All Posts By

Ali Amirrezvani

In Best Practices

Winning Answer from the DealerOn Webinar with Bill Wittenmyer, VP of ELEAD One

Katie Wagner, ISM at Swant Graber Chevrolet-Dodge-Ram-Ford, was the winner of a 500 name GoldDigger Campaign Gift Certificate, valued at $1750, during today’s weekly DealerOn webinar.  The prize was donated by ELEAD One – they also lent us their VP, Bill Wittenmyer, to present CRM strategies dealerships can use to maximize their profits.

Listeners were asked to share the most innovative example of customer follow up or lead generation ‘that actually worked’ in their dealership.  Here is Katie’s response:

“We use video in our newsletters and monthly web ads from their sales consultants to service adv.-When an inquiry hits our CRM we take a walk around video of that vehicle too. (Video may take more time to edit/publish/etc. but it proves to be beneficial overall). Customers love to know that we care because we really do!”

Such a great idea!  To find out more ways your CRM can help your dealership maximize profits, grab the recording of the amazing webinar Bill put on for us.

Also, check out the DealerOn FREE weekly webinar series for great tips every Thursday.

In Mobile

Google Announces Mobile Website Guidelines and Recommendations, Finally!

It’s official!  At SMX Advanced in Seattle, WA this morning, Google has finally announced guidelines and recommendations on how to build mobile websites that work best for users and Google.

Google recommends building your mobile site with a responsive design approach.  This means that your mobile site uses the same URL as your main site, and serves the same HTML, but uses CSS to change how the page is shown on the device.  Google says this is best since one URL makes it easier on users and Google doesn’t have to crawl multiple pages on different URLs.

Their second-best option?  Device-specific HTML.  This means that the same URL is used, but the mobile version serves different HTML and CSS depending on the device that is detected.

All of this is a little technical, so make sure you talk to your car dealership mobile website provider to see which approach they are taking.  You can read the full release from Google here: Recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites.

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Priority SEO Pages for Auto Dealerships

If you’re doing the SEO for your own auto dealer website, it can be difficult to know where to focus your energy first. Here are the pages you should start optimizing first to get the most bang for your SEO efforts:

 

Main Navigation Pages: Your home page and those that have direct navigation from your home page (mainly your inventory) should be optimized since they are the ones potential customers are most likely to find. Also, if people are linking to your site, they are probably linking to your homepage or inventory pages. Back up these link “votes” by optimizing these pages to help their rank in search engine results.

Your Most Profitable Vehicle Pages: Help potential customers find the vehicles that bring in the most money for your dealership. Optimizing your more expensive cars and trucks, as well as your service and parts department pages will help interested buyers find these dealership website pages first.

Your Best Performing Pages: Which of your website pages provide your dealership with the most leads, highest time on site, and lowest bounce rate? Spend some time here to help interested customers find these pages in their search engine results

If you’re using a third-party SEO company, or your car dealership website provider is responsible, make sure you ask them which pages they focus the most SEO effort and energy. While each of your dealership website pages need to be optimized for search engines, make sure your SEO provider is paying special attention to the pages that will ultimately help your dealership sell more cars.

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google Places New Bulk Listing Management Tool

Does your car dealership sell have more than one location?  If so, big news from Google Places.  In the past, it was difficult and cumbersome to create and manage more than one Places account.  To help their users, Google Places has created a new Bulk Listing Management Tool.

This new tool allows your dealership to edit one or more listing, search your listings (filtering by specific info or by listing with errors), and upload new listings from a data file or individually.

Google also created this video to help users become verified to bulk uploads.

Once your account is verified, the following video gives more information on how you can use the Google Places Bulk Listing Management Tool.

If you don’t manage your Google Places account, check with the person or company (maybe your auto dealer website provider) that does to ensure everything is properly optimized.

In Mobile

Are Your Dealership Emails Mobile Ready? They Need to Be…

Your dealership customers aren’t just using their mobile devices to find your car dealer website, they are also using them to read the emails you send.  A recent report from the marketing agency Knotice found that more than 27 percent of emails were opened on a mobile device during the second half of 2011.  This is a 36 percent gain from the end of 2010.

Not only does your dealership need to have a mobile website and marketing strategy in place, but you also need to make sure your emails can be read on mobile devices.  iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) make up over 22 percent of mobile email opens, compared to less than 5 percent for Android devices.  For this reason, make sure your dealership emails use a minimal amount of Flash, if any.  Also, if you are sending pictures or video, make sure they have alt text or tags that explain what the images are showing.

The study counted an email “opened” if images were downloaded, so keep in mind that these numbers may be lower than reality, since some devices don’t download images by default.

Can your dealership afford to miss out on a quarter of your emails not being seen the way they were intended? Test the emails you are sending on a mobile device to make sure your message is getting across.

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