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Tips to Optimize Your Dealership’s Google+ Page

Have Content Ready: Google recommends having 10-20 posts on your Google+ business page before you really start promoting it.  Recent posts is one of the things they use to judge the quality of your page, so having it full of content once people start visiting it will help.

Promote Your Page: Add a Google+ button everywhere you promote your other social media accounts. Allow your website visitors to +1 your inventory and dealership from your site.

Incorporate your +1’s into AdWords: Google will pull your +1 count into your AdWords campaigns if you link them.  Within your AdWords account, click the Ad Extensions tab. Select “Social Extensions” from the “View” menu, and enter the URL to your Google+ page.  Talk to your dealer website provider or PPC vendor to get more information.

Make sure your dealership’s Google+ page is optimized and ready for the combination of Google Places into Google Plus Local.

In Web Analytics

How Can Your Dealership Use Google’s New Indexed Page Report?

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the new Google Webmaster Tools report that tells your dealership how many pages have indexed on your website over the last year.  Unfortunately the information on its own is a little vague, and can be difficult to fully use when taken on its own.  For example, a big segment of the data revolves around how many website pages are not selected for indexing.  What does that mean?  Google says that:

“A URL can be not selected for indexing for many reasons including:

  • It redirects to another page
  • It has a rel=”canonical” to another page
  • Our algorithms have detected that its contents are substantially similar to another URL and picked the other URL to represent the content.”

The information in this report can be used in many ways, but a couple that really stand out to me are:

1) When your dealership changes providers, hires an SEO company, or hires a content creation company–you can use the tool to watch how many more pages Google indexes over time

2) When you are writing content (or having content written on your behalf), like on a blog, you can see whether Google is indexing it (which content does get indexed, what doesn’t, etc)

I think what is really important for dealerships to understand is that this report gives a lot of relevant, important information, but taken alone, can be overwhelming and misinterpreted.  Discuss this with your dealership’s website provider to help fully understand what it all means.

In Best Practices

DealerOn Weekly Webinar Winners

Michael Speigl, Nick Miller, Josh Cole, Steve Duff, and Ashley Lopez were the winners of this week’s webinar prize!

Each will a receive an entire year of Dataium’s INSITE Standard tool, a completely independent reporting tool, FREE! Each prize is valued at $1299 – all just for participating in our weekly webinar series!

Congratulations to all of our winners – and we hope to see you at next week’s webinar on Thursday!

 

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google Announces, and Releases, Latest Panda Update

It’s not often that Google announces when they are going to make changes to their algorithm in advance, but they did just that on Tuesday.

The latest update under the Panda name went into effect Tuesday night, Panda 3.9.  Panda was originally released in February 2011 as a way to remove low-quality content from Google’s search results.

Google made this announcement via their Twitter account:

“New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. To put this Panda update into perspective here’s some context: goo.gl/huekf”

Your dealership can avoid being penalized by any of the Panda updates by making sure you have high-quality content on your auto dealer website.  This means that the information is relevant, up to date, and provides the info your customers are looking for.

If you are worried about how this update may be affecting your car dealership website, talk to your dealer website provider about their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and what they are doing to keep your site up to date.

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Tips for Avoiding Over-Optimization Penalties on Your Dealership Website

Google announced a few months ago that they were going to start penalizing websites that were deemed to be over-optimized for SEO as an attempt to “level the playing field”.  While many auto dealer websites shouldn’t have an issue with this (your site provider should not only be up to date on Google’s latest algorithm changes, but make sure your site is performing as well as possible), here are some things to avoid so you don’t over-optimize your website:

Keyword Stuffing: Google wants the content on your dealership to be relevant, quality, and valuable to users. This means that every other word can’t be one that you are trying to optimize for.  Use your keywords when they make sense, but don’t write choppy, difficult to read sentences just because you are trying to get more keywords on the page.

Non-Relevant Anchor Text: This is the highlighted text that website visitors click to visit another page. The anchor text should describe what is on the page that you are linking to, for example, “used Nissan Altimas” should send traffic to a page about used Nissan Altimas.  Having the same anchor text for all links, or anchor text that doesn’t accurately reflect the content of the landing page for a link is spammy and is exactly what Google is trying to penalize with this update.

Having Hidden Text: Frequently, organic search spammers create extremely keyword-heavy text that is hidden or obscured from website visitors, but visible to search engine spiders.  Again, Google wants to reward websites that give relevant information to visitors, so there isn’t much value (and potentially harm) in hiding content from visitors.  Text that is “white on white” or hidden under a “see more” layer may be penalized by Google, and could even get a site dropped from Google’s index.

As always, create your auto dealer website with your customers in mind, and the chances you’ll be penalized by Google are highly reduced.  Talk with your dealership website provider to see what SEO techniques they are using on your dealership site and how they’re making sure you’re on good terms with Google.

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