Internet Marketing Insight by DealerDex.com

I recently wrote an article for SEOmoz that recaps a discussion I had with a client who wanted to understand PageRank but had no concept of SEO or the Google algorithm. While most of you don’t want to admit it, I think a lot of Internet Sales Managers in the automotive industry are in the same boat. So read the PageRank/Celebrity Analogy, and don’t complain about Jay-Z being a PR8. Seems nobody got respect for the H-O-V-A.

One of the identifying marks of a car dealership absent of any serious Internet Marketing personnel is a domain name(s) WHOIS with old, outdated information. This shouldn’t be a big deal to any business but in many small companies it often is. Here’s a timeline that shows why:

•  1998. 1998 was a big year for dealers getting their first websites, because that’s when Reynolds realized it had some value and pushed it on all their uninterested dealers. “The guy who knows about computers” in the company is asked to buy the domain. Naturally, he uses his own personal data to fill out the WHOIS, because he doesn’t have a corporate email address, and there’s no one else’s name to put on the thing besides his own. Maybe he buys a five-year term… maybe 10. No one cares about the site so it really doesn’t matter to him.
• 2003. If they’re lucky, ”the guy who knows about computers” still works at the dealership, so he’s around for that domain renewal email that comes to his personal inbox. If he’s not around anymore, hopefully someone else there has some clue as to what’s going on and takes it upon him/herself to renew the domain. Of course, he/she doesn’t change the WHOIS, because he/she doesn’t want to get involved in this mess. So whether the original domain lease term was 5 or 10 years, it’s still going to have the original guy’s WHOIS info when 2008 rolls around.
• 2008. Speak of the devil. Here we are, and ”the guy who knows about computers” has been fired, and his replacement has been fired, and that guy’s replacement has been fired. Now the dealership’s domain is up for renewal and the notice is going to an email address that a) is totally unrelated to the dealer, and b) probably doesn’t even exist anymore, given the rate people change their email addresses. If the dealer’s lucky, they get something in the mail to remind them… of course, then it becomes a madhouse as a handful of computer-illiterate alarmists try to figure out how the hell to keep this thing from expiring. Maybe it does expire… and someone like me picks it up and blackmails you for it to the tune of $5,000. Not that I’ve ever done that.

Are you seeing how much confusion is being created here? When I go in to consult with a dealer, the WHOIS info on their domain names is one of the first elements I look into. Changing all that data over to an administrative setup is excrutiating for people like me - and excrutiating for me means expensive for you. This stuff is your virtual real estate. It’s pathetically cheap to maintain, but it’s as valuable as your business name. In a few years, it may even be as valuable as your physical real estate… so take a moment to get your house in order here.

Step 1. Find out what your WHOIS info says. You can visit any domain registrar like Network Solutions or GoDaddy, find the WHOIS section, and enter your dealership’s domain name. Most of the time it will spit out the name of the business, address, and administrative contact information. The most important element by far is the email address listed under the administrative contact. The person with access to that email address can do whatever they want with this domain name.

Step 2a. If this is an active email address in your company, get access to it, and set up a mail rule on it that will forward copies of received mail to several administrative personnel (you, the CFO, the I.T. Manager if you have one, etc.). Go into your domain administration using this email and change out any personal or outdated info. Change the renewal method on the domain to auto-renew, and if you can, enter a corporate credit card into the database so the domain can renew itself without you having to lift a finger.

Step 2b. If you have no clue where this email address goes, send an email to it. If you get nothing back, you’re what we like to call S.O.L. - you now have to contact your domain registrar and request a Change Of Administrative Contact fax form. You’re going to need to prove that this old email address is no longer relevant to your business and that you deserve to be given access… and you prove that by sending in a fax form on letterhead with your driver’s license. Obviously, make sure the right person at your dealership is doing this. Once you are granted access to the domain, go back and do Step 2a. That’s it, you’re done forever… problem solved. Well, unless you have a few dozen domain names…

In a perfect world, what would car dealers need to create a great video for showcasing vehicle inventory? Let’s see… a Steadicam or some dolly-type device for professional, steady shooting… high-quality recording hardware to do the voice-over… effects software to overlay images and text… about a dozen takes…

Ah, but you work at a car dealership, and you’re lucky if the General Manager approves a P.O. for a mouse pad. Plus, you probably wouldn’t have the knowledge or time on your hands to utilize the aforementioned resources, even if they were available. In the end, I guess automotive dealers are confined to posting those psuedo-videos… you know, the ones that are just a set of photos fading in and out Ken Burns-style. See ya later, conversion rate.

Well, the kings of Web 2.0 may have saved your asses again. Last week, YouTube announced the implementation of Annotations (read the YouTube blog post) in their videos. Annotations are basically text overlays of “video notes” that you can plop into your video, available in three different iterations:

• General Note
• Speech Bubble
• Highlight Area (mouse rollover)

Why is this awesome? Because now you or any other member of your staff can shoot a quick and dirty vid with a cellphone or digital camera, post it to your YouTube account, and fix’er up to be infinitely more appealing and useful to the consumer.

I created an example video for marketing dealer inventory to give you an idea of how useful YouTube Annotations can be. It’s not just about adding content either; if you conduct a less-than-stellar walk-around on the video and don’t have time for another take, you can use Annotations to correct your missteps. I purposely neglected items while shooting this walk-around so that I could overcome them with the video notes:

• Failed to mention vehicle’s mileage
• Failed to open hood and trunk
• Failed to point out all of vehicle’s highlight features

Check out the vid, and take notice of what is annotated and how it’s said. You can really make the video more engaging and useful for consumers with this new capability, and I promise you, that will lead to more units rolled. Of course, it’s a beta feature at this point on YouTube, which means I can’t embed the video here yet… and like a lot of YouTube vids, you might have to refresh the page once or twice if you get the notorious “no longer available” rejection. Come on you smug little billionaires, and get this thing into full operating status!

Click to watch the YouTube Annotations For Car Dealer Inventory Marketing video

If I had a dime for every dealer who demanded to be at “the top” of Google… trouble is, most of them don’t know where the top actually is. Or, they know where the top is and (as usual) prefer to invest money for instant ROI rather than invest time and effort for long-term ROI. In both of these cases, the dealer inevitably lands on spot #2: the top of paid search.

But folks, that ain’t the top.

If you’re a dealer asking questions about getting to the top of Google, then you already have some understanding of the power and value of search engine presence. But what you haven’t realized - or refuse to realize - is that “paid search” (PPC) marketing is not the magic bullet of search engine marketing. While PPC is highly cost-effective and can be tracked and analyzed to no end, it’s still just rented ad space. If you don’t pay for your ad to be there tomorrow, some other competitor will take your place… just like print ads.

Organic SEO on the other hand, builds upon itself. These are the results that “naturally” list out along the left side of the page; the sites which Google has deemed relevant to what users are searching for. The closer your site gets to the top of that area, the more clicks you receive, the more Google values your site, and the higher your site will go. It’s the snowball effect, and there’s really nothing like it in any other area of automotive advertising. Build a high-quality site and maintain it frequently, and you could be on top of the natural listings within a few months. That’s the discipline to keep in mind: the top of Google is in the organic/natural listings, not the paid listings.

The #1 result in the organic listings (Spot#1) gets about 40% of the click share on Google and other search engines. The #1 paid result doesn’t even come close (maybe 20% of the click share on a good day when listed above the organic side (Spot #3), and more like 10% at the top of the sponsored side (Spot #4)), and often you get better results as the #2 organic listing (Spot #2) than you would as the #1 paid listing. That means the majority of people are going to look past your PPC advertising efforts to find the page that Google has declared the most relevant page on the queried topic. That’s because users know PPC marketing listings are ads, and to a degree, they’ve trained themselves to avoid looking at such listings. It’s also because the organic results deliver more information in their results, so the user has a better idea of what they’re clicking on.

Now there are still a ton of people who mistakenly or purposefully click on paid listings, and I’m not suggesting you give it up. It is, after all, the second best marketing expense in this industry right now. But it’s still an expense, and that’s why it’s in the same boat as newspaper, direct mail, radio and TV advertising: when you stop paying, you stop getting leads. If you’re on a tirade about being #1 in Google, your first step is to realize that it’s not going to happen overnight, and that PPC marketing is not what gets you to #1. Your second step is to find a website developer who rocks at SEO and can build you a killer site… unfortunately, that means looking outside the offerings within this industry.