you can develop a true personality that is both professional and completely human, you have the opportunity to start making real strides in using social media as a true marketing tool. It isn’t just for social; the search engines are putting a lot of faith in social signals, so whether you believe in social media as a tool for your dealership or not, you have to admit that search engines clearly drive traffic that can turn into leads and sales. For this reason alone, social media is extremely important for moving well beyond your competitors in 2013.

This article has been moved for better exposure to Soshable.

This is Part 2 in a 5 part series. Read Part I here.

As we advance in social media strategies, one of the biggest challenges is getting traction. The rise of social signals in search marketing alone is enough of an incentive to make it happen even if you don’t believe in social media itself as a marketing tool. It is one, but now’s not the time to make that case. For now, the undisputed truth is that social media can help your dealership rank better in the search engines by sending social signals (Google +1s, Facebook likes, Twitter retweets, etc) to content on your website.

This article has been moved to Soshable for better exposure.

Twitter is not a challenge for most car dealers. It’s pretty easy be above average as a dealership because most of your competitors aren’t doing it at all. Getting to the next level isn’t that hard, either, as long as you apply some basic strategies.

Hashtags are one such strategy.

In the video below, we discuss how to apply Twitter hashtags to your Tweets and posts in order to improve their exposure and enhance your messaging. There are more strategies that we’ll discuss soon that are much more advanced, but starting with the basics is often enough to take a Twitter account from above average to really good.

This is Part 1 in a 5 part series.

When it comes to teaching some of the more advanced techniques in search engine marketing and social media promotions, we often find that we create challenges. It isn’t that the techniques we use are hard once the individual components are understood. It’s that the individual components themselves are often challenging to turn into a reality. In other words, saying something like, “take your most powerful and influential social media profiles and generate a bunch of likes, tweets, and +1s to your viral pages” is easier said than done.

This article has been moved for increased exposure to Soshable.