Search Engine Marketing For Car Dealer Service Departments

Search Marketing For Service Departments

Last week Patrick and I were approached by a car dealer in Orlando Florida. They are already an existing customer of ours, using our Orlando Microsite to sell more new and used cars online.

Anyway, they wanted us to help them market their service department online because they are very happy with the results we’ve given them so far.

This dealer has 3 separate websites. The first is their main site, which is operated by Izmo Cars. The second is a macrosite provided by Showroom Logic. The third website is a microsite by dealer.com which attempts to target the Orlando Florida market.

The campaign we agreed upon will be Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing using Google Adwords.

For the SEO Aspect we felt it would be best to develop and maintain a blog for their service department. This will give us more flexibility to optimize the website for keywords. The reason we decided not to use any of their existing websites is because of the lack of technology available for creating new pages.

Their Izmo Cars website doesn’t have a log-in where you can add or edit a webpage. They have to be contacted for each change and they will do it. The problem is I do not wish to wait when I need something changed.

The Dealer.com website is much better than Izmo, but it still lacks flexibility. I could of created a new page for their service department, but I wouldn’t have access to change the title tags.

This is why we chose the blog, and it’s actually like having an additional website for our customer. Counting our used car blog, they now have 5 websites:

• Orlando Used Car Classified  Microsite This website shows up better than any of their websites for organic (free) searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo. We do not market their brand or franchise. We market their inventory, new and used. We also use our Google Adwords Software to promote their vehicles within a 40 mile radius of their dealership.
• Orlando Car Blog This blog helps to rank all of their other websites in search engines. Weekly blog posts are done about their new inventory as it comes in. Whenever a blog post is published, the system “pings” Google, and the article is crawled and indexed within a couple of minutes. A couple of months ago they acquired over 10 used Corvettes. I made the Corvette keyword a main focus during one week, and since then all of the Corvettes have been sold.
• Service Department Blog: This blog provides the same as above, only the traffic is funneled to either their lead management tool or their existing main dealer website service pages. It also blends in social networking accounts like Twitter and Facebook.
• Main Napleton Website: This website is their main dealer website, operated by Izmo Cars. It obtains most of it’s traffic by drive-by’s, newspaper and TV advertising.
• Corporate Website: This website is provided by Chrysler and it has backlinks from corporate Jeep, Chrysler and Dodge websites. It also offers more flexibilitythan their main dealer website.

This is why Napleton is a leader in internet sales in the Orlando area. They have a large internet presence consisting of 5 different websites and they blast their inventory daily to Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist using our automated tools.

We can only service one dealership per city, so it’s first come first serve. If you would like more information regarding our services, please email mike@showroomlogic.com.