Where did you find us?

keywords and sources. You can blame Google for officially killing it. They don’t provide the keywords your visitor found your website with if they are signed into Gmail. If you check your analytics you will see your number one keyword is now “keyword not defined”.

One of our biggest problems is our industry itself. We are selling an item worth tens of thousands of dollars, so people don’t just search and submit a lead. They visit, leave and come back. Sometimes weeks or months later.

If you ever did try tracking conversions you will see that your number one source was always your dealership name. I think we can all agree that this is unacceptable. Nobody is born knowing your dealership exists, so the problem is to find out where these leads really came from.

In my opinion the only way to get it done is to train your salespeople, this way you can track not only your sales but your walk ins and appointments as well. The problem is there’ll be more than one question.

Your typical response would be this:

Salesperson: “Can I ask how you first heard about our dealership”?

Customer: “Yeah, I found you on the internet”

OK, that’s a little vague. We need to dig deeper. “What’s your favorite search engine”? can be a good question, followed by asking what exactly it was that they searched for (if they even remember). Now with a little bit of practical thinking you can figure out if it was a paid search or an organic listing. In most cases you will see that it came from Paid Search for a term like “Dodge Ram” or “Dodge Dealer”. You can have the best SEO company on the planet but the fact is you will never rank organically for terms like that unless your city is mentioned. That is why I’ve been consistently saying if you are spending more than $1,500.00 a month on SEO you are wasting money. I could get you many clicks for that amount compared to SEO clicks.

If you properly train your sales people to ask the right questions you can really start getting a grasp on what is working and what isn’t. We all have budgets, and the first place you need to be is where 80% of car shoppers go: Google.

I highly recommend that you contact Matt Weinberg and see his presentation of AdLogic.

The Google Penguin Update

When I switched over to the car business about 5 years ago there were very few companies that offered legitimate automotive SEO , and ones that did got away with a lot of spammy practices. Every major update Google has had since then never really effected car dealer seo…..until now.

I’m not going to give away what keywords I go after for my clients, but I will share an important finding in my business which is car dealer SEO related queries on Google.

One of the many keywords that I go after is Dealer SEO. After clearing out my cache and all cookies I did this search for the past few days and I was very surprised to see Showroom Logic gain the top two organic spots. This isn’t very common for such a competitive market, and my first thought is many of these companies got slapped with the penguin update.

**Remember, always clear your cache and cookies before searching or your results will be tainted

Many Automotive SEO Companies were penalized by the Google Penguin update, including keyword domains. On another note, I still can't believe how many well knows automotive vendors have to bid on these terms. If they can't rank for these keywords, they should.t be doing it.

Obviously it was nice to see that we didn’t, but I knew we wouldn’t. Why? We play by the rules, it’s that simple.

There are a few things I want to share with you that don’t work, and if you have an Automotive Dealer SEO company doing these practices you should question them:

Bad Practices In Automotive SEO

1) Press Releases

Let’s not forget the purpose of a press release. If there is some type of “newsworthy” news at your car dealership someone would craft an article and submit it to a website in hopes that a news reporter would fine it interesting and make a story about it. If it was interesting enough, 100′s of bloggers would pick up the story as well providing many backlinks to the original source.

Let’s be honest, there isn’t much news that will be worthy enough, so the article and link will be buried in just a couple of hours providing absolutely no backlinks (or very few spammy ones that Google would devalue anyway).

Here is one example of a press release that will work. This dealer in Tampa Bay Florida took a horse in on trade. The only reason they did it was that they knew the media would pick up the story. I hired a local writer who had some contacts with media outlets in the Tampa area, and within a week just about every local TV station did a feature story on it. Even Fox Business news picked the owner up in a limo and brought them to their studio when he was featured live via satellite on one of their shows.

So unless you plan on taking a horse in on trade (or something similar) this type of SEO died many moons ago.

2) Directory Listings

Back in the day having your website listed in directories like Dmoz & the Yahoo Directory resulted in a great backlink, especially with Google. The reason was simple, these directories were human edited and Google knew they wouldn’t allow a low quality website in there.

It didn’t take long for web hustlers to realize that creating a directory could make them quick cash with paid directory listings, especially since the Yahoo Directory was charging $300.00 per year. So now everyone and their mothers were starting directories and it didn’t take Google long to figure this out.

3) Blog Comment Backlinks

I’ve seen many proposals where an SEO Company will promise X amount of blog comment backlinks every month. Blog commenting has been dead in the Automotive SEO industry for years, and I can’t believe car dealers still fall for this. Most blog comments have the nofollow tag anyway, but if you can find a dofollow it probably won’t be related to the car business. If you do find a good car blog with dofollow, the odds of your comment getting approved is a whole other thing.

4) Over-Optimized On Page SEO

I still get a chuckle when I see too many spammy links on the text section of a dealers website, mentioning a bunch of cities and towns, zip codes and a bunch of internal links. This does nothing but confuse the search engine spiders, and it makes them hard to figure out what your website is really about.

Remember this, you cannot trick Googlebot into thinking you are in another city because your actual address is on every page of your website. Plus, you probably have a Google, Yahoo and Bing place page that clearly shows a map listing of your dealership.

The internal links can be a killer for your visitors as well. Sometimes there are so many navigational pages and internal links that the visitor will get confused and leave. Remember, you have to funnel your visitors to some type of action like an email or phone call. Most often the less pages you have the better experience your visitor will have.

If you stop wasting your time and money on this type of automotive SEO you will see success. My method works, and none of my dealers suffered any losses during the Google Penguin update. Matter of fact, my clients benefited because of the penalties other car dealers took.

Updates:

Since I wrote this article a few of my thoughts have been confirmed:

New York Times Article – Andrew Strauss discusses how his sales plummeted as his website traffic from Google dropped 96%. As you will see in the article, he mentions Ezine Article submissions as part of his demise.

Search Engine Land -  Search Engine Land discusses Google removing over 100 directory websites from their index.

Only In Seattle

See the actual ad here.

Ken Garff Corporate Headquarters in Salt Lake City

During the past few months we have worked together to build the largest IP based dealer website around, with all of their new and used vehicles on one massive website.  The biggest challenge for the Ken Garff Group was the fact that they were spread out in Utah, California, Iowa, Indiana and Texas. So, the first question was how do we cater to people in each state without having the expense of five different corporate websites? Showroom Logic’s CTO Patrick Bennett made it simple when he said, “let’s just build an IP based smart website.” It’s important to note that this entire website was custom made without any type of framework or template system.

Here are some features of the new portal. Each image can be clicked to see a live demo of each page mentioned.

Smart Homepage:

Now when anybody visits http://www.shop4usedcars.com  it will show the nearest dealership to the user by scanning the visitor’s IP address on the middle left along with a dynamic map listing on the lower right.

Ken Garff Portal Homepage

 Advanced Search:

Besides the obvious we have implemented some cool search and browse features. From this page a website visitor can browse by vehicle type and other important features like transmission type etc… We also have a simple search box where the visitor can simply type in what he or she is looking for and search, just like a search engine. Actually, we find it hard to believe that today’s dealer website providers don’t have a simple search box like this on their websites. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for a visitor.

A simple yet robust search page without too many options will keep a visitor on the site.

Advanced Search Filters:

This website has a massive amount of vehicles, so the smartest thing is to apply advanced search filters on the left. We decided to show 25 vehicles per page, so we have plenty of real estate to give plenty of options. Some people shop by price, some are looking for a particular make and model, while others are concerned with features like color.

Advanced Search Features Keep The Visitors Flowing

Compare Vehicles

Now vehicle shoppers can compare vehicles side by side as they narrow down their search for the car, truck or SUV they are interested in. This is my favorite feature, and according to our analytics the visitors love this. It’s almost like this dealer has its own personal AutoTrader or Cars.com without the advertising.

Click the image, then tick the compare box next to 4 vehicles. On the bottom, click compare vehicles

Clean Vehicle Detail Pages

I’m a huge fan of the vehicle detail pages for this website. When it came to design, we found the nation’s best designer and she gave us exactly what we’re looking for. We also selected the best color scheme for different calls to action to increase conversions. My favorite is the 3D effect where the vehicle images are, I love the way it bows out a little.

Some dealer websites have way too many calls to action, and this just confuses the visitor. We eliminated many and only show the important ones that people actually use. The live chat with the dealer is probably the most effective.

Web 2.0 Vehicle Detail Pages With Conversion Optimized Color Schemes

AdLogic Google Adwords

Showroom Logic was the first company in the automotive world to specialize in Google Adwords using our AdLogic platform. We now have data from over 2 billion impressions and millions of clicks to discover what keywords are best to bid on, and what aren’t.

There isn’t a company out there that can truly optimize a car dealers’s Google PPC account like Showroom Logic. Other than saving the dealer one to two dollars per click, we also never take a percentage of a dealers ad spend.

Although AdLogic was designed to work with each car dealer’s specific website, we tweaked it to work with a portal like this. We now get about 20,000 targeted unique visitors to this website using only “buy action” keywords from Google search, the Google display network and a massive remarketing effort which we call “E-Backs”.

To learn more about our dealer portals or our AdLogic tool, schedule an online demo here.

Our CEO Sia and CTO Patrick will be there as well. If you would like a meet and greet with them, please ask Danielle or Matt.

Patrick, Matt, Sia & Danielle

We’re always looking forward to meeting new faces!

What is we told you we could get them back for you?

• Scenario: Consumer visits your website. They spend 10 minutes or more on your website searching inventory. They leave without calling or emailing.
• If you could have a second chance to send a message to that consumer what would it be? How much would you be willing to pay?
  

  One of the best new digital advertising tools for car dealer is Remarketing

Now that we added remarketing to our AdLogic Google Adwords tool we have the ability to send special targeted ads to only the visitors that meet the criteria you decide.

A good example is for us to create a special coupon offer that will only bee seen by shoppers who abandoned your website.

Here are some facts that you can easily confirm by looking at your Google Analytics:

1) Returning Visitors spend 100% more time on you website than new visitors

2) The bounce rate of a returning visitors is significantly less

3) Click through rates on remarketing image ads are 4 – 10 times higher than normal display ads.

4) Overall conversion rates are 50% higher than any other form of advertising.

For more information or to schedule a demo,  contact Matt Weinberg here.

The problem with the Ed Napleton group was their locations. They are scattered around the state of Florida, Illinois and Missouri. Showroom Logic’s Chief Technical Officer Patrick Bennett came up with a simple solution. “Let’s make the website based on the visitors location”, he said.

Here is a screenshot of an almost finished product that works like a charm:

Location based Inventory Portal For Ed Napleton Auto Group

I was in Miami Florida when I captured this screenshot, and as you can see the closest dealership to me was Napleton’s Palm Beach Acura because it’s first on the list. The rest of the dealerships are listed in order of proximity. If I was

Location Based Sorting

browsing out of Orlando Florida, Ed Napleton’s Jeep Chrysler Dodge Dealer in Kissimmee Florida would of shown up. If I was browsing near Chicago all of his Chicago dealerships would of been listed.

This is a problem for anyone who likes to track keywords for SEO or conversion purposes. Take a look at this screenshot:

How Do We Measure Keyword Now?

Monday, November 7th is when it really started kicking in. I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of these missing keyword phrases is the car dealer’s name, but what about the others? My issue is the quality of the traffic. It had an overall bounce rate of only 16% with 7 pageviews. Are we suppose to guess?

This is the main reason we stopped trying to track conversions. Besides this, we’re finding that it’s getting harder to drop a cookie on any visitor because people are using multiple computers. I’m a perfect example. I have an Imac in one office, and I travel around with my Macbook Pro. I also have a PC at the office, and on rare occasions I’ll use my mobile phone. Good luck to any website that wants to track my behavior, especially a car dealer.

If consumers we more spontaneous it would be possible, but not in the car business. How many people are going to search for a car or a brand online and bite on the first one? A new car is an expensive purchase, so unless someone absolutely needs a car right now it won’t happen.

To end this let me give you some advice: Don’t even attempt to set up your Google Analytics to measure conversions because it just won’t work. This may work in other industries, but not in the car business.

Every website that uses the Google Content Network has a choice of 8 different sized ads, and it’s up to their design team to decide which size to use. This is why it’s important to have every size available. Here is an example of AdLogic’s 8 different sized ads:

468 x 60

336 x 280

160x600

300 x 250

336 x 280

200 x 200

250 x 250

120 x 600

728 x 90

Here is a perfect example. Many franchise dealers will bid on the term “used cars your city”, or “car dealer your city”. This click alone will cost you a few dollars, but is it a good keyword to convert? The answer is no, unless you have 200 or more preowned units. The odds are you won’t have enough inventory to please the visitor and they’ll move on. That keyword phrase is simply too vague. The same goes for “Car Dealer”, it’s just not specific enough. There are hundreds of other keyword phrases car dealers bid on that don’t convert to a lead, and the few that do drain your Google Adwords Budget.

Anyway, now that we have this data we had to merge it with our existing campaigns, which is part of our new rollout. Between that and the access we have to the largest scarcity index in the automotive world, we have created the world’s best and most effective Google PPC Campaigns for car dealers. For our used car campaigns alone we’ve seen CTR metrics jump to over 3%, which means our dealers will save hundreds to thousands of dollars every month. Plus, we don’t ever take a percentage of a dealer’s ad spend like the rest. You simply pay a monthly flat fee of $499.00.

Example AdLogic Image Ad

For those of you who don’t know what AdLogic is, it’s simply a tool that works with your inventory feed that creates Google search ads for every used car on your lot. It also creates 8 different sized image ads with your actual vehicle photographs and sends them to automotive websites like MotorTrend, Lemon Free, YouTube and thousands or others that talk about the vehicles you have in stock. When clicked, the visitor is brought directly to the Vehicle Detail Page of the vehicle.

Here is a list of our new features for Adlogic:

1) New Car Campaigns

We’ve always created new car campaigns, we just never advertised it because it was in beta for select dealerships. In the past we did it manually so we could identify the converting keywords. Now that we have the data we are rolling out our new car campaigns. We’re very excited about this technology, as it will save dealers a lot of money.

2) Google Mobile Campaigns

Our team at Google has been pushing us since last year to get into mobile advertising, especially since 20% of online car shoppers are now on mobile. The problem was it was an entirely different animal, so we had to be methodical about rolling it out. To achieve good quality scores, special landing pages had to be made. Thanks to another great partnership which we’ll announce soon, we now have a car dealer mobile website for both Androids and the IPhone. This entire platform was built around special mobile landing pages designed for Google PPC for mobile phones. It’s a website that acts like an app. This will be included with our Mobile Google Adword Campaigns.

3) Retargeting

Retargeting is huge, especially for image ads. Once we properly identify a car shopper who has been to your website, your AdLogic image ads will follow them for 30 days or more even when they’re on non-related websites.

Fore more information about AdLogic, you can contact us here or Call Matt Weinberg at (561) 926-0455.