Managing your dealerships virtual front line

 Most dealer principals have strict standards when it comes to managing the front line of their dealership. Everyday they go through a ritual of lining up the cars to the inch; hauling out the flags, blowing up balloons, and hanging banners. It makes sense; it is good retail business practice to have attractive product display. What astounds me though is how many managers and owners don’t pay attention to their real front line, their website. When was the last time you browsed your own online inventory?

The new digital car buying process

In the last few years the typical car buying process has shifted dramatically. It use to be that when a consumer wanted to buy a new vehicle they would jump in their current car, drive around to local dealerships, and browse the inventory. Today 70% of car buyers do some type of online research before even stepping foot in a dealership. A recent study showed the average number of dealerships visited when buying a used car went from 2.5 places to 1.3. While consumers are physically visiting less dealerships they are virtually visiting even more. This is why it is extremely important to have a solid set of standards in place when it comes to dealing with your virtual front line.
 

Your dealer inventory pictures

 Your pictures do say 1000 words about your dealership. Are your cars clean inside and out? Do they look neat and lined up on your website? Ideally if you have spare time on your hands, you should take each vehicle to a nice spot in front of your showroom or sign. It is important to take the same sequence of pictures for every vehicle making sure your first picture is always the same angle and facing the same way. This will make your website and vehicles look clean and uniform. Pay attention to details if a car has a scratch on the side that you haven’t touched up yet, keep that picture off the website. I will never forget an embarrassing call I got once when a customer asked me if I had any information on the accident a car was in. We had a car up where the back bumper was smashed in! Make sure your floor mats are straight and clean, that little detail makes a HUGE difference.

 There are dealers out there that have a standard of 60 pictures per car. For retail sales I agree, if you have the resources, the more pictures the better! More pictures equal more confidence in the vehicle and more emotional attachment. A customer is much more likely to take emotional ownership of a vehicle they saw 60 pictures of then 6.  If you are Buy Here Pay Here I tend to think less is better, 8-12 is good, because you don’t want the customer to get too emotionally attached to the 05 trailblazer!

Vehicle inventory - Leave out the details

 Leave something to the imagination! Marketing Buy Here Pay Here online to the educated consumer is a little more difficult then regular retail. There are certain deficiencies we have to overcome, like deciding whether or not to list prices or mileage on certain vehicles. You have to play a delicate balancing game between motivating a customer to visit or call the dealership without having them loose confidence in you. I’ve found it better to leave the information out because it encourages the call! Just make sure you have people with good phone skills in place when it comes to handling that phone call.

Google rolled out its new search bar today, May 5th 2010. The bar essentially lets you modify your searches on the fly to get more targeted results.
There are quite a number of important changes in the new tool bar so let's break them down.

Google Result Sorting 

<This section allows you to sort the results according to type.
Most of this sorting has always been available to you, you just never used it because google always told you what you wanted to see.

I ran across this nifty site that tells you how fast google will index your pages. Below is their description on how they calculate the index rate.

IndexRank is a 0-10 metric (higher is better) that uses an algorithm based on Google's indexing data to determine the indexing rate of a website.

What does IndexRank measure?
IndexRank measures the rate at which your site is being indexed, which also translates into the rate at which it is growing. If you have a stagnant site with little content being added, you will have a low IndexRank. If you constantly increase content, you will have a high IndexRank.

How can I improve my IndexRank?
In order to improve your IndexRank you must consistently add content to your site. One of the easiest methods is to incorporate a blog, but you can also write or buy unique content and grow your site week after week, month after month.

How it works
This tool collects Google indexing rate data for different time periods. If your site is less than a year old, you can expect your IndexRate to be lower. Data is cached on a weekly basis, so changes in an IndexRate would only be seen at a minimum every week. Basically, you don't need to check it every day.
http://www.soloseo.com/tools/indexRank.html

5 Link Building Ideas – Some avenues you may have overlooked or forgot about.

BBB Page

Most companies are already signed up with BBB but is your website linked from there? There are 2 different pages where you can list your link on the bbb website. The one is your profile page that lists your rating. The other is their consumer index located at http://www.bbb.org/online/consumer. The later one is the better link and it requires an extra step by applying for a business accreditation. You can find that here http://www.bbb.org/us/bbb-online-business-application/. Once you are accepted you will then be listed in their directory which gives you a nice high trust link.