In this first installment of Blog Content Saves The Day, we’ll take a look at how blogs can help car dealers solve one of their biggest search engine-related issues: negative publicity.
The days of empty threats from disgruntled customers are coming to an end… make way for angry blog posts and damaging YouTube vids from your Internet-savvy prospects. Social networking not only provides a forum for dissatisfied buyers, but also allows the rest of the world to participate in (and further promote) the damaging content. If you want proof, just take a look at the sheer number of comments on both of the links provided earlier in this paragraph.
But the immediate danger doesn’t lie in the negative publicity itself; nor does it lie in the amount of supportive comments from other users, as most of them are probably not in your DMA anyway. Where negative publicity “2.0″ really hurts car dealers is in search engine results. Imagine you’ve got a customer saying horrible things about your dealership on their personal blog. Now imagine (this part’s not too hard) that your dealership has a weak presence in search engines, and the end result is that a potential customer who googles “John Doe Honda” might see something like this in the top three results:
- 1. “JohnDoeHonda.com: Honda Dealer in Anytown, USA”
- 2. “New And Used Honda Deals In Anytown at ThirdPartySite.com”
- 3. “Don’t Buy From The Criminals At John Doe Honda!”
The customers who see these search engine results are the ones you really need to worry about. Negative publicity here will instantly change your prospect’s intent from looking for directions to your showroom to looking for a different dealer in the neighborhood. On top of that, there are a few real savvy Internet users out there who will actually query your name along with some negative terms (for instance, querying “don’t buy john doe honda”) just to see if anything pops up. The last thing you need is to lose a customer before they’ve made a single click on your web site.
So, how do you combat this issue? We’ve seen dealers shell out thousands of dollars a month to search engine marketing companies in an attempt to “monopolize” the entire first page of Google… this is not only costly, but also has absolutely no guarantee that it will work. Fortunately, there is an easy and cost-effective way to fight negative publicity that you can manage yourself. You guessed it: your very own DealerDex dealer blog.
Creating blog content to fight negative publicity is easy, and all you have to do is think unhappy thoughts.
1. Make a list of popular negative terms that you’ll be able to work into your blog writing.
2. Do some research on your own dealership to see what negative publicity you already have in the search engines. Document what the prevailing negative term is in any of those articles… for example, maybe the title of someone’s blog article is “Don’t Buy From John Doe Honda”.
3. Start writing blog posts with the mindset that you’re going to work in some of these negative terms, but write your content in such a way that the terms are no longer negative. You’ll also want to “mimic” whatever bad publicity you’re getting, a la that example blog article title of “Don’t Buy From John Doe Honda”, so that you can beat it out in the search engine queries for those terms.
So maybe you decide to write a blog post with a title of “Don’t Buy A Used Car From John Doe Honda Until We Give You Your Free CARFAX Report”. Or, if your dealership is infamously found on Complaints.com, perhaps you write a post titled, “2008 Honda Accord Test Drive: No Complaints From John Doe Honda!”. Now you’ll start to attract those customers who are just itching to find some dirt on your store, and all they’ll find instead is a well-written, value-building promotion.
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