Social media dominates online activity, and now has a growing impact on search. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to make their search results more relevant for users, and social search is another way for them to do so. By annotating results that users’ social connections “like”, the online search experience is more personalized and trusted.

Recently, Google officially rolled out its social search worldwide, and Bing announced “Friend Effect” – search results derived from the web’s IQ (its existing rankings factors) and opinions of people that users trust most. Some of the social signals included in Google’s search results include content shared or created by friends, content recommended by friends using its +1 button, continue reading..

If you’re constantly on the hunt for best practices in SEO and read a lot of articles about the topic, it may seem like everything focuses heavily on ranking in Google’s SERPs. That’s because the majority of them do – Google dominates 64.2% of all searches in the U.S. It’s obviously important to know how to perform well in the search results of the leading search engine, but do not discount Bing, the fastest growing search engine in the U.S. (according to comScore).

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When optimizing your dealer website, it is very important to know (and adhere closely to) the webmaster guidelines of the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Not following these guidelines could result in your website being penalized by the search engines, which in the worst case scenario, results in the removal of your website from search results. In their guidelines, the search giants outline things that website owners should do (and not do) to ensure that their web pages are visible in the search engines.

To make sure that you’re optimizing and not harming your dealer website through your SEO efforts, I’ve listed the important items in the guidelines. Many of the recommendations from the Big 3 overlap, so under each guideline, I’ve listed recommendations that aren’t covered elsewhere. continue reading..

When you’re writing content for the pages of your car dealer website, choosing words that appeal to your potential customers might seem like the most important thing to do. Instead of using words that tend to have a less than positive connotation, like “used cars”, most dealers opt for more attractive-sounding words like “pre-owned cars”. While writing content that appeals to your customers is important, it’s absolutely vital to write content that includes keywords that will help your site show up higher in search engines and bring you more visitors. After all, what’s the point of writing appealing content for an audience that doesn’t exist?

Keywords on your car dealer website play a huge role in how your site ranks in search results; the correct use of keywords can help to drive lots of traffic to your site from search engines. continue reading..

There was a big splash in the automotive news world a few days ago when we saw the first auto dealership Groupon offer. Twitter and blogs were all abuzz with industry experts, vendors, and dealers debating the deal, and offering opinions about whether it would work or not.  Now the deal has expired, and the minimum number of Groupon vouchers weren’t purchased, so the deal is null and void.

Of course, everyone is now jumping on the “here’s why it didn’t work” bandwagon… There’s a great post by Arnold Tijerina over at dealer-magazine.com called “Why the first car dealership Groupon failed” – give it a read, he’s got a few great points…

To summarize, he says the deal didn’t have value for the customer because customers EXPECT to negotiate with the dealer and bring the price down by at least $500 – so why would a Groupon be necessary?  Also, the dealer probably didn’t handle the Groupon correctly – as potential buyers were leaving comments debating the worth of the deal, the GM left a few comments of his own to try to prove to people how valuable the deal was: continue reading..

So I just saw a really interesting post over on Advertising Age – The first Groupon deal for an auto dealership was rolled out today for LaFontaine Buick GMC Cadillac in Highland, Michigan. Sure, we’ve seen a few Groupons for oil changes and service departments, but apparently this is the first voucher that would be applied to purchasing a vehicle.

According to the article, they’re not sure how it’s going to perform, and they’re a bit reluctant to be the first dealership in the country to attempt a Groupon deal – but they like the fact that they’re setting a precedent. continue reading..