Park Automall Using Showroom Logic’s Lobster Trap Theory
This comparison was used for one of our car dealers. They had 2 different campaigns going at the same time, from us and another marketing company. They had a small budget, but the results were still impressive. (Click to Enlarge)
Showroom Logic has always been about microsites, and the effect is best described using our Lobster Trap Theory. If you were a lobsterman, how many traps would you set?
I don’t think anyone would say one. The best answer would be ‘as many as possible”. The more lobster traps, the more lobster. The same will go with leads and sales for a car dealer.
We like to think each miscrosite is a lobster trap, plus social media websites like Facebook, Twitter & Linked In. There are even more free lobster traps available for car dealers like Squidoo and Hubpages.
Many car dealers fall for the quick buck some marketing companies make in setting up a microsite for them. They will set it up with the proper keywords but the microsite will fail. Without backlinks pointing to it, it won’t do much good. Backlinks is what you need, so you either hire an SEO Company or do the work yourself. You could have the best optimized website on the planet for your niche, but if you lack backlinks you will get a tiny amount of traffic.
Showroom Logic first built a microsite for Park Automall in Tampa Bay Florida about 6 months ago. During the launch we set it up to rank on thousands of keywords. Park Automall understands that it is impossible to launch a website and obtain rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing overnight.
It takes time for any website to rank, so we utilize that time to broadcast their inventory. We automated their Twitter and showed them how to obtain thousands of local followers, we automatically update multiple Facebook pages (personal and Fan Pages) and we embed a car dealer’s inventory RSS Feed into any website that will take it.
Park Automall took advantage of our exclusive Google Adwords tool as well. Without even mentioning the word “car” or “dealer”, we obtained 2,849,994 impressions throughout Google’s Search and Content Network so far in the month of February alone. Out of those millions of impressions, we lured 2,679 relevant clicks at an average cost of only $1.10 per click. This cost the dealer $2,945.00 in advertising on Google. Sounds like a lot of money right? It’s not when you realize last month they sold over 120 cars and trucks, and their closest competitor sold about 75.
As a car dealer, you need to remember what you sell. Thousands of people are looking for cars like a “Ford Mustang” and “Dodge Ram” every day in your area. A car dealer will never rank organically on a Google search like that, so you are forced to use Google Adwords to reach the searchers. David Ingold is the Internet Director over at Park Automall, and he properly interviews each up.
“How did you find us?’, he asks. “the internet”, says the customer. “Where on the internet may I ask?” 50% of his customers say Google.
Many dealers use vendors like Autotrader and Cars.com. As consultants, we highly recommend both. As long as you monitor your leads properly and you are confident the money spent is resulting in not just leads, but sales.
What you must understand is simple. Most consumers go to Google, not AutoTrader or Cars.com. Having a proper Google Adwords Campaign will allow you to let these consumers see your inventory first before the dealer down the street who pays thousands of dollars for spotlight ads gets them.
Showroom Logic sets up campaigns for every new and used car a dealer has in inventory. When a vehicle is sold, the campaign is deleted. When a vehicle is added to their inventory, we create a new campaign for each vehicle.
Many dealers have tried this, but they soon realize that they would need a dedicated skilled full time employee to handle it. Showroom Logic’s complete Google Adwords tool costs as little as $500.00 a month, and the clicks can go directly to a dealer’s current website or to a Showroom Logic miscrosite.
Now that Park Automall is reaping the benefits of proper internet advertising, we are building them a second miscrosite. We cannot divulge too much information, but we had a three hour meeting the other day and planned a great strategy.
As a vendor, I won’t be satisfied until they sell at least 175 cars a month. My plan is to do everything I can to make this possible. Although we have a lot of automation I still spend many hours building backlinks to all of their lobster traps, including link wheels. I even go one step further and sporadically list their inventory on Craigslist.
Showroom Logic can only service one dealer per city with our miscrosites, so if you’re in Tampa, Orlando or Pensacola Florida we cannot service you. Dealers who want to use our Google Adwords tool with their existing website are welcome anywhere.
If you want to own your city anywhere in the USA, contact mike@showroomlogic.com for more information. Our Google Adwords services are guaranteed.
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
- 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:
A Dealer Microsite Needs Backlinks
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:
Their Showroom Logic Microsite Out Performs All Others
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.
Dealer Microsites From Showroom Logic Provide Powerful Backlinks To Dealer Websites
One of the greatest features a Showroom Logic dealer microsite provides is strong backlinks pointing back to a main dealer website. Unfortunately most internet directors are advised by their vendors and they don’t realize without backlinks your website will not rank, no matter how optimized it is. I see many dealerships that have microsites without any backlinks pointing to them, rendering them useless.
Here I will list all of the benefits of having a Showroom Logic Dealer Microsite in one short post. If you would like more information on any of the features I suggest your read our blog. I will also link to wiki article for certain phrases in case you don’t know the meaning. This one post will give you a wealth of information, and could help you bring your dealership to the top.
This is a screenshot of a Showroom Logic Microsite. Scroll down to see a breakdown.
1) Powerful Backlinks: Many people think that having a properly formatted website is the answer to SEO. Although it’s important, the biggest factor used by Google and other search engines like Yahoo & Bing are how many backlinks are pointing to your website. We provide a strong backlink from your Showroom Logic Dealer page directly to your dealer website, with whatever anchor text you desire. Plus, you will get a direct text link from every single vehicle you have in your inventory. These backlinks are very powerful because links that come from relevant websites are the most powerful. If you plan on obtaining your own backlinks be sure they come from car related websites and blogs.
2) Complete Inventory With Friendly URL’s: We create a webpage for every single vehicle you have, with the most search engine friendly url’s. No strange characters or vin numbers needed, just the car. That is why all of our dealers rank organically on specific keywords for make and models. The only other companies that show up consistently are Yahoo Autos and Cars.com, but they are so over-saturated with inventory that the odds of it being your car are slim.
The Most Search Engine Friendly URL's Possible
Calls To Action: We all know how important this is, and we give our users many opportunities to become a lead. We go one step further and provide an image link to your dealer website. Everything a user does on our website is tracked, including map clicks, phone calls, email leads and visitors sent to your website.
Newest Inventory Links On Homepage: When you get a vehicle added to your inventory, it can take days or weeks for the search engines
RSS Feeds
to find it to crawl and index the page. Some dealer websites attempt this, but they use flash or java scripts which defeats the purpose. Search engines like Google cannot read javascript so they will not find the link and crawl the page. Our links are clean links via an RSS feed. Every dealer we have gets their own RSS Feed, so you can use these on blogs widgets and other means of broadcasting an RSS Feed. Not only do we add this to each homepage, we also add them to a network of car related blogs, like this one.
Twitter Widget: A surprising number of car dealers still aren’t using the power of Twitter to reach a new generation of internet customers. This is where your most qualified car buyers can be found online. Twitter users are the Savvy folk, and most have great jobs and great beacon scores! Showroom Logic will not only help you with Twitter, we will automate your Twitter for you. Every new vehicle that is added to your inventory will be sent out in a tweet with a direct link to each vehicle. These automatic tweets will only go out during normal hours (we won’t send a tweet at 3:00am). Plus, we will space them out. If you blast your Twitter with 10 new vehicles at one time your followers will become annoyed and may “unfollow” you, which is the Twitter kiss of death. Showroom Logic will help all of our dealers get more followers, and we also add a Twitter Widget to your micro site to encourage more followers.
Embedded Twitter Widget
Yesterday I took a ride to Stingray Chevrolet in Plant City Florida. They have a sister store in Texas which is the largest volume Chevrolet dealer in the United States. The Texas dealership recently started using Twitter and currently have about 600 followers. I wanted Stingray Chevrolet to look good, so I showed the internet sales manager how to find quality followers. About 3 hours after I left, I checked their account and they had over 800 followers (they had about 60 when I was there). It’s nice to see internet sales managers eager to learn new methods!
Similar Vehicles On Each Vehicle Page: With all of our Twitter Tweets, Facebook Updates and Organic Search visitors we bring steady traffic to each vehicle. Let’s say a user saw your Tweet that said “Hey, check out this 2006 Honda Accord we just got in”! You may have similar vehicles in your inventory, so this will encourage them to keep clicking. If you scroll down the bottom of any of our vehicle pages you will see similar vehicles on the right hand side. This also helps the cars to rank better on search engines because the Googlebot love to crawl links! If you look at the similar vehicle snapshot, you will see that Napleton has more than a few Dodge Rams in stock.
Similar Vehicles Are Important To Keep Users On Your Website
Maps On Each Page: This is obviously a no brainer, and I’d don’t think there is anyone who wouldn’t have a clickable map for driving directions on their website. Although most locals will know where you are, the ones coming from 30 miles away because you have a vehicle they want will not. We have to make it as easy as possible for your customers to find you, because we are all finally realizing that most internet customers just show up. Our study showed that 51% will not call
Embedded Google Maps
or email, and Autotrader feels it’s as high as 80%.
If you read more about us you will realize that we are a forward thinking company that constantly make changes. Me have many tools available and our goal is to help you sell more cars.
We are nothing like Autotrader or cars.com. If you currently use them and have success then keep it going. In the world of internet advertising there is no single method that will bring a dealer success in internet sales. You have to be open to try new things or you will simply be like every other dealer. Most dealerships have a budget, and sometimes it is necessary to shift things around. For example, the price you may be paying for a billboard could be put to better use.
Showroom Logic is a small company, and you will not see us at seminars. We currently service about 30 dealerships nationwide, and all of them have my cell phone number. I am available 7 days a week from morning until about 10:00PM at night.
My name is Mike, and you can call me direct at (863) 666-0130 or email me at mike@showroomlogic.com.
I invite you to read more about us on this blog, including our newest tool: Automated Google Adsense for car dealers.