There is a divide in the SEO community between behaviors that are considered unethical and those that are merely pushing the rules to the limit. As a dealer, you have the opportunity to choose who performs your SEO and what tactics they use to enhance your rankings. It’s up to you to make sure that your SEO’s tactics fall in line with Google’s quality guidelines in order to maintain a long term ranking strategy.

As with any industry, unethical behavior is a grey area. Everyone has an opinion about what is acceptable and what is not – the key is to educate yourself enough to be able to make your own judgments. However, I’d like to make the argument that an SEO should know, understand and abide by the quality guidelines set forth by the search engines in performing optimization services. In my book, not doing so quite often constitutes unethical behavior.

Gaming the Search Engines

The quantity and quality of links pointing to your site have a direct impact on your rankings. As a result, many SEOs will attempt to inflate rankings by participating in link schemes. Popular methods include purchasing links from third parties or creating a portfolio of websites solely intended to boost client rankings. The latter method is fairly prevalent in the automotive industry, so I’ll explain in more detail.

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Congratulations to the Top 5 Winners!!

Last month Contact At Once and DealerRefresh hosted a Best Practices for Dealer Chat contest asking dealers to submit their best advice and practices for gaining appointments and selling to a chat prospect. We wanted to know how successful dealers are converting their chat requests into showroom visitors and customers.

More than 40 tips and chat transcripts were posted to the DealerRefresh.com forum. Click here to check them out

The top 5 winners won a $100 Starbucks Gift Card. That’s a lot of coffee!

Many of the chat tips that were submitted represent current Contact At Once! best practices including the idea of “Treating a chat request like a phone-up, and “Asking open-ended questions to uncover prospect needs” (submitted by Kane McCullin of Homes Honda of Shreveport) .

Others reminded dealers to “Just be yourself. Most of my chats, if handled properly, result in a sale” (submitted by Dave Sherman of Lavery Automotive). Beyond these best practices, five tips stood out in terms of their wisdom and practicality.

Here now are the Top Five Tips for Selling to a Chat Prospect along with the winner.

CHAT TIP #1 – Lenny Fly of Windham Select Motors
“Accept text communication – Don’t always try and push to get a consumer on the phone. Some are at work where phone calling is frowned upon.”

Why this is important: Continuing to remain competitive in an age of increasing text-based communication requires that dealers not only remain accessible, but comfortable with communicating over chat.

CHAT TIP #2 – Shamara Coates from Jim Ellis Chevrolet
“Get excited along with the client.”

Why this is important: In her submission, Shamara explained that her job as a salesperson is to help customers find what they’re looking for – and she enjoys the process. She gets excited for them the way she would if she’d found the perfect car for herself. Essential to gaining an appointment is the ability to build rapport with prospects. Contact At Once! displays the actual name and photo of the salesperson responding to the chat in the chat window to help salespeople build recognition and trust with online consumers. Adding personality and demonstrating real concern and excitement for the customer can enhance the customer’s perception of the

dealership and build a stronger rapport between the customer and the dealership salesperson.

CHAT TIP #3 – Blake Zweifel of Toyota of Waldorf
“Save time and improve outcomes by preparing for chat conversations in advance. Anticipate shopper questions and have the necessary tools and information up and ready to go.”

Why this is important: Unlike delayed-response lead form submissions, instant messaging is designed for quick response. Consumers choose chat because of its convenient nature and the promise of instant answers (amongst other reasons). Having the internet at their fingertips (including access to your competitor’s listings), an online consumer is less likely to wait very long for a response. Key in converting online prospects into showroom visitors is the saleperson’s ability to address questions which stand in the way of consumers taking the next step.

CHAT TIP #4 – Walt Kustra of Preston Auto Group
“Use a give-and-take approach: Provide some info, request some info.”

Why this is important: This tip represents a widely understood principle that applies as equally to chat conversations as it does to phone conversations. The give-and-take principle ensures that both parties are served by the conversation. After successfully building trust and rapport with a chat prospect, many will have no problem leaving their information. Remember though, that just like on the telephone, it may be all in the way you ask a question or how you frame a response.

CHAT TIP #5 – Amanda Marsal of Oxmoor Mazda World
“Incorporate a strong call to action – a compelling reason to come in now or risk losing out!”

Why this is important: While inventory, price, and trust with the salesperson are compelling reasons to act, dealers must compete with other dealerships and with the passing of time (which also kills deals). Building urgency into the conversation provides specific incentive for the buyer to deal exclusively with the salesperson and increases the likelihood that a visit will occur.

A special thanks to all the dealers who participated!

To read the specific chat transcripts relating to each of the submissions mentioned here, please review the original DealerRefresh.com forum thread entitled “NEW CONTEST: Top Five Tips for Selling a Car to a Chat Prospect”. For more dealer chat insights and information, be sure to check out the Contact At Once Chat Blog.

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The year is 1932 and you’re working at the Hawthorne Factory, a dusty, smelly factory just outside Chicago. You’ve worked the same assembly line for 20 years and have lived through countless lame brain ideas from management to squeeze out more productivity: hire more workers, buy new machinery, work longer hours….yeah yeah yeah, big deal. Are the Cubbies playing today?

One day, just when you think you’ve heard them all, Bossman strolls onto the factory floor (cigar in mouth, no doubt) with a new plan to push productivity up a notch. He says he’s simply going to crank up the lights in the factory and by doing so, productivity should increase. So, he does just that but for the first time ever, he actually hires a gentleman to measure this whimsical experiment. This stiff looking guy stands there taking notes and when the results steam in, it was your best day ever. Bossman thinks he’s figured it out…crank the lights!!

When his findings are published, a couple of brainiacs step back and look through a different lens. They come to your factory and ask to take a different approach. They dim the lights, nearly dark. Again, the stiff looking guy takes notes about the lighting experiment and again, your factory has a banner day. So, what does Bossman have to say about that! Dimming lights also leads to productivity…dim the lights!!

What happened here?

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Credit cards are a necessary evil.

Yes, that’s right. I’m calling credit cards evil.

It’s trendy in this day and age to be angry at banks, Wall Street, and people that make money, but in this case, the anger is well-placed. Credit card companies are doing everything possible to take as much money as possible out of your business as they can, and they do a great job of it. With so many people paying with credit cards, not accepting them is not an option. So how can you help your dealership maximize profit and minimize card processing fees?

Simple. You need a guy on the inside who can point you in the right direction. As a former Five-Star Dodge Dealership service advisor, mechanic, and business-to-business dealership CRM sales rep turned credit-card processing salesman, I’m here to help. What follows are some insider tips on dealing with your credit card processing account.

Understanding the Vocabulary is Key

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When was the last time you used a phone book to find ANYTHING?

Do you even know where your phone book is?  I don’t!

The Internet is the most important entrance to your dealership. If your phone rings 100 times a week, the internet was involved in 95 of them.

For a moment, take off your car guy hat, go to Google and go car shopping. Are you visible?  Look at your competitors, are they visible?  Every one of your competitors is gunning for that same spot on page one and competition is fierce. How do you win in this game?  Back in the News Print and Yellow Pages days, all you had to do is spend more to get more.

You need brain power to beat your competitors! Having your 2^nd cousin do it for you may have worked in 2007, but not anymore, those simple days are gone.

Today, we get to chat with Dev Basu, president of Powered by Search, 1 of only 4 global agencies chosen to participate in the prestigious SEOMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors and David Mihm Local Search Ranking Factors study.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

http://www.poweredbysearch.com/

Dev is one of the most brilliant minds in search in North America.  When Dev is not helping our members in the DealerRefresh forums he is working with automotive tier 2 and tier 3 clients including GM, Honda, Chevrolet, KIA, Nissan, Mazda, Suzuki, and Lincoln delivering unparalleled results via Organic SEO, Local SEO, and Online Reputation Management services.

Having been consistently ranked as a TopSEOs Best in Local Search company with press coverage in traditional media such as The Globe and Mail (Canada), CTV News, and ITBusiness Canada as well as SEO industry publications ranging from SEOmoz to SEOBook, combined with frequent speaking on the topics of SEO, Local Search, and Social Media at conferences such as Search Engine Strategies and Search Marketing Expo, Powered by Search is considered to be a thought leader in the Local Search space.

Dev has always been a straight shooter and I wanted to take a moment and interview him. Let’s get started..

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