Dealership Websites

In a follow-up comment to a post I wrote last week about social media web tools, Jared Hamilton asked me about other free tools I’d recommend for dealers and internet managers to be as effective as possible in their daily marketing efforts.  Below are some tools that various team members at DealerOn use or have used in the past.

Compete.com –By entering your website and those of your competitors, you can see site traffic history, competitive analytics, and your “Compete Rank”, a stat based on unique visitors.

Quantcast.com — Similar information to Compete.com, Quantcast gives you another site to triangulate on information about your website, your visitors, and your competitors’ website visitors.

Spyfu.com – Not free, but they provide a free trial, and if you find it useful, it’s fairly cheap.  Spyfu provides information about your competitors keywords (organic and paid), ad copy, and spend levels.  The data isn’t perfect, but it’s interesting and helpful.

Website Grader–This is similar to Compete.com, providing information on various aspects of your site (metadata, readability level, indexed pages, linking domains, etc), and ways you can improve your website’s score.

Google Keyword Tool–This well-known tool allows you to see how many searches are done on a keyword, as well as related terms.  It’s a good, basic way to help start your keyword research for your website.  It also serves as a keyword discovery tool–providing additional keyword suggestions, that Google views as similar to the keywords you provide.

Google Webmaster Tools–Get the most out of your website by seeing how Google sees your site, get information about internal and external links, and make sure Google has your sitemap.

Google Analytics–I recently wrote a post about the importance of incorporating this analytics tool on your dealership site.  There’s absolutely no good reason not to have it, its free, and even if you don’t check it but every few months, getting your site coded today, will mean that 2 months from now, you haveenough data to actually draw some conclusions about your site and your traffic.

Google Alerts–At a minimum, your dealership should be tracking when your employee’s names, dealership name, and competitors’ brand names are mentioned online.  Results are delivered to your email inbox.

Backlink Checker–By simply entering your URL, you can find out how many backlinks Yahoo, Bing, and Google have to your site.  You can click onto the results to see which sites are linking to your website.  This is a useful stat to keep an eye on–if there is a sudden increase or decrease, you’ll want to find out why.

If you have any questions about how best to use these or other free web tools, feel free to contact DealerOn at clientresults@dealeron.com.  Are there are any other free web tools that your dealership uses?  Please share below.

Almost a year and a half ago, Google announced that their search algorithm would begin to include car dealer website load times.  This meant that auto dealerships with slow loading sites would not only lose potential leads from website traffic that “bounced”, but also risked hurting their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

DealerOn originally built their website platform with this in mind, making sure to limit the amount of flash used, keeping big files (images, auto-play videos, sounds) compressed, and closely followed all industry best practice methodologies pioneered by Google and others.

In addition to these basic design rules, DealerOn has recently begun a series of infrastructure hardware and software upgrades, making our dealer websites load ten times faster than they previously were.  The most recent feedback we’ve received on these new site load times is that they are “way faaaster!!” and “blazing”.

Check how fast your car dealership website is loading here.  If you aren’t happy with the results, make sure you talk to your auto dealer website provider to ensure they are doing everything they can to increase the load time of your site, from site architecture to technology upgrades.

Since DealerOn’s core service is our website product, we work with hundreds of dealers’ domains every day, and consider ourselves fairly expert in this area.  Dealers and their IT people may not always have much experience in this area– for most online companies, the only time you need to worry about your domain is when you register or renew it, UNLESS you’re about to lose your domain, and then you REALLY have to worry about your domain.

Your domain is your online brand and you have likely spent years, countless hours, and millions of dollars building the value of your domain name.  You’ve advertised your domain in print, TV, radio, search engines, online banner ads, email marketing campaigns, social media sites, and in online directories.  While the original selection of your domain may have been arbitrary, after building your domain brand for 15 years or more, it is now too valuable for you to lose.

Nevertheless, not a month goes by where I don’t talk to a dealership that’s in some jeopardy of having their ability to use a domain seriously impaired.  I’m going to briefly discuss your rights and recourse if your dealership ever finds itself in this situation and what you can do right now to ensure it doesn’t happen to you in the future.

Your Rights:

Your dealership has a valid legal claim to any domain name that someone has registered on your behalf while acting as your agent, UNLESS your website company’s contract or service agreement specifically states otherwise.  If you change website providers, you should not have any issue getting your prior provider to release your domains for transfer if they happen to be managing it or if they have registered it on your behalf.  DealerOn, for instance, does not prevent any current customer from transferring their domains, nor do we use any legal language impairing your ability to do so.  Your website company should not have any language in either their user agreement or their contract language providing them legal claim to your domain.

If your provider has legal control over your domain (they are listed as the registrant), and they refuse to transfer your domain for any reason, you should be aware of your rights.  First, they cannot put up a website themselves (see the Anti Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act) that in any way allows them or their registrar to profit from the website (this includes “parked pages” which usually have ads running on them).  These limits make it practically worthless for someone outside of your dealership to have control over the domain; they can only spite you by holding it.  The only instance in which they could continue using an active site on a domain you had been using in the past is if it contained only brand-agnostic words (EG- unitedstatesusedcars.com).

Your Recourse:

If you do get in a dispute with a website provider, marketing agency, former employee, or anyone else over a domain, there are many options available to you:

1. Contact the Registrar directly– If you can demonstrate to a Registrar (Go Daddy, Network Solutions, etc) that your business is clearly the business that should be in control of the domain (EG-your dealership is Cavalier Ford Lincoln and the domain is cavalierfordlincoln.com), the Registrar will have a process that you can go through to re-claim your domain.  It will usually require you to provide your letterhead, and document your state business license, among other things.  The Registrar has an incentive to help ensure that cybersquatting is not rewarded.
2. Submit a formal UDRP complaint to the Registrar – Registrars are required by ICANN to follow the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP).  If a company is “cybersquatting” on your domain or holding it hostage, you should submit a formal complaint.
3. File a Federal Court Action or administrative proceeding to compel the company to turn the domain over to your dealership.

According to Mike Steger, a leading Intellectual Property Attorney, neither of the above processes will usually take more than a couple months, nor cost more than a few thousand dollars (which you may recover from the defendant).  Both the time and cost involved will likely pale in comparison to the time and effort you’ve put in to building your online brand.

What you can do RIGHT NOW

For every domain that your dealership uses, your dealership should be the listed “Registrant”.  You want to make sure that even if your marketing agency, your website provider, your IT director, or your Internet sales manager is the technical or administrative contact for your domain, that your dealership or ownership company is still the listed “Registrant”.  You can check the legal Registrant for your domains on any accredited Registrar’s website.    Here are a few good ones:

• www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
• www.whois.net
• https://whois.domaintools.com/

Here’s an example from networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

Before you sign a website agreement with any provider, make sure you have a clear understanding of their policies regarding owning and controlling your dealership’s domain name.  Losing a URL that your dealership has built could cost your dealership millions of dollars to rebuild your online brand.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a few of our auto dealer website clients have asked what we are doing to keep up with the advances with HTML 5.  Since it seems to be a topic of concern for multiple dealers, I wanted to share what DealerOn is working on.

First, most people that are asking about HTML 5 are concerned about how their website will look on iPhones, iPads and other Apple devices.  Since Apple excluded Flash compatibility from their platforms, they are using HTML 5 as their preferred direction.

While DealerOn dealership websites do use some Flash, we are moving away from the technology.  When a site uses Flash, visitors to the site who don’t happen to have the right Flash version installed get a screen telling them to update their plug-in.   We’ve found that this dramatically increases bounce rates for a page or site.

Currently, Mobile devices constitute roughly 10-15% of a well-optimized dealer website.  Over half of this traffic is from devices that will not use Flash.  For a fee, DealerOn can build a completely Flash free site for those dealerships that see a large amount of their website traffic come from Apple products.

For others concerned about HTML 5, I want to point out that the technology is still classified as being under development.  It has not been released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is in charge of developing and instituting standards for the Internet.

DealerOn’s current major technology focus includes implementing all of the latest web technologies.  Once HTML 5 is released for stable public use and major web browsers start conforming to its standards, DealerOn will begin to ensure our websites are HTML 5 complaint, across the board.

As always, please feel free to contact DealerOn with any questions about our technologies, products, or online marketing tools.

True to its nature, the Internet is changing again.  2012 should see the emergence of new domain suffixes like .eco, .love, and .god.  And of course, this isn’t without some controversy.  This will open a ton of possible domains, which could either make the Internet more intuitive (you’d know what type of site you were going to if it have the domain suffix .god, for example) or confusing (who gets control of john.smith?).  There are currently 21 domain suffixes in use right now like .com, .org, and country suffixes.

A small non-profit organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), will be responsible for determining which sites have the rights to which domain suffixes.  The organization will start accepting applications from companies and governments, though the application process costs $185,000; organizations that are able to operate a domain also have to pay ICANN $25,000.  For controversial domains, ICANN plans to use “morality and public order” as their guidelines for approval.

I’m curious…what do you think of this opening up of domain suffixes?  Would you want your auto dealership website to have access to a .auto or .dealership suffix?  Even if it had a large cost attached to it?  Do you think it will make the Internet more intuitive or confusing?