The Future of Google Local?

Have you seen the new offering from Google for local search? Unless you live in Austin, Portland, Madison or San Diego, chances are that you haven’t. Google’s new “Beta” Local Directory Portals are a bit of a mix between their place pages and Yelp. They let users look at all of the businesses in a city in one place (similar to Yelp’s model).

Here is a screenshot of Google Portland.

You can sort by category, and then drill down even further using the filters. While there is no automotive category yet (the tool seems to lean a bit more towards tourists/visitors), it’s another example of how important Google Places is now and will be in the future.

These local portals are pulling their results directly from Google Places listings, including the reviews. In fact, one way to sort is by rating. If your dealership doesn’t have a lot of good, quality reviews, you may not appear above the fold.

If you haven’t already, I can’t stress enough how important it is to claim your listing and make sure it is as complete as possible. This means photos, videos, categories, reviews, and information is completely filled out and accurate.

Google’s Local Portals are just another example of how Google is relying more and more on the information in their Places, and why your auto dealership needs to have an accurate representation in the Places realm. How do you think this new offering will impact the local auto dealer industry?

Take Control of your Facebook Places

If you use Facebook with any regularity, I’m sure you’ve seen the rising popularity of Facebook Places, used it yourself, and seen your friends check-in information as well. If you haven’t noticed this yet, Facebook Places allows users to “check-in” through their mobile phones, letting their friends (and businesses) know where they are. It’s designed to compete with Foursquare, a similar location-based social network.

So what happens if someone tries to check-in at your dealership, only to find your Facebook Place doesn’t exist yet? They can create the listing for you—which is probably NOT how you want to establish your dealership’s Facebook Place! You want to control your FB Place listing, just as you want to control any aspect of your dealership’s brand, and this includes making sure that the information presented in your Facebook Places listings is accurate.

Here’s how to set up your dealership’s Facebook Place:

1. Check to see if your dealership’s Facebook Place already exists. Using a smartphone, log into a Facebook account and click onto either “Places” or “Check-in”. Type the name of your dealership–if it does not appear, then add your dealership and a description.

2. On your computer, log into Facebook and using the search box at the top of the page, find your dealership. Make sure you click onto the “Places” version, not your dealership’s “Page”.

3. Once there, click on the “Is this your business?” link on the left hand side. You’ll see a small pop-up asking you to verify that you are an “official representative” of your dealership. Click the tick box, and then “Proceed with Verification”.

4. Fill in the information about your dealership as accurately and as completely as possible. It’s important that the information you enter on this page matches the information on your dealership’s Facebook page, as well as on your Google Places listing. Click “Continue” when you have everything filled out.

5. The last step is to show Facebook that you are actually affiliated with your dealership. This can be done by adding your dealership business email to your Facebook page, entering a dealership email address (it must be one that is associated with your dealership’s business page, otherwise you’ll need to do step 1 first), or uploading a utility or phone bill from your dealership. Hit submit when you’re finished.

Facebook advises that it can take up to a week for them to verify your “claiming” of the Places page. If all goes correctly, your dealership will have control of the address, contact information, business hours, profile picture, admins, and other settings of your Places page. Also, since Facebook is constantly changing their offerings, it’s important to claim your page as early as possible to help ensure your dealership has control moving forward.

DealerOn at Digital Dealer in Orlando

DealerOn’s team had a great time and a fantastic experience at Digital Dealer in Orlando! We had a chance to talk and socialize with current and potential clients, show off what the company has been working on, and of course, have much more fun than should be allowed.

While we didn’t take nearly as many pictures as we meant to, I’ve posted some of the ones that we did below. Let me know if you have others…we’d love to see them!

For those we didn’t get a chance to meet, we look forward to next time, and as always, feel free to contact us at 877-543-4200 with any questions about online marketing for auto dealerships.

New Technology Makes DealerOn Car Dealer Websites 10 Times Faster

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.

Dealership Relevant Keywords

While using Google’s AdWords Keyword tool is a good place to start when you are trying to come up with a keyword list for your dealership online marketing, a lot of people start there, which means your competitors could have a very similar keyword list as your dealership.  To help you stay a step ahead, I want to highlight some of the alternative keyword tools I’ve found.

Facebook has Lexicon, released in April of 2008.  When you enter a keyword or phrase, the tool will count “occurrences of words and phrases” on the Walls of their users.  This can be a great tool to track the trending of keywords your dealership is interested in, but it doesn’t show an actual total.  You need a Facebook login to use the tool, and it appears they are working on a new Lexicon tool in Beta.

Another tool for keyword list generation is Google’s Wonder Wheel search feature.  After conducting a regular Google search for a potential keyword, click on “More Options”, then “Wonder wheel”.  Google will then show you a diagram with related keywords as spokes around your original search.  Click on any of the spokes to expand the diagram, showing related keywords to the spoke you clicked on.

While Google’s AdWords Keyword tool is more in depth than the two tools I’ve talked about here, using alternative keyword list generation tools could possibly expose your dealership to new keywords to use while promoting your auto dealer website.

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