When: May 7th (Tuesday) through May 9th (Thursday) 2013
Where: The Rosen Shingle Creek Resort

Booth: Booth # 107

Visit us for a free digital evaluation of your dealership!

Why Instant Search

Vehicle inventory pages are by far the most trafficked pages of a car dealer’s website. We know this to be true as we monitor analytics on a wide variety of Independent and Brand dealer’s websites. Since we know that the primary reason people are visiting the dealer’s website is to get to their inventory and sift through it to find what they are looking for, we know that the faster we can get them to what they are looking for, the better their experience will be and the more likely they are to stay on your site looking at the vehicles they are interested in.

Previously, the best way digital web providers have found to allow users to find the vehicles they are interested in is by implementing many drop down pick list search options. The user would have to enter a year range, make, model, trim, price range, body style, and possibly many other options before searching through the results and trying to find the vehicles they are interested in.

While automotive web providers have found many creative and interesting ways to quickly lead users to these inventory search forms, the ultimate problem has remained that it is cumbersome and time consuming for users to find what they are looking for.

As all of the usability studies on website users will show, people’s attention spans drop to infantile rates when they are on websites. Imagine asking them to sort through 4-6 options followed by sifting through inventory results to find what they are looking for. They might do it, but only because no matter which automotive website they go to, they will have to work their way through a very similar interface. But no longer!

Enter Instant Inventory Search

Drive Digital Group is the first automotive digital marketing agency to implement instant search. Instant search is a simple search bar that is powerful and intuitive. We conveniently place the instant search bar in the header of the website globally, so that no matter where the user is on the web page, they are only one or two keywords away from quickly finding the vehicles they are looking for.

By simply entering any keyword in the search bar, our instant search tool will begin showing results underneath the bar instantly! Our instant search shows them exactly how many matching results we could find and we break it up by new and used vehicles for the user.

Relevance is key!

The instant inventory search results will display the most relevant inventory results that we can find in your inventory based on the keywords the users is searching. If, for example, the user searched for a 2012 Blue Civic, we would obviously show any of those vehicles you have in stock. if you don’t have any of that particular vehicle in stock, we will show 2012 civics, blue civics, civics, and other 2012 depending on what you have in inventory.

Instant Automotive Inventory Searching

This is the future of automotive inventory searching on car dealer websites! As an automotive website provider we are very proud to be able to offer this smart instant search tool to our customers. When combined with Semantic Markup and Google Authorship implementation, Drive Digital Group Automotive websites are a powerhouse for car dealers looking to dominate their local markets!

How Google Authorship Came To Be

Google Authorship began with Google’s implementation of their massive social network Google + (Google Plus). Google+ is Google’s attempt to directly compete with Facebook “Likes”. You can create personal or business Google + pages on which you can connect with friends. Google+ aka Google Plus has been blowing up with users, and with the many features they have implemented since they launched it last year, it is quickly becoming a widely used social media platform.

Why Google Authorship

Now that Google has their own social media platform, it only makes sense that they push benefits to tying this platform into your websites. Google has integrated voting buttons that allow users to “+1″ content and also to share content on their Google + timeline.

Another useful feature is the ability to claim the content on a website or web page by linking it to your personal Google + profile. At this time, authorship can only be claimed by personal pages, but we are waiting patiently for the ability of a business Google + page to also be able to claim authorship.

Once you properly markup your website or web pages for Google Authorship you have a chance for your Google + profile image to show up in organic search results next to your search page listing. The benefits of claiming content on a website or web page using authorship markup are:

• Much more exposure for your personal Google + page
• Ability to get analytic data about social engagement
• Higher click through ratios from organic search results
• Increased credibility prior to visitors clicking through to your site
• The satisfaction of knowing you are more advanced than your competitors

Take a look at the screen shot below to see what both Authorship alone and what Authorship combined with some semantic SEO rich text snippets look like combined together on an organic search result page:

As you can see from the image above, there are many free tools that are available to help your business get more traffic from your organic search results. DRIVE Digital Group is always looking for ways to implement any and every available tool that can help our automotive clients dominate their local competition. Properly implementing Google Authorship and semantic SEO on page is a great way to stay ahead of your competition and build authority for your dealership website while reaping the benefits of getting more quality traffic to your site.

For a Free Quote on how we can help your dealership get the same results simply fill out this form now!

What Is Semantic SEO?

You will find a couple of definitions of what Semantic SEO really is out there. In both cases the ultimate goal of Semantic SEO is for Google to deliver the most relevant results as quickly as possible to people searching on their site. In the past searches have been strictly keyword based with very little context considered. Google now is getting quite clever in the way they deliver search results to users. In addition to suggestions and instant search results, they now try to analyze the usage of the keywords you enter and deliver you the most relevant results based on what they think you are intending to search for.

As web developers, we encompass marking up dealer websites with rich text snippets as another usage of Semantic SEO on a website. Utilizing standards that Google & Bing have agreed to and published on their schema.org project, we now markup pages of the website and especially vehicle data with rich text snippets. This encoding allows Google & Bing to crawl your website and get very specific information about the content of the pages, allowing them to better use your website content when they deliver search results to users on their platform.

Semantic Markup In Action

It’s all well and good to talk about these types of concepts, but what does it really mean to a user? That’s a great question and this is a situation where an image can speak a thousand words. Please check out the image below to get a sample of what a search engine results listing can look like when you mark up your website properly with some rich text snippets:

As you can see the search results are showing extra data that Google is picking up because the website has been properly coded with the use of schema.org approved rich text snippet markups.

User behavior tells us that the eye will automatically be drawn to this new search result data, even if it is not in the first three positions where users would normally click. Because of the extra data about our websites that Google is providing to the users, we gain instant credibility and a higher click through rate, even if we are not in the top organic placement! More click through to your site means more visitors that you can attempt to turn into real business opportunities.

Drive Digital Group has embraced the next wave of Google’s future by including full implementation of Semantic Automotive SEO on all of our websites.

Stay tuned for our next blog post where we will talk about further manipulating search results with Google Authorship implementation! What do you think, can your website benefit from taking advantage of the next level of SEO and web markup?

PageRank was a system based on variables that ranked a site based on keywords and key-phrases, which and how many other sites link or refer a given website, how many links a website has, and many other factors. Overall, web pages are ranked by hundreds if not thousands of variables. In an attempt to further improve search engine results, Google introduced a system that takes into account any web content author(s).

High-quality authors and content creators can boost the profile of their work and their site with a boost of recognition from new Google’s search engine site-ranking system. Content authors are graded on their reputation, credibility and quality of their work. AuthorRank is the name of this new ranking factor, and it’s gotten a lot of attention in the media lately.

Google Authorship Features

AuthorRank has several interesting features, such as time-on-site and a system of variables relating to an author’s content that basically adds up to a positive-mention count. Time-on-site tracks how long a user stays on a website that appears in Google search results. There is a cutoff time, unspecified at this point, beyond which a site raises its profile on Google’s ranking system. The rationale is that if visitors stay on the site longer, they are more likely to be interested and engaged with the site’s content. This implies a higher-quality website deserving of better placement in search results.

Another important feature of Google’s search ranking system is measures of positive mention, reference by other content and reach of a given author’s content. This is a measure of popularity, important to a site’s overall ranking. Lastly, AuthorRank-influenced results may look distinct, depending on other information an author provides to Google.

Using Google’s AuthorRank

Search results influenced by AuthorRank may include author’s name and picture in a small tab next to the website link.

If content does not have a reputable author, it may pay to ask a reputable author create some content for your site. Their credibility will likely boost your site reputation. Search engine rank is also driven by social signals such as Facebook “likes,” tweets, shares and other indication of popularity, credibility, quality or approval.

Additionally, it is a good idea to generate website content and features to entice a visitor to stay on the site. The longer they stay and browse your site, the better your bounce rate and page views. The logic of this ranking is to get a rough measure of visitors’ interest. Two sites may have an equal number of visiting clicks, but if one site has visitors leaving after an average of 15 seconds and the other one has them staying for over 5 minutes, the second site will be seen as more favorable to Google.

Google Authorship Possible Flaws

What is an objective measure of credibility and productivity? For example, how does one rank:

• a physics professor who wrote a few singularly creative but practically useless articles about possible causes of galactic Dark Flow
• a financial planner who publishes a few practical articles about investing in unconventional assets
• a popular and respected plumber who frequently posts about people’s propensity to ignore leaks as well as interesting stuff he’s found in drain pipes

Basically, AuthorRank digitizes a problem that has plagued the academic world for a long time: the relationship between popularity and quality.

There are other potential pitfalls and possibility for unfairness with implementing Author

Rank. Google may give special prominence to already-established authors at the expense of creating a higher barrier to entry for newer, less experienced authors to gain popularity and site visits.

Visit our Automotive Dealer SEO page for more information on how we can put this new algorithm to use for your automotive dealership today or get started with Drive Digital Group NOW!

• How many likes can you get is within X time period?

I have to be honest with you when I tell you that I absolutely hate that this is the most commonly asked questions when we are talking about social media. In all honesty I would wager a bet that Mr. Zuckerberg himself doesn’t want people to be asking or thinking about this either!

Regardless of whether we like or not, the fact remains that this is the most pressing questions on our customers minds when they think about Social Media (in particular Facebook) marketing. While other companies might be willing to indulge a bad questions with a bad response, we prefer to change the entire mindset of the customer and point the direction of the conversation from volume to quality. More specifically to talking about engagement versus an arbitrary number of people that have pressed the like button on your fan page.

What is a Like?

A Facebook page like is essentially a person that has visited your business page and decided to like it. Once an individual likes the page, they are able to receive updates in their feed whenever you add a new status update on your business fan page.

The fact that they like your page will also appear on the individual’s timeline for all their personal friends to see. Once they are connected to your page you are able to essentially market through your Facebook page directly to all of the “fans” of your page.

It’s natural that when your potential customers visit your fan page, you want to have a large number of people that are a fan of your page. This shows what we call “social proof” of your products, services, and your reputation. This is about the only correlation between having a large number of likes on your business page and a positive net benefit to your business.

What Is The Correlation Between Likes and Potential Business Opportunities For My business?

Now here is a question that merits some discussion!

There are scores of new companies starting up and offering page likes for a very low cost. When you hire a social media company and ask them how many page likes they can get you, if they are responding with a definitive number… it’s time to worry about how they are acquiring those likes and just who those people are that they intend to get to like your page.

Buying likes is typically going to get you a triple dose of bad. Paid likes are typically not going to be in the vicinity of your business, they are most likely not interested in what you offer, and worse yet they may very well be fake Facebook accounts.

If you are going to organically grow your like count, it’s impossible to give an exact number of likes you are going to generate for a business page. If you put 100 people in a room and ask them if they like seafood, you might think you will know a roundabout percentage that will say yes, but how can you possibly say that 70 will yes within 1.5 minutes? You can’t, unless you have paid off at least 70 of those people to respond in the way you want within the time frame you want, in which case you are not really getting a true finding from that group. So it is with social media. People are individuals, each of us have different tastes and motivations. It’s impossible to promise a definitive number of likes within a certain time period unless you are going to rigging the game!

This leads into our biggest discussion when we talk about social media. Forget about the volume of likes on your page and ask yourself what kind of engagement you are getting from real people that are potential customers in your backyard!

It’s All About Engagement!

If you are selling cars in Brooklyn, New york, why would you want thousands of people from India, Pakistan, or even Sarasota, Florida to like your page? Worse yet why would you pay someone to get them to like your page? Are these people going to potentially buy a car or refer a family member to buy a car from your dealership?

You know the answer to those questions.. it’s NO!

So what SHOULD you be doing on Facebook? How do you go about getting real fans who are going to be potential buyers to like and engage with your Facebook page?

We recently wrote a guest post on Driving Sales called Facebook Marketing: Are You Doing It Right? We encourage you to take a look at that post to get ideas about how to properly grow your Facebook page following organically in a meaningful way. You can get some ideas on how you can reach out in a positive way to local people that have a good chance of becoming a sales opportunity and how to use them to help you market your own pages to their local friends and family.

For the purposes of this article we want to talk about what engagement is. Engagement is getting real people that are potential customers for your business to like, comment, or share your content on your Facebook business page. If you are stuffed with fake profiles liking your page and people that are not interested in what you do or are in another country, how likely do you think they will be to engage with the content you are providing through your business page? The answer is not very likely!

If you cultivate a real community on your fan page that is within a realistic buying radius from your business and has some type of personal tie in to the content you are providing, you will have a far greater chance of really engaging with that person through your content.

Our CEO often describes Facebook as a cocktail party. You wouldn’t want to go to a party with people that you have absolutely nothing in common with and will likely never see again. You also wouldn’t want to be the person at the cocktail party that is incessantly talking about selling your products or services the first time you shake hands with someone! You want to be the charming like-able person that everyone is gathered around as you tell about the good you are doing in your community, finding out what others are doing in the same community, and sharing tasteful & funny anecdotes that everyone can relate too! Once they like you it’s only natural to talk about work, what you both do and eventually how you can save them money on your products.

That is the proper way to engage with someone at a cocktail party. It’s called a soft sell and that’s exactly what Facebook pages are built for. You NEED to let your fans know about everything you are doing in the community. You NEED to let them know about any free tickets to local sports games you might have and make a fun giveaway out of it. You NEED to show them your satisfied customers and how those customers feel about doing business with you. Ask those customers to take a picture or a video and let you post it on your Facebook page. Tag them in it and let them share it with their family and friends! Your hard selling should be sprinkled into your Facebook marketing strategy like seasoning on a steak. Too much and you overpower the real flavor, but just enough gets the job done perfectly!

Engagement metrics are provided by Facebook page insights. You can see how many people are viewing your posts, how many are liking them, sharing them, and commenting (talking about) them. This is the true measure of how good of a job you are doing with your Facebook marketing strategy. If people are truly interested in your business or what you are promoting, they will engage with your content. It’s up to you (or the company you hire to implement a comprehensive Automtive social media marketing strategy) to organically grow your pool of quality Facebook fans and continually engage them in a meaningful way over time. Only by doing the hard work will you reap the rewards of having a positive image of your business on Facebook and opening up new potential customers to your dealership.

Before we get into what this tool does and how you can use, I think it’s important to look at WHY Google has had to create this tool so you have some context about what it is doing.

Why Would You Want To Disavow Links To Your Site?

In the past SEO used to be about links. The more you had the better. There was a time when links from just about anywhere had value and could help boost your website rankings on search engines. Some of the ways that SEO companies would get links for their dealers in the past included:

• Getting links from low quality directory submissions
• Getting links from low quality forums
• Grabbing existing articles and submitting them all over the internet with your own links in them.
• Getting links from circles of blogs all interlinking
• Getting links from reciprocal link exchange schemes

Now this is not a complete list of ways that you might have spammed the internet in your quest for back links, but it does highlight that there were many ways to try to quickly and easily get as many back links as possible.

Over the last several years Google has been working harder and harder to really weed out low quality links from real organic high value links. This year they released several updates such as the Panda and Penguin updates which caused a massive amount of websites to drop in the rankings. The point of these updates was to penalize websites that Google determines to be actively trying to game their algorithm by seeking out mass low quality back links.

In response webmasters have been frantically trying to reach out to directory owners, blog owners, link wheel owners, forum owners, etc… in an attempt to remove many of these back links that point to their site. Indeed there are several well  documented examples of companies that bounced back once they managed to prune their back link profile and shed all those low quality links.

Enter The Disavow Links Tool

Webmasters began screaming for Google to give them a tool to easily disavow links that are pointing to their site. Rather than expend a huge effort in trying to reach out to hundreds or thousands of contacts begging to remove links, now you have a simple tool to help you automate the process of separating your website from all of these now toxic links that point to your website!

Watch the video below where Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutt’s explains the new disavow tool…

Who Should Use The Disavow Link Tool?

Just because there is a new Google tool does NOT mean you should run out and begin disavowing every link you think might be a bit shady.

In fact Google suggests that you should only use the tool if you have received a notification through Google Webmaster Tools that they have taken some manual spam action on your site due to “unnatural links” pointing to your site.

We highly recommend that you resist the urge and not begin using the tool unless you have a reason to think that you are currently being negatively impacted by low quality unnatural links that point to your website. If you are doing just fine, DO NOT use this tool! If you have noticed a drop in rankings since Panda and Penguin, then you might want to give your link profile a look and see if there are any obvious bad eggs in the basket that you can disavow.

Keep in mind there are many other factors that could be causing you to not rank well other than low quality back links such as:

• Poor site architecture
• Slow page load times
• Poor analytics performance
• Low quality content on the site
• Poor use of meta tags on site
• Duplicate content

and the list can go on and on. Just because your not ranking well today does not necessarily mean you should utilize this tool straight away. We highly recommend having a professional SEO company do a full seo evaluate your website so that you can get a full picture of where you are at with the site’s SEO.

How to Use the Disavow Tool

With the Google disavow tool announcement, all webmaster now have an easy way to separate themselves from negative links that might be weighing down their website in search results.

Keep in mind that not everyone should be using this tool and that using this tool may take several weeks before Google actually disavows the links you input into it. Also keep in mind that it will be quite difficult to get the link approved again once you disavow it, so you want to be doubly sure you want to disavow a link before you put it into this tool!

Now that you have been warned here is how the tool works. It’s quite simple really.

1. Visit the Disavow Links Tool page

2. Select your site:

3. Upload the file containing the links you want to disavow:

The format for the text file you want to upload is straightforward. here is a sample of how to structure the file:

# Contacted owner of spamdomain1.com on 7/1/2012 to

# ask for link removal but got no response

If you’ve decided to tackle the SEO beast on your own, it’s possible that you’re not seeing the best results. Most people who aren’t professional SEO providers find themselves head over heels in the world of SEO. If you’ve experienced any of the following, it’s a sign that your SEO simply isn’t working.

1. You haven’t increased traffic.

When SEO tactics work correctly, they should help boost your site’s visibility, which in turn increases the amount of traffic heading to your site. If the amount of traffic visiting your site is the same as it was before you implemented SEO (or—gasp—if it’s worse), that’s a clear-cut sign that your SEO tactics are not working.

2. You haven’t moved up in the search engines.

Successful SEO tactics will also help your website gain more visibility on the search engines, which means that you should start seeing your site listing higher and higher. If you were on page 8 before you started your SEO, and one year later you’re still on page 8, your SEO isn’t working.

3. You drop in the search engines.

Having the same ranking for months on end is much better than dropping in ranking, but a fallen rank means that your SEO isn’t doing its job. If you again started on page 8 before implementing SEO, and have since fallen to page 12, something is not quite right.

4. Your website does not have content.

Website content is important to SEO because it is where you will find keywords, and keywords are the heart and soul of SEO. If your website is made up of forms or Flash images, you’re not optimized for successful SEO. Make sure that you are using keywords throughout your website content, and make sure that you’re also adding keywords to image titles and descriptions to help you get the most out of your SEO.

5. You’re not using social media.

Social media is a great way to drive traffic to your site. You can push out links to valuable content from your website to your social media fans and followers. Now, your fans and followers can easily click on a link and be directed to your site, which increases your traffic and improves your SEO.

6. You’re not tracking your SEO.

If you’re not tracking your SEO, you’re not going to know if it’s working. Make sure that you know the metrics of your site before you implement SEO, and then continue to track your efforts after it’s implemented. But keep in mind that SEO will not generate results overnight, so don’t quit your SEO tactics if you don’t see changes right away.

SEO is an important marketing tactic for your business. Some companies just don’t know how to implement it the right way or use the right strategies. If you’re noticing any of these examples, it’s a sign that your SEO tactics, well, suck.

If you want to learn how to implement superior strategies to your SEO campaign SEOMap, where you can download the latest keyword strategy book.

What is mod_pagespeed?

mod_pagespeed is a module built for use on Apache HTTP Servers. By installing this open source module on your server you can automatically make adjustments that will make modifications that should make the websites on your server load faster. Some of the enhancements it makes include optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload sizes.

Google launched this module in beta in 2010 and many developers have been finding bugs, glitches, and general issues that Google has been diligently fixing. Apparently Google now feels it’s ready for general use on the web.

You can view a Google test of the mod_pagespeed in action on the Google Adsense Blog. It’s a side by side comparison of a page loading with and a page loading without mod_pagespeed in effect.

Why Should You Care?

There are two main reasons you should care about really getting you website’s pages to load as quickly as possible.

1. It’s Good For Customers

There are copious amounts of data freely available on the web that prove that faster  loading pages increase conversions. Even with faster internet capabilities, visitors don’t want to stare at a loading web page for very long. They will bounce of your page very quickly if moving around it is sluggish. By having your web pages load faster you give yourself a better chance at keeping the visitor on your site longer, and having them go deeper into your website.

2. It’s Good For Search Engines

Google has been using website load times as a ranking factor for quite some time now. Google has continually stated their commitment to providing a faster web in general, and this includes giving some weight to websites that take the time to optimize for speed as well as the hundreds of other ranking factors.

In 2009 Google offered a Page Speed tool that would help you analyze your site and make suggestions about how to optimize it for speed in all areas possible. This tool is great because it gives web developers very clear suggestions about modifying .htaccess, web server settings, javascript, CSS, HTML, etc… all to maximize your website’s page load times. We have been utilzing the page speed tool in our automotive website design and automotive SEO efforts for years. The introduction of the mod_pagespeed module enhances this by automatically making corrections to your server for you, without any development required (except for installation on your server of course).

How To Implement On Your Server

Setting up mod_pagespeed is not difficult at all.

1. Simply download the mod_pagespeed module
2. Then install and configure as directed here.

Now test it out and benefit from seeing you page speed load times cut in half! Good for users and good for Google, what more can you ask for?

How To Find It

Finding the new feature is simple. Just the friend you want to stalk’s profile and click on the “About” tab. Here you will find a brand new section called “Local” that has a link to view all of the reviews that this user has posted publicly on Google. Now you can see what bars, restaurants, clubs, etc.. that your friends are reviewing. Google just made it a lot easier to find out what your friends really like about their local haunts!

In fact we have found that this feature has been live for some time, I suppose Google is busy with other things and just now got around to making a public post about it. You can read the whole post here and subscribe to their Google + Account to get more updates like this in the future in your personal Google + stream.

What do you think about this new feature? Cool new feature you will use or just another concern for your privacy online you have to worry about?

While your on Google + why not subscribe to us too!