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Last month we talked about reviews, and how critical they are to a dealership’s online success, and subsequently their brick and mortar success. The successful dealers now are those that understand that the battle for customers and their dollars is a digital one, and can be won or lost before they even leave their homes.

In a previous article, I talked about the Brightstar 2015 search report that highlighted the importance of having both a lot of positive reviews, and recent reviews – because 68% of searchers reported that they believed that reviews older than 90 days were no longer relevant. 

The big takeaway is that to be successful, your dealership needs to have a system in place that is constantly harvesting legitimate positive reviews from past and present customers so that when searchers find you online, you are the logical place to go.  Of course, my shameless plug is that we offer a done-for-you system that has proven to do this flawlessly, but whether you use us or not, you need a good system.

Once you have your reputation maintenance plan in place, the next step in the parade is to drive traffic to your site, and ultimately, to your dealership.

This is done in two basic ways, through SEO efforts, and SEM. SEO (search engine optimization) is an organic way to make your site rank better in the search engine results by having good content that is well structured and easily ‘crawled’ by search engine spiders. In addition to having a good site, having consistent name, address, and phone information (referred to as NAP info) on sites across the web also boosts your rankings. When Google sees a lot of other sites linking back to your site, they look at you as a more credible business and rank you higher in search results. 

Having solid structure on your website, good navigability, and lots of good content is important, and your web provider will (or at least should) be handling a lot of that for you. I don’t suggest you spend a lot of extra time and money on SEO services outside of what is on your site. 

Many people will disagree with me on this. Your web provider will probably disagree with me. Keep in mind that most of the folks who will disagree with me sell SEO services.  They have an interest in being able to bill you monthly. 

So why do I say not to spend a lot (or any) money on SEO services like link building, article writing, custom landing pages, and the other bells and whistles that a lot of SEO services offer? Because we are in a niche industry, and the OEMs and lots of national companies compete there, and have a lot more money to throw at those services than you do. 

When you search for your dealership name, you’re always going to show up in the search results. If you haven’t tried it, do it. When you start typing in the names of particular models though, like when someone is researching a bike to buy, the organic results are populated by the OEMs and national sites like Cycle Trader and others. These are huge sites that get a lot more traffic than dealership sites, and have a lot of money to throw at them. Don’t take my word for it, fire up Google and do some model specific searches and see what I mean. The amount of money and time that a dealer would have to spend to compete at the organic level with these sites isn’t reasonable, practical, or in most (if not all) cases, possible.

So how do you compete? Take your budget and spend it on SEM, Search Engine Marketing. While there are a lot of ways to spend money on search engine marketing, I recommend spending it on AdWords. Google is the 800 lb. gorilla in the search engine game, and AdWords is how you market with them.  

Using AdWords, you can cut through the clutter and appear on the first page of search results immediately, right next to the national sites – and ahead of your local competition. If you use a professional company to manage your campaigns for you, it can be the most economical way to advertise outside of email. 

AdWords levels the playing field, and it is a VERY quick way to get results. We have managed campaigns for dealers that increased their monthly website traffic by as much as 50%, and created hundreds of new leads. Done properly, AdWords just works.

I like to think of reputation maintenance and AdWords as a sort of 1-2 punch for online marketing success. AdWords gets you in front of the specific people who are actively looking for what you sell so that they know who and where you are, and by guarding your reputation (reviews), they find that you are the best place to buy from.

If you want a clearer picture of how this can work for your dealership, give us a call, or go to powersportsmarketing.com/local-web-dominator.

Talk soon.