Car Dealer Search Engine Reputation Management

"Search Engine Reputation Management (or SERM) tactics are often employed by companies and increasingly by individuals who seek to proactively shield their brands or reputations from damaging content brought to light through search engine queries. Some use these same tactics reactively, in attempts to minimize damage inflicted by inflammatory (or "flame") websites (and weblogs) launched by consumers and, as some believe, competitors."

-  Wikipedia.org

What are your money terms?

Car dealer money terms are the dealership name and, brand and market area keywords. For example if you are John Doe Nissan Dealership who is a Nissan Dealer in the Golden Isles your money terms would be "John Doe Nissan", "Golden Isles Nissan Dealer(ship)", "Nissan Golden Isles", "John Doe" and all derivatives thereof. Those are the keywords that people will use when using the Search Engines to look specifically for your dealership and or brand in a given market area.

What are people seeing when they search your money terms?

If you have done a good job with optimizing your website for your name and money terms you should be number one in the "Search Engine Results Pages" (SERPS) and possibly hold the number two position as well with an inner page of your website.  It is all of the other entries above an below your website you should be concerned with.  They could belong to a great number of things that may or not benefit you directly.

Third Party Vendors

• Auto Classified Sites - Site such as Cars.com and Autotrader.com do a great job in bringing in leads and shoppers from people who are using their sites to look for used cars. If someone is already looking for your money terms why would you want them visiting these sites? It's like parking competitors inventory on your dealership display area to give customers other choices.
• Lead Providers - Third party lead providers will target your name and money terms in a variety of ways.  Through Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.  Sites like Edmunds.com and Carsbelowinvoice.com use your "money terms" to bring traffic to their site.  If a customer is already looking for you why would you want them going to one of these lead providers to submit a lead for you to buy or be sold to a competitor?

Consumer Generated Content

• Review Sites - Sites like dealerrater.com and ripoffreport.com are showing well in the SERPS for dealer names when consumers voice their pleasure or unhappiness with their dealership experience.
• Blogs and hate sites - Sometimes people will blog about good experiences with your dealership and other times they will "flog" you.  Rip you the proverbial new one.  And as witnessed by sites like http://planethyundaisucks.com  they will even create sites to aggregate other mad consumers.

Competitors

 If your competition has done a good job with Search Engine Optimization and they are within a reasonable distance of your location they are probably ranking in the SERPS for some if not all of your money terms.  It really is quite easy for a dedicated SEO expert to have a site rank for any terms they want, including your dealership name.  Especially easy if your dealership is call Anycity Ford or Mycity Toyota.  (In my opinion that is the worst name possible for any business in todays digital age.)

Directory Listings

Some directory listings are good and others may encourage customer searching for your money terms to shop with other dealers.  Almost all of the major search engines have free directory listings and you cannot control what shows there.  However sites that may appear to be directories also sell other advertising to your competition.  There is no long term benefit to your brand by having these results show up on page one for your search terms.

Control what shows up for "your" searches.

Start a blog

There are many free and low cost resources to get started with blogging.  Places like blogger.com and wordpress.com are good places to start.  Don't just blog about senseless stuff, give the readers some value for their time.  Sure it is ok to talk about your sales and link back to your website but also provide the reader a reason to continue to interact with you.

Video Content

Add your latest television commercials, customer testimonials, or any other video content to the various video sharing platforms like youtube.com or Google video and post them on your blog and website.  Vidieo SEO is not rocket science and is quite easy if you just do a little research on how it is done.

Dealer Micro Sites

Micro Sites are almost a has been buzz word in the industry.  Many have had tremendous success with them in the past and their real value as a lead tool may be gone.  You can build online branding pages through a variety of mediums before shelling out big money for content you do not own.  Here is a good example of one I built for a Kansas City Suzuki Dealer.  Do some due diligence before shelling out big money for Automotive Micro Sites.

Any place online you can create a page

There are hundreds of places online that you can control the content for that do not cost you a dime.  Some may have third party advertising tied into them but if your content is genuine and you give the person who finds it what they are looking it will pay off in additional traffic to your main website. (List coming soon) 

Conclusion

If you have made it this far you can understand the importance of Car Dealer Reputation Management.  Getting started with reputation management is not difficult unless you are in a desperate situation then it will probably take professional intervention.  Make sure you bookmark this page as it will be the feeder to more articles in the near future for how car dealers can manage their online reputations.

The author Paul Rushing is a participant in the www.DrivingSales.com online community were auto industry professionals share best practices, network and rate vendors who serve them.