Reputation Management

One of the primary draws of DealerDex will soon be the Dealer Reviews section, which promises to play a key role in making up consumers’ minds about which dealers to visit and which to steer clear of.

But there’s a problem: as usual, dealers across the nation have been entirely ignorant of the value behind dealer reviews. As a result, negative reviews from consumers have become the norm, sprouting up in a dealer’s search engine results and turning potential customers away. There will always be a few angry customers who want to get on their soapboxes after a bad experience, but as a dealer you don’t have to lie down and live with a damaged reputation online.

The online dealer review situation is no different from your sales satisfaction surveys: most of your satisfied buyers won’t take the time to express themselves, while the small percentage of your customers who are out to tarnish your name will always find an outlet. Dealer review sites are the perfect place to wreak such havoc, as they often send bad reviews shooting to the top of the SERPs. You can combat a poor reputation in search engine results with a well-developed blog, but an even better way to improve your standing in the dealer review realm is to flood such sites with positive reviews.

Did your customer have a great experience with their purchase? Did you receive a letter from an owner touting the performance of your Service department? Get those customers to submit reviews on DealerDex and other dealer review sites, and in a matter of months you’ll drastically improve your standing. Do whatever you can to get your happy customers talking.

But don’t stop there. Once you’ve established that positive reputation, make the most of it by marketing it wherever you can. As an Internet Director, I always made sure that my first autoresponder to new leads showcased a link to my store’s consumer reviews, and prefaced it with a comment about our “well-known reputation for outstanding customer service”. Such canned phrases take on a whole new meaning when backed up by unbiased testimonials.

I recall that at one dealership, we were both the new guy and the little guy on the block, fighting for deals with two large, well-known dealerships within 5 miles of us. So I went as far as to include those dealerships’ dealer reviews as well in my autoresponders to third party leads. The chances of a third-party submitted prospect being cognizant of those other stores was pretty much 100%, so rather than fight a price war, it made more sense to show how we stood out from the crowd. Of course, those two dealers had piles of bad reviews, and our store came out smelling like a rose before price had even been discussed.

So there’s your lesson for the day: get a hold of your satisfied customers, incentivize them to write about their experiences, and market the hell out of it. Dealers need all the positive juice they can get, and this is a great way to make it happen.

In our final segment of the Blog Content Saves The Day series (previous entries: Part 1, Part 2), we’ll be discussing the benefits of monitoring a blog’s incoming search queries… one of the keys to maximizing any web site’s presence and stickiness.

Imagine a world where your ad agency could whip out the newspaper ad you ran last week, and tell you that 34 people were searching for offers on minivans and found yours, whereas 63 people did the same for your SUV offer. Not only that, but of the 63 people who saw your SUV offer, 32 of them had been searching to find a low payment, 20 were searching for a zero-down lease offer, and 9 people had no clue whether or not that SUV was in their price range and just wanted to get an idea. Now imagine you could review those stats, make the appropriate changes to boost interest, and hop in a time machine to last week in order to re-run the revised ad.

In reality, you can’t monitor your newspaper ads beyond analyzing the actual leads you received, and you can’t undo what’s been put in an ad. But, in the world of dealer blogs, each eyeball that touches your site is tracked to the point that you can know within days the kind of traffic your latest entry is bringing. And because blog content isn’t set in stone, you can use the information you find to go back and actually revise your article, making it more search-engine friendly every week.

Let’s say you’re a Toyota dealer writing about the 2009 Toyota Corollas that just came in. We’ll approach the article with a blogging technique I like to use, which I’ve dubbed “Vishnu goes fishing”.

The idea here is that with a new model coming out, you’ll want to test the waters to see what kind of bait will bring in the most traffic. If you key in on a single keyphrase, such as “2009 Corolla lease $199″, you’ve only got one line in the water. So instead, do like Vishnu, the multi-appendaged Hindu god, and try to cast 4-6 keyphrase lines out there:

• 2009 Toyota Corolla lease $199
• new Corolla price range
• 2009 Corolla colors
• new 2009 Corolla dealer

What you may find within a few weeks of your article being up is that the fish are biting on generic Corolla info at this stage, and most of the search queries bringing people to your blog are related to the Corolla’s price range, colors, and availability. If that’s the case, why drop your drawers and start offering up lease programs?

Use this information to go back to your blog post, delete anything about $199 lease offers, and bolster comments about having the new Corolla on your lot, starting at $xx,xxx… maybe drop in images of all the available colors. Keep the actual search queries in mind as well - if dozens of visitors got to your site by querying “09 corolla price range”, put that exact phrase in your article content and your tag field.

Hypothetically, you could tweak the same article over and over for weeks at a time, generating better search engine presence with each tweak. Keep all of this in mind when marketing your store, and you’ll start to understand why Internet marketing blows newspaper ads out of the water.

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.