Digital Perspectives for Automotive Dealers: Part 1

A word to the Midwest automotive dealers:

After 8 months in the field in my nifty new job I thought I might have some insight for our regional dealers. I am the director for the Central Region at Search Optics. We are a digital marketing agency that hyper-focuses on automotive, both tier 2 and tier 3. We develop great marketing messages and use the web as the channel to get them out to our customers. Technically we are very, very good at getting relevant traffic to our sites and converting them to phone calls into the dealerships. We measure everything we do and report out face to face to our customers at least once a month so everybody knows what’s going on with the money they spend with us.

I have a sense of humor and can sometimes be a wee bit sarcastic so please don’t take the advice below too personally. It is meant to help you, perhaps, see the potential and potentially disastrous in your web presence but also to make you laugh a little.

1. The first piece of advice is stop searching for your own name in the middle of your dealership and then resting assured that your internet presence is perfect. For somebody standing in the middle of your dealership asking for you by name or your make/model, there is nothing else for Google to serve up that is more relevant than you.

Imagine them back at Google headquarters scratching their heads wondering why someone would be asking for a dealership by name while standing in the middle of the showroom. They would wonder why there isn’t a sales person greeting them and interrupting them from their searching to ask what they can do to help them out. If you don’t come up in the middle of your dealership you might want to check and see if your phone and internet lines are down or whether you paid your web service provider this month. Otherwise you should be filling up the page without any effort at all.

Do a search from the parking lot of your kids’ school or your mother-in-law’s house (as long as she doesn’t live over the dealership, then you have bigger problems than your internet presence) go to a coffee shop ten miles away and look from there. Then see what you look like.

If you’re a Jeep dealer look for Wrangler in the town 10 miles away from your dealership. Ask for Jeep in the biggest town near you like; Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis etc. Are you in the top three listings? Are you in the map? How many times are you listed on the first Google page? That is what I look for when I analyze a dealer presence. I am never surprised. There is opportunity everywhere and in the Central Region, a significant first mover advantage.

To be continued…

By Cristina Foster

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