Local business owners, hold on to your seats… it looks like Google is about to take us all on a wild ride. The new “local carousel” has been rumored for months (it was mentioned on Search Engine Watch about a month ago), but it looks like the new layout is rolling out to the general public. Most people who have seen it or written about it have assumed that it was meant for mobile or tablet users, but we’re actually seeing it on desktop.

In fact, we’re ONLY seeing it on desktop, if we can see it at all. Clearly, it’s still being tested, because only 2 out of the 4 people on our team can see the carousel. I can only see it on Firefox, the other guy can only see it in Chrome. It doesn’t matter if I’m signed in or not, and Steve can still see it in Chrome when he’s incognito.

This is going to be an image-heavy post, so I apologize up front. Since most people aren’t seeing the new layout, I want to post as many screen captures as possible to show all the differences. Let’s start with a comparison between the “old” (current) layout compared to the new (carousel) layout:

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We’re always preaching to dealers that a good, honest vehicle description can make a huge difference in how fast you sell a vehicle. Customers appreciate clear photos and honest descriptions of any blemishes. They’d much rather read the truth than a generic 2 sentence description that says “this car is in great condition.”

Camibanks has taken his honest description to a hilarious extreme. He posted his Mercedes E320 Cdi on eBay Motors yesterday, and his photos and description are by far the funniest eBay Motors auction we’ve ever seen. As of the time I’m writing this post, the auction has had over 124,000 views.

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Google quietly announced the rollout of a new Google Plus dashboard for business pages. As part of their continued effort to update the Google+/Local/Maps/Places interface, they recently updated the old Places Dashboard, and now they’ve rolled out a similar change to the Google+ dashboard for businesses that have pages.

Jade explained it in the Google Business Help Forum yesterday, saying that it would give business owners one place to easily manage pages and data, and that Local Google+ page managers would now see improved page insights. (that means if you’ve got a merged local/business page, or one of the new already-merged pages, you’ll have tons of cool info) continue reading..

If your listings on Craigslist are being flagged, then there are multiple potential causes. The Craigslist community is known for overzealous flagging and it’s not uncommon for a Craigslist listing to be flagged simply because enough Craigslist users flagged the listing as spam. A more common reason is that the anti-spam software Craigslist uses flags the listing as spam or abusive.

Craigslist has repeatedly stated that they do not want car dealers posting multiple vehicles in a single day. Although this is a very common practice, the fact remains that it’s not what Craigslist or the Craigslist community wants. Craigslist routinely updates their algorithms to detect people that are posting too frequently or that are posting the same listing to multiple categories. As they make changes to their algorithms, flaggings will increase and decrease. continue reading..

Think your dealership doesn’t need a blog? Think again.

One of the main reasons blogging helps with SEO: dealers can quickly publish original content. Setting up a blog can pay huge dividends in terms of promoting your brand and connecting with customers. In addition to providing multiple SEO benefits, dealers can also use their blog to answer common customer questions.

Most car dealers can probably think of at least one or two questions that they hear over and over again from customers or potential customers (not including basic info e.g. location, hours, etc.). continue reading..

Most car dealers have a content problem on their websites – other than their vehicle details pages, their websites have very little unique content. Sure, most dealers an “About us” page and a “Financing” page, but  those pages are typically generic default content that’s inserted by the website provider. Dealers seldom know what to write on their pages to make their websites unique and useful.

Auto dealers (and most business owners, for that matter), often forget to take a step back and look at their website like a complete noob. You deal with your business day in and day out, and have an incredible depth of knowledge about your field – but your typical customer knows just about zip. What would that person with little or no industry knowledge think about your website? Does it answer all of their questions?

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As the search engines have evolved and gotten much more intelligent, the quality of content on websites has become one of the most important ranking signals. Google is moving in a direction where it’s not just about the quality of the content, but about who created and owns the content. At SMX West in San Jose last month, Google’s Matt Cutts said that within the next few years, Authorship will become a very powerful signal for search engine ranking.

Our last blog post covered the simple steps for using rel=author to claim pages and posts that were written by a specific author. This post is going to cover Google Publisher markup, which uses rel=publisher to claim an entire site for a company.

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If you spend much time on Google, you’ve probably noticed the little square pictures of people showing up to the left of random listings in search results. Looks cool, doesn’t it?  Kelly wrote an awesome blog post about it recently; if you missed her post, you should head over and read more about why you should set up Google Authorship.

There are wildly varied reports from sources all over the web that adding Google Authorship will increase clickthroughs to your website – supposedly, you can get anywhere from a 40% increase to a 150% increase in clickthroughs. Call me crazy, but I don’t care about any of those numbers…

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Google has finally released an update to the Google Places Dashboard! They announced yesterday that they’re rolling out an update that is “easier to use and more intuitive” – and it’s about time.

Google changed Google Places over to Google Plus Local last May, and the outdated Places dashboard has been a huge thorn in the side of almost every business owner. (how many times can you say “Google” in one sentence…?) The extremely clunky Places dashboard was an awful solution that just didn’t mesh well with the Google Plus Local public-facing listing.

Most importantly, Google is now allowing Service Area Businesses to get a Google Plus page – this was a huge problem with the old system, and it shows that they’re finally taking steps to fix the many problems that came with the migration form Places to Plus Local.

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It’s an exciting time at AutoRevo… We’ve had a pretty significant management change, and we’re heading in a bold new direction with the way we run things. We know that our customers might question such a sudden sweeping change, so we made a short video to fully explain all the changes.

We want to be sure that everyone understands why the management change was made, how things will be different moving forward, and why AutoRevo will be better than it ever has been before.