Early on it was about generating foot traffic by using billboards, or getting someone to call in after seeing a 30 second spot on TV. Now car dealerships seem to be hyper focused on website visitors, email conversion rates, and Facebook fans, so they might sometimes forget the importance of a phone prospect.

What we know from the National Automobile Dealership Association (NADA) is that 75% of all auto purchases initiate from a phone call, and other studies show that phone prospects are likely to purchase a vehicle within 2-5 days after that initial call, so why aren’t automotive website providers focused on getting car dealers more phone leads? The truth is that responsible car dealer website providers are focused on getting dealers more phone leads. At ClickMotive we see 10 phone call leads for every 2 email leads on traditional websites, and 10 phone call leads for every 1 email lead on mobile websites.

Our philosophy has always been to get our dealerships lower-funnel, higher converting visitors and leads, and consumers that are submitting email leads are likely to be higher in the purchase funnel than someone that is calling into the dealership. This information isn’t meant to discount the importance of an email lead. I believe that an email lead like a phone prospect is just a means to the end, which is to get the consumer to the dealership. Since most opportunities start with a phone call, car dealerships need to focus on making the most of their phone leads. Timely manager involvement with phone prospects, and continuous phone training could potentially help a dealership save half of their lost opportunities.

Google “not providing” organic keyword data for logged in Google users.
Back in October Google announced they would no longer pass organic keyword query data for logged in Google users performing searches. As a result in Google Analytics and other analytics applications will receive a value of “(not provided)” in place of the users query. While Google is approaching this as a security feature for users there is no personally identifiable information available to webmasters that would present a security or privacy issue. This is what has webmasters and site owners up in arms about the loss of information that will help build better experiences for users. For most of our car dealers the impact is relatively small. We’re seeing approximately 10% to 13% of dealer traffic being affected by this.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html

Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Updates
This year Google released a series of algorithm updates that affect poorly written, copied or other content deemed poor quality. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land referred to the initial shift as the “Farmer Update” because content farm type sites were primarily affected. Google later called the updates “Panda,” named after the engineer behind the formulas used to identify the content. Over the course of 2011 Google released additional iterations and tweaks of the algorithm with a variety of implications including: improved ranking placement for video content for some search queries and downgrading signals for sites/pages that aren’t offering relevant content in relationship to overall page content. Sites heavy on ads have been noticeably affected. Overall, very few automotive sites have been affected unless there were issues of poorly written content, content duplicated from other sites or content heavy on grammatical and spelling errors.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
http://searchengineland.com/minor-google-panda-update-on-november-18th-101891

Bing’s Stance on Meta Keywords
We’ve known for more than two years that Google doesn’t make use of the meta keywords tag but we’ve not known for sure what Bing’s position was. Leave it to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land to get to the bottom of the story and learn that Bing does make use of the keywords meta tag, …. as a SPAM SIGNAL! Basically Duane Forrester of Bing confirmed that they see a high correlation between keyword stuffed pages and keyword stuffed meta tags – so they use that information accordingly.

While ClickMotive continues to make limited use of the meta keywords tag for non SEO purposes; we regularly see dealers and so called third party “SEO Experts” recommending changes to meta keywords tags. Hopefully this new information will serve to educate all concerned.

Google Expanded Site Links
For many brand specific queries Google introduced an expansion of sitelinks. Sitelinks normally appear below an initial listing with links to some deeper pages of the site that a user might be interested in. The expanded links for most brand searches now consume the area of the results page above the fold. For business owners this is a great feature that makes it easier for users to find relevant content but also pushes some review, directory and third party site content further down the page; a real plus from a reputation management perspective. The new format (shown below features larger links with urls and snippet text to help users. In some cases businesses can have up to 12 sitelinks in addition to the primary link for the homepage of the site. Most car dealerships are seeing up to 6 sitelinks.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/evolution-of-sitelinks-expanded-and.html
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/08/googles-expanded-sitelinks.html

Google Places Updates
In the past two years Google has made numerous changes to how local business search results are displayed.  One of the biggest changes in 2011 was the expansion of information provided for queries for specific businesses or points of interest. Where Google feels certain that it knows the intent of the user they now display additional map, image, business details and review information to the right of the search results listing. This new information with the previously introduced expanded site links means that fewer users are likely to have to scroll down the page or refine their search queries to find exactly the information they are looking for. Notice how the sitelinks mentioned above also help fill a large portion of the page.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-way-to-get-information-about-real.html
http://searchengineland.com/google-raises-local-search-stakes-with-new-places-serp-99627

Google Places Reviews
This past year Google started using their own review information as the primary source for star ratings meaning that reviews submitted on DealerRater, Yelp and other third party sites were given less weight. As a result many dealers that had previously ignored Google in favor of third party sites may have seen star ratings plummet. While Google is still the biggest dog on the block and an obvious choice as a primary source of reviews we’re in favor of gathering reviews from wherever users are able to leave them.

Google Introduces Modified Broad Match Type in Adwords
In 2011 Google introduced a new keyword match type “Modified Broad Match” which gives PPC practitioners greater control over how Google matches on keywords. With this new match type we can specify that one or more keywords in an expression must appear in order for an ad to be triggered. In the past a broad match term like “Ford Dallas” could cause an ad to be triggered for a wide variety of terms where either of the individual words were used or even searches using similar words that might be unrelated.

Changes to Google AdWords Algorithms
Yes you read that correctly…. Google does make changes related to Adwords and in October they made an adjustment that affected landing page quality that had the potential to impact quality scores for AdWords advertisers. Fortunately our dealer clients’ sites didn’t suffer as a result of this change.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-quality-improvements-rolling-out.html

Google Analytics and a Year of Updates
Google Analytics introduced version 5 of the popular free analytics package and more changes in 2011 than in any previous years that we can think of. From an update of the interface and reports to a new version of the Analytics Help Center and tons of new ways to slice, diced and segment user activity on websites Google has really outdone themselves.
While there are more new features and updates to easily list here a complete list can be found at http://analytics.blogspot.com/search/label/New%20Google%20Analytics and check back here in the coming weeks for more details on how car dealers can make use of some of the most important features.

1.      Go to the keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
2.      Enter the keywords that you would like the research into the “Word or Phrase” box
3.      Check the filter that says “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” under the “Word or Phrase” box and click search.
4.      After the search has completed, on the left side, under “Match Types” check “[Exact].” This will allow you to see how many people search using the exact keywords you’ve entered.
5.      Now you can download the all of the results into Excel to sort by search volume and make sure you’re prioritizing your keywords correctly.

As you’re looking at the data that the keyword tool reports here are some points to consider:….

• Make sure you’re looking at “Exact” match keywords. Many SEOs tell you that there are hundreds or thousands of searches for a particular term when in fact the exact match search volume the numbers are considerably smaller.
• Look at terms using geographic modifiers associated with your city and area. Trying to rank for “MAKE dealer,” while valuable locally, won’t be nearly as valuable as “CITY MAKE dealer.”
• “Local Monthly Searches” as shown in the Google keyword tool isn’t “local” for your area. It actually corresponds to the traffic for your location (USA) and language (English).
• Search volumes reported as <10 or dashes (representing zero) don’t mean that there are no users searching for those terms but that the search volume is low (think one or two a month). With that in mind feel free to test keyword variations and keep those that bring you valuable traffic.
• High rankings won’t always bring you the traffic and being on page 1 isn’t always enough. For the top terms like “CITY MAKE” and “CITY MAKE DEALER” Google is almost always going to put a dealer in the city at the top of the list. The further you are from the city being searched the less likely users are to click your result and buy from you.

The scam begins with an email to someone listed as the contact for your domain with a subject line of something similar to “Internet Domains dispute: your-doman.” In the email a representative of the “registration and solution center in China” announces that they’ve received an application from someone trying to register .cn, .com.cn, .net.cn, .org.cn, .hk, .com.hk, .in, .tw, .com.tw, and .asia versions of your primary domain.

Basically this company will ask you to contact them to dispute the purchase by the third party or ignore the message and they’ll release the domain to be sold. If you contact them to dispute the third party’s claim to the domain name they try to sell you the domain names to avoid them being purchased by other parties. In reality there’s actually no one trying to buy these domains – this company is trying to scam you into buying domains you don’t need at exorbitant prices.

The likely hood of someone in Asia actually purchasing your domain is pretty slim. We’ve seen cases where even two years after the initial email scam that the Asian versions of the domains are still available.  Site owners that still feel the need to register these domains can use sources like GoDaddy.com; or a web search for “.cn domain registrar” or “Asian domain registrar” should provide more than enough options.

You can find multiple references and additional details on this scam on Google:                                             http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=asian+domain+scams

So how can dealerships use this fact to their advantage?

Because an increasing number of consumers are using their mobile phones for surfing the web and collecting information, the best way a dealer can take advantage of this is by spending more time and resources in enhancing their mobile websites.

Mobile websites typically produce a higher percentage of leads compared to visitors than any other form of advertising.  Think about it.  When a consumer is searching through your website and stumbles across your phone number, it is almost effortless to just tap the number and call right then and there as opposed to watching an ad on TV and scrambling to pick up a pen to write down the number, only to put off calling to a more “convenient” time.  Speaking of, does anyone still watch ads on TV?

What can dealers do to enhance their mobile websites?

On the surface, dealers should start with some basics such as having an app style website that is fast and easy to use or adding phone number and email links to every page to increase leads.

But more importantly, dealers should focus on engaging consumers with their mobile websites and what better way than with pictures and videos?

Having stunning graphics and interactive videos increases the likelihood of converting a visitor into a lead, especially in an industry where looks matter.

With that being said, go ahead and saturate your mobile website with more and more pictures.  Your customers will thank you for it.  But in this day and age, pictures can get boring fairly quickly and the consumer will most likely want to see the car in action before making the decision to actually stop by the dealership, and this is where videos come into play.

Having videos on your mobile website is a huge value-add, especially since many mobile web providers still do not have the capability to add video.  By making the decision to add videos to your mobile website, your dealership could be at a first-mover advantage versus the competition.  Videos have the ability to strongly engage customers because it makes it a whole lot easier to gain knowledge about a vehicle by watching a 30 second video on-the-go as opposed to navigating through the mobile website only to read the same information.

So what do you do when simply having a video on your mobile website isn’t enough?

Here’s a checklist of things you should make sure your video has in order to gain even more exposure to your dealership:

□        Does your video have stay-in-page technology?  Many of the mobile web providers who have the ability to place a video on your mobile website do not have the capability to make it play in-page.  This is important because without stay-in-page technology, your consumers will be directed to another window or video player in order to watch the video and will be directed away from your website.  Studies show that most consumers will not know how or will forget to go back to the page they were viewing on your website after being directed away to watch a video.

□        Does your video improve your SEO ranking?  Many videos found online do absolutely nothing to improve SEO.  Knowing that SEO plays a huge role in the amount of organic traffic your website gets, why wouldn’t you want all aspects of your website to help your SEO ranking?  Making sure that your videos are sent to Google and syndicated on third party websites that link back to your site will ensure that your video will have greater SEO value.

□        Does your video syndicate with YouTube, Facebook, or Cars.com?  Welcome to the new age of social media.  If your dealership is not currently utilizing social media websites such as Facebook or YouTube, then it will surely fall behind the competition.  Making sure that your videos automatically syndicate with YouTube or Facebook, allowing them to play on those sites, will help keep your social media websites up-to-date with zero effort from you.  By keeping these websites up-to-date, you will also reach a much larger community of car buyers who could potentially become your future customers.

Having an enhanced mobile website, with videos that include the above properties, is essential to making sure your dealership remains relevant and gains even more exposure.  ClickMotive’s mobile inventory videos offer everything you need to get started with your newly enhanced mobile website, positioned for even more customer engagement and greater potential for leads.  Contact our sales team at 888-518-5513 for more information.

In September 2009 Matt Cutts of Google announced that Meta Keywords were not used as a ranking factor for web searches. In this same post they also announced that they don’t use the Meta Description for ranking purposes. Google and other search engines often (but not always) use the Description Meta tag as the text for the search results snippet, so it’s more important that the meta description be compelling rather than keyword stuffed. Ideally you want someone to click through to your page and not avoid your listing because it looks like keyword stuffed spam.

While Bing has been less vocal about the death of the Keywords Meta tag our own tests have shown that meta keywords isn’t likely a factor in rankings for them either.

We do however recommend that some keywords be used in the meta description because these terms, if they match the search query, will be bolded on the search results page and could draw the user’s eye to your listing.

One of the few cases where the keywords meta tag would still be valuable is with some site search tools that can be configured to utilize this information.

So, if you’re dealing with an SEO expert or firm that recommends updating your meta keywords tag or stuffing your meta description with every possible keyword combination, we suggest that you look for someone else to help you with your dealership’s SEO needs or ask one of our account executives or sales team members about our FUSION SEO packages.

Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome users can download the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (beta) at http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Opera browser users don’t yet have access to this tool but a similar extension is available at https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/block-yourself-from-analytics/1.2.2/?display=en.

Use of these browser tools will help ensure that your own search and navigation tendencies don’t adversely affect decisions about how real users are finding and making use of your site.

First, let’s look at how Wikipedia defines Cybersquatting …

Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers to sell the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price.

The first defense against cybersquatting is to trademark your business name. The process for trademarking a business name isn’t terribly difficult and most any lawyer can help or recommend someone they know that specializes in trademark registration. In addition there are a growing number of inexpensive services specializing in trademark registration that a dealer can utilize.

The second step is to purchase as many domain names relevant to your business name as possible, including domain names with dashes separating words. While you’re at it look for domain names including “I Hate,” “Stinks” and “Sucks” variations which could be damaging to your dealership’s online reputation if they end up in the hands of a disgruntled customer. We’ve even seen clients purchase misspelling variations on their primary domain name and point those to the default domain. The most important top level domains include .com, .net, .org and .mobi variations. However, you may want to consider expanding this to include some of the newer .co, .us, .info, .biz, .ws and other extensions. Fortunately, domain name registration has become relatively inexpensive, allowing dealers to purchase several domains at minimal cost.

When ClickMotive purchases domains for clients or at a client’s request, the client is subsequently billed for those related changes with the understanding that we are simply providing this as a service for them. Dealers maintain ownership of the domains afterwards for as long as they wish. While this is standard practice for us, and most of the other reputable service providers in the industry, there are plenty of others that don’t.

While this will help with limiting the domain squatting opportunities it won’t completely eliminate them. Any time you work with a vendor making domain name purchases make sure you’re the one footing the bill and, if necessary, have a portion of your contract or an addendum to the contract specifying that domain names purchased for your dealership or related projects are your property.

Fusion Mobile V3 takes our industry-leading Fusion Mobile platform and pushes us even further into the lead.  This is a ground-up re-write taking advantages of industry & technology changes from the past 6 months.  The world of “mobile” is changing very fast compared to the rest of the world and ClickMotive continues to lead.  Here are some highlights of the major improvements:

Pictures everywhere!

Touch-enabled phones like iPhone & Android can produce eye-popping display – and it’s the right medium for pictures – lots of pictures.  We’ve taken this to the extreme.

• Almost all listings (Vehicles, Models, Specials, Incentives, etc.) have pictures on them – making it easier to see where you’re going – no more reading required –just click the picture of what you want

Photo galleries dramatically upgraded for ease of use and fun – now they work a lot like Facebook galleries – just flick through to see more

More Designs!

ClickMotive pioneered fresh, clean websites that look & feel like native Apple iPhone applications.  This created an edge in the market that all our competitors have since copied.  It’s time to innovate again!  Using the new Fusion Desktop Palette engine, we have released 6 new Palettes (color schemes) for mobile websites giving us a total of 7 designs and 14 configurations:

More Customization

Dealers can now customize their mobile websites more than ever before – to break away from the pack with a distinct look all their own.  In addition to the eight exciting new color palettes, they also have the choice of two very distinctive looking home screens, shown below:

You can also re-order or change any of the items on the home page in just seconds.  In this version we also added the ability for custom markup pages to extend the functionality even further!

Faster Launch Times

We decreased the size of files for initial load resulting in a startup time that is 3 to 7 Times Faster than our previous version (our previous version was already the fastest in the industry)

Speed, Speed, Speed!

In Fusion Mobile v2, we pioneered a new technology for improving application performance. We call it “predictive loading”.  The idea is to figure out what the user will click before they click it – and pre-load it.  The result is navigation performance that is faster than the human eye.  In Mobile v3, we amplified this even further:

• We invented and implemented a queuing prioritizing engine that analyzes user behavior and prepares details behind the scenes  - the result is a seemingly zero-load time on most pages
• We programmed in “predictive loading” that increases the psychological sensation of speed.  This is in use on almost all forward navigation.
• Faster shortcut navigation everywhere – for example, in the previous version, if there was only one used Toyota in stock and it was a Camry, the user would click “Used Inventory”, then “Toyota”, then “Camry”, then see a listing (with one Vehicle) and click the listing to get to the Vehicle.  This is 5 clicks.  The last click would take 1-3 seconds.  In Fusion Mobile v3, the user clicks “Used Inventory”, then “Toyota (Camry)” – 2 clicks and usually zero seconds of wait.

Huge Inventory Searches

With all the big performance optimizations – we’ve suped up Fusion Mobile to be able to handle some of the biggest inventory lists in the world!  Dealer Groups, Manufacturer Regions, or nation-wide  sites are now ready-to-go on the most responsive platform ever!

More Screen Shapes & Sizes

More & more hand-held devices are being released every day – and not all of them have the same shape & size of screen. With Fusion Mobile v3, any size, any angle looks great.

More Ways to Get Leads

• Every single Model, Trim, Vehicle, Special, Incentive, Department, & Video has the option to Call, Email or Text.

• Every call to action is represented with both text and an icon – no reading required, just touch the picture you want.

SEO

• Deep Linking – (a Fusion Mobile breakthrough!) – the new iPhone technologies used by most companies are very cool and slick – but not very SEO friendly.  ClickMotive has pioneered a technology that combines the best of both of these words – rich interactive pages that can take very deep links from search engines, bookmarks, sharing programs, and future concepts like phone scanned inventory tags and more.

• Friendly URLs (a Fusion Mobile breakthrough!) – URLs are rich with keywords and organization that search engines love.

• Optimized Mobile SEO (a Fusion Mobile breakthrough) – all pages are correctly tagged for cataloging by mobile search engines

• Fusion Meta Engine – this feature from Fusion Desktop allows SEO experts and consultants to tweak title tag & meta tag formulas for each page.

• Markup – add your own custom content to your Fusion Mobile website.

Stay-In-Page Improvements

Fusion Mobile v3 relied on external applications like Google Maps & the Video Player for some functionality.  The problem was this forced the consumer to leave the website.  Most consumers will not be smart enough to know how to get back.  All of this is solved in Mobile v3 with “Stay-In-Page” features like:

• Videos now play “in page” – with full controls that work just like the video player on YouTube – but without ever leaving the site. [i]

• Photo Gallery “Flick-Through” Browsing – never leave the page while you casually flick through one picture after another – featured on Vehicle & Research pages.

Improvements for low-end phones

Older phones (and some newer phones!) do not have the same capabilities of rich touch-enabled devices like iPhone and Android.  We still want these users to get the most they can out of the mobile experience.  Several new features have been added to support this group of users.

• Incentives – these were left out of the last version

• Video Gallery – uses all the capabilities of lower-end phones

• Map – stronger integration with Google Mobile Maps

• Markup – the content is shared with the “Mobile Touch” interface.

More High-End Platforms

• More new devices mean more shapes and sizes of screens – Fusion Mobile is now 100% flexible and can change shape and size as needed.

• Landscape mode – when the screen gets “wider” than it is “tall” the entire screen, including picture galleries and more – all adjust automatically.

More Devices Detected

We audit the world of mobile once per month and add new device detection code – supporting more and more mobile devices.    For the month of July we added detection support for HTC Smart_F3188, LG GR700, LG LN240, LG VN250, LG VN250L, LG VN250P, Motorola Evoke, Nokia C3, Nokia E73, Nokia N8, SAMSUNG GT-M3710, SAMSUNG I8910, SAMSUNG SCHR100, SAMSUNG SCH-U750P, SAMSUNG SGH-i917, SAMSUNG SPH-M570, SonyEricsson M1i, SonyEricsson U5a, SonyEricsson U5at, SonyEricsson U5i, Toshiba TG02, Samsung SCH-i910, and HTC ADR6300

In Summary

Well, Fusion Mobile was already one of the hottest products on the market.  Dealers, Regions, Groups, & OEMs everywhere are waking up to the fact that many of their customers use phones to surf the web these days.  To be ready, you MUST have a fast, full-featured, rich, engaging web presence in mobile If you do, you meet car buyers where they want to talk – and the results speak for themselves.  Even in our current version we see conversion rates way above 40% on a normal basis.

Fusion Mobile V3 is the next step – it’s a free upgrade to all current Fusion Mobile customers.  Contact our sales team at 888-518-5513 for more information.