How To Juice Up A Car Dealer Miscrosite

A dealer miscrosite is one of the most important strategies a car dealer can do to get more traffic. I call it my “lobster” theory. If you were a Lobsterman, how many lobster traps will you set? I hope your answer is more than just one.

The problem with a dealer microsite is you cannot simply launch one and expect immediate results. Any new website has to wait to be crawled and indexed by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The quickest way to get a new site indexed is to point a link from a relevant website, even if it’s from your main dealer website. Other than that, you will need more backlinks pointing to the website if you want results.

A good start is 2 powerful directories, the Yahoo Directory and Business.com. They each cost $300.00 a year, but the backlink they provide will be well worth the $600.00 a year charge. Both of these directories are human edited, so to be approved on these websites shows Google, Yahoo and Bing that you are a quality website. It also helps to prove you are not a spammer. Spammers will not spend $600.00 to get listed in these directories, and if they did they would be rejected anyway.

These directories will also reduce your sandbox period you will be subjected to. You know, the sandbox that Google denies they have. If you don’t know what the sandbox is click the link to read the Wiki Article.

To obtain more backlinks, find some car related blogs and make educated comments with a backlink to your microsite. Many of these will be nofollow, but it will still pass relevance. If you make one blog post a day, you will have over 300 backlinks in a year time.

Another good way to pass relevance is to create a link wheel using websites like squidoo.com and hubpages.com. Before you go any further, be sure to know what a link wheel is before you waste your time. There’s a right way and a wrong way.

Now back to the lobster trap theory. With our Showroom Logic System we provide to car dealers, these are the Lobster Traps we love:

• Showroom Logic Microsite
• Corporate Microsites
• Dealer Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook (personal and fan pages)
• Squidoo

Every one of those website will show up on searches. With some hard work, you can easily obtain a 50% traffic increase compared to your main dealer website. The traffic will also have more quality because of the keywords you will rank on.

If you look at your main dealer website stats, you will see the top 10 keywords will always include your dealer name. These are the people that already know about you, and they Googled you to find your website. That is not SEO. If you cannot rank your dealer name than you are in the wrong business!

Another factor with microsites. Don’t pay much attention to bounce rates because your microsite will never beat your main dealer website. The reason is simple, as I said above, your main keywords are you dealer name. These people search for you and find you. The search engine gave them exactly what they were looking for so they will not bounce.

One of our clients had a corporate website from Chrysler. It’s a Dealer.com website that they asked us to optimize. The page has links coming from Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep, so it’s an important website to have. Unfortunately those backlinks do no good at all for SEO because they’re usually written in javascript. Search engine spiders do not read Javascript.

I was relieved it was a Dealer.com website. They use Izmo Cars for their main website and I have never been a fan of them. If their Microsite was from Izmo or BZ Results I wouldn’t have touched it to avoid setting myself up for failure. Cobalt isn’t that much better, but if I had a choice I would go with a Dealer.com website.

The first thing I did to juice up this microsite was to build backlinks. I started the campaign in mid January, so if you look at the graph you will see the nice spike in traffic:

The microsites Showroom Logic supplies is the best lobster trap you can have, and we’ve proven it with our stats. Here is a snap shot of the other microsite we provide to the same client:

We believe in search engine saturation, and our method works. The car dealers that use our city packages respect us, and we’ve never lost a client.

I like to call it a “macrosite”, and it includes:

• Organic Miscrosite: New & Used Cars In Orlando
• Wordpress Blog (properly set-up and self hosted) Napleton Blog
• Twitter Automation: Automatically update your Twitter using Showroom Logic’s Twitter Application: Twitter Example
• Facebook Automation (Inventory and Blog Posts) Napleton Fans

Car dealers using our automation are still encouraged to manually update Facebook and Twitter. Blog posts are created by Showroom Logic, and we do this to obtain more traffic from search engines.

Showroom Logic can only service one dealer per city. Car dealer’s that utilize our city packages will be exclusive, and we will not service a neighboring car dealer.

To find out more about Showroom Logic’s service, contact mike@showroomlogic.com.