#153 - Top 5 Tips for Dealerships SEO-SEM w Steve Neu

Good morning, everybody. I hope everybody's had a wonderful start to 2021. Maybe we got all this election stuff behind us, we can get going, right, Jeff?

Right.

So today, special guest Steve New. Is that correct, Steve?

Yes.

We're going to talk all kind of under the hood Google stuff that I don't necessarily understand. But the best thing is it's all about marketing and marketing that we use in the on the real level. Steve digs deeper and shows us how to do it on Google. And I believe it can help everybody by listening to this.

Yeah, Steve's gonna give us some really great insight. It's gonna be his five top tips for dealerships, SEO, SEM, and what we talk about. So you guys want to stay tuned. We cover about the audience and the journey. We cover about your website content, we talk about how mobile optimization and we talk about call to actions on your website. So a lot of it's all the really, really exciting stuff that Google is just super thirsty and hungry for. And Steve is the man that knows it all. Steve, quick, introduce yourself to the podcast community and tell us a little bit about your background.

Right. First of all, thanks for having me. My name is Steve New. I'm the head marketing strategist for PayHere Marketing. We're a boutique niche digital ad agency serving buy here, pay here. I grew up in a dealership family, third generation, spent about 10 years in retail, mainly in the Internet sales, business development departments. Worked my way through to becoming a general manager and then spent the last 10 years working with marketing, ad agencies, developing targeting and audience acquisition online.

Thanks for being here today, Steve.

Okay, here we go.

Welcome to the independent dealer podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson, a podcast by Dealers for dealers.

Here we go again, Steve. Thank you for joining us today. So let's jump right into it. Tell us these five tips you have for dealerships. SEO, SEM. What's your number one tip? What should dealers be looking at today in their dealership?

Well, first of all, it's kind of important to understand the difference between SEO and SEM. But related to that tip is first and foremost, understand your audience and the audience's journey online. Okay. And we know it's going to be impacted through search. They're searching for all kinds of things through their life. You know, what restaurant to go to or, you know, get a review on a, on a, you know, a product that they're interested in buying or in our case, trying to find a particular car or an auto loan. Right. Because they meet certain situations and in our case, what we work on is trying to identify audiences that have challenged or poor credit but are in market today, looking specifically for auto loans in their current market. So to kind of help explain that know your audience tip. Okay. And that audience journey, it's real important to understand what the. What that search engine looks like, what, how that listings page is actually structured, and look at that from that standpoint. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and actually put in a search that a customer typically is going to go through, or even a journey of multiple searches and see how the search engine kind of responds to the searches.

Perfect. Yeah, jump on here. Share screen. So if you guys are listening to the podcast, obviously you're going to want to jump over to the YouTube channel and watch this demonstration. We'll try to explain it as best we can. And interesting enough, Steve and Luke are fairly close to each other. So I think if Steve does a Google search, we're going to see how strong Luke's SEO SEM placement is live right here on this podcast. So you share your screen whenever you're ready, Steve.

Talking about knowing your audience, and that's so important. And dealers, sometimes you try to get too fancy. Okay, I did it for a long time. So. So knowing your audience is very important. You don't. You may be. You may be preaching to the wrong audience. You may be trying to carry a car that doesn't fit your audience. So take it from years of spending money doing things I shouldn't have been doing. That that was the biggest thing that changed our marketing. Go ahead, Steve.

Jeff, the. It's disabled, so if you can allow the share screen.

And while I try to figure this out, I'm also going to say one interesting situation that I had is I had a problem with. I was marketing to the wrong group. And Steve, you may be able to talk to. This is. I was. I remember I was running my SEO or my Google Ads or something, or my keywords, and all of a sudden I noticed I was getting a ton of clicks from people that were completely out of my market and they were eating them all my Google budget. And I was like, what in the world? So I didn't exclude this little audience. And we might get into that. You might tell us about that. But, man, it was such a. Like a leak in my dam, I guess.

Right. Well, that's going to be a tip for later, but yesterday news came out with Dominion Software, which is a automotive dms, and they have a lot of other properties and so forth. But dealers would search for software and put in Dominion. And of course during that period of time we had that with the election and Dominion was a, you know, a ballot system and really increased their traffic and their click throughs and caused all kinds of charges and, and cost to Dominion Software, which is an automotive company. So it's really about relevant, understanding that, but keeping track of that as well. But I think that what I have up on the screen here is just kind of a quick example of what the game is. And I kind of look at this as like a, almost like a board game. And the challenge is when someone is searching for something relevant to your business, the search engines set up a page, a listings page, a results page, and then they organize it in different categories and sections. Every one of those categories and sections has purpose. And your game, the name of the game is to try to be in every single one of those categories, connecting to the customer that is making that relevant search. Okay, okay, so, so if we look here at, you know, this is Google now, there's all kinds of ways you can search in Google today. I mean you can go right to the browser and start typing into, into the field. You could talk to Google by, you know, through familiar with that, do it mobile, whatever the case is. But you're going to get a search result when you do that. So I typed in car loan with bad credit and see what happened. Now I live in Lexington, South Carolina. So there's some components to the local and so forth in here. But the way this is organized, the first thing Google does is if I select here, which is where most hits go, is going back to the search. Because customers search more often. Google wants to give you suggestions on what's going to give you other search results that are related to your original car loan, bad credit. So this is a good way to know if you're on target right off the bat. Because Google's going to say, hey, are you in the right track, at least the right path? Are you looking for auto loans, bad credit, a second chance? Car loans, dealerships that accept bad credit, car dealers that accept bad credit. Well, those are all related to the word car loan or phrase, in this case car loan with bad credit. So one of the first tips is just a dealer to start typing in what they think their audience is looking for, what services they provide and then go there, is it relevant? And we're going to talk about that tip as it goes through. The next thing is that Google, real quickly they say, hey look, you got 102 million results and we try to narrow this down and categorize this for you based on what we think your intent is. And your intent has a lot to do with where you're at, how often you've searched this, different pages you've looked at before. So every search is different for Google. But the first thing they're going to do is because Google wants to make revenue and they do a really great job at doing that is generate ads right up at the top. So you can see AD1, ADD2, AD3, AD4, okay? And they put that up at the top because this is where most of your, your click throughs are going to occur. And you want to build ads that show up here. That is called SEM, Search Engine Marketing. You are going to pay for your placement to bid to be placed in this spot. If you don't pay and you don't bid, someone else is and they're going to take up those spots.

And you can see that the top two people who bid that is Drive Time and Carvana. And there's no way to outbid them for those spots. Just for everybody out there to know that.

Well, there are some good ways to outbid them, but we can get into that. And that's where possibly, you know, you may want to look at the specialists, understand the reports and really get into the tools to understand because that's what they have. They have tools to help them figure that out and win and constantly win. In one of my articles, I kind of, I talk about this being kind of the king of the hill type of challenge. Once you get to that position, you want to stay in there and it becomes easier to stay there as long as you keep going with it. So you can work to that position. But as you scroll down, if it doesn't have an ad on it, it is what is called an organic listing. Okay. It came there naturally. Google said, hey, this has a lot of content in this webpage that we've evaluated that relates to this key phrase. And so we're going to rank those and put them together. Okay, so there's a lot of content in here, in this article or in this webpage that Google thinks is relevant to that search. What Google also does is they have a section here to say, hey, well people, if you're going to ask that, let's also confirm that you're still on that same path. Here's what other people ask. And so are you interested in how to get a car loan with bad credit? Well, if you do, you can select this. It will provide you more content. Typically what shows up in this section are blog articles, articles that are very specific to the intent of that, you know, the relevant relevancy of that search. Okay, so this is an area dealers ask all the time, what should I, should I write something about my business? Should I. What kind of content should I have on my website? Well, if you do a really good job with that and relate, relate to the key phrase, then you can start showing up here, which is a big area to be in as you scroll down. The intent is very important here too in the essence of location. So what Google's going to try to do is say, okay, well if those weren't working for you, let's present you some businesses in your local area that we think match as well. And we think we want to drive obviously traffic to that business. So we're going to use our mapping mechanism right here and use that as a search function as well. So as you can see, you know there's a Auto Credit of Columbia, a MVP Bad Credit Loans, Title Max. And a lot of customers then will just call this number right here or click on this website or get directions. And all that is also related to search engine optimization. Okay, do you have the local content in your website that is going to get you listed here? Okay, that's not an ad. It's something that you can build within, within the content.

Out of curiosity, Luke, are any of those guys competitors? Those two dealerships, never heard of them. Are they even in your neighborhood or.

Those people I've never, I've never heard of.

Based on that map, that map that came up, is that something where you should have popped up on there? Just out of curiosity, that Auto Credit.

Of Columbia is probably 20 miles from me. I mean, I know Title Max. I mean they're a big, you know, mvp Bad credit loan I've never, I've never heard of.

What part of that map are you in though?

So you see where it says Forest Acres?

No, I don't know.

Right above Columbia.

Okay, yeah, right there. Like wait, so you're right in the.

Middle of it, where the F is.

So that's. So Steve, my question for you would be then that if it's giving you this general search and this might be jumping ahead too far, why did it bring up Auto Credit of Columbia and MVP Bad Credit loans who both have one Google review, only one. Why would those be listed above someone like Luke who has a couple hundred. Hey everybody, real quick to jump in here and plug our sponsor tax Max. Luke's. It's Tax time.

It is. It's getting there, right? It's not quite there. We gotta get through the riots and all these craziness before we. Before we get into tax season. But I'm ready for it. January is. It started off a little slow. How about you, Jeff? Are you doing some.

Well, I reached over to get into my safe to pull out this check. So if you guys are on the YouTube channel, you watch the video. That's a $6,000 deferred. Not even deferred. It's a customer of ours. It's great. They came in, we filed their taxes. They get like $8,500 back every year. They got the refund advance max. So I got a check for $6,000 guaranteed. I printed it right here at my dealership. I'm gonna go stick it in the bank this afternoon. We put it towards their down payment. They got into a new vehicle.

So that's wonderful.

That's the beauty of tax max. I already literally have my hands on tax cash right now.

That's crazy. So I'm not as. I'm not as good at that as you are, so make sure y'.

All.

You're telling people you're doing tax max, right? That's. That's one thing that. That I forgot to do this year. So tell people you're doing it and actually do it, because as Jeff is proof, he's already got tax money.

Yeah. And you guys are getting this today on the. This podcast. We'll go on the 14th. It's not too late. These guys will get you signed up quickly. The process is super, super simple. And they hold your hand every step of the way. They verify everything you call them. They pick up on the first ring. So don't think that you're just going into this blindly and having to figure it out. You could literally get signed up right now, be up and running next week, filing people's taxes and intercepting that tax money before it gets spent elsewhere.

That's awesome.

Back to the podcast.

Right? So one is going to be content structure of the site. Okay. As we start going through. Through the. Through that. And are you actually coordinated? This is a coordination here with Google, my business as well. So there are functionalities in a separate product that Google has that you log into as a dealer to ensure that all those things are going to show up for you. And so it's not necessarily.

I can tell you. I can tell you why, Jeff. That car loan with bad credit is nowhere in my sight, because in our research, nobody has typed in that typical phrase. That's not.

You're saying that phrase is not one you're typically targeting car.

In my opinion, that's not a. Necessarily a phrase that our customers use. And I think that has most to do with it.

Okay, okay.

That, that would be my opinion.

So I'll take you through the cycle here and we'll kind of make that determination and you'll see all this change because every time you make little subtle changes, because ultimately it matters on the intent of the consumer. The consumer may or may not be finding what they're looking for here, right. As they're scrolling down and they're like, ah, I don't know. That doesn't really work. Experian Lending Tree, Nerd Wallet. This is not what I'm really looking for. I don't see a lot of dealers in here. Here's another.

This looks like a horrible.

Yeah, too lonely for me. It's less dealership and too much.

On that loan word. Very strong.

Yep.

Right. And, and then even down here, if you get down to the bottom, what Google's saying is you don't like everything that's up on top. So you're scrolling down. It must be because we're not relevant to your search. Is any of these other searches make more sense to you? Okay, so what I did was so typically a customer might go, okay, that didn't give me really what I'm looking for. I need something more localized. This map. I'm not dry. You know, I live in Lexington. I'm not going up here to Elgin to go to MVP Bad credit loans. I may have hit View all and you may show up there. Right. But from a direct first strike sort of scenario, you didn't pop in there. So customers then. And this really important point that I want to make, if you don't get a conversion or a click through on this, right. Google doesn't have anything to say that this was relevant to the intent. Right. So now they know that you didn't do anything here and what this is called an impression. Right now there's still value here, right. These companies, although not maybe what they're looking for, got into the brand element of at least someone looking at it. Right. And maybe even recognizing the brand. And as they continue searching the second search, the third search, the fourth search, they may see some repeated companies there that will actually increase the chance of them getting clicked on later. Okay. So impression strategy is important just as well as knowing what's going on. So let's take the next step here.

And help me out here, Steve. If a dealer is doing this and they're searching their own dealership to find out where they come up. Because. Because that's kind of what we're doing here, you know, joking around with Luke's dealership. But if I'm doing that, don't I need to do that in like an incognito window so that I'm not getting cookied by Google to have my results come up artificially? Is that, is there some sort of a trick to looking at my own dealership?

Well, if you're looking, you're gonna. If you're looking in your dealership's area, you'll be just fine. You know, it's going to treat you just like a customer. But what I caution is it's not just a search for your name. Right? You should, of course, you should do that to make sure you win. It's how do you grow here, how do you get more traffic? Because not everyone understands, let's say, buy here, pay here. You know, there's a lot of searches for that, but there's also a lot of searches for saying, hey, I need, I got bad credit, but I need a car loan. And they literally type that phrase in, which is highly intentful as well. So just doing that in your own search is important. Now if you wanted to take a look at, let's say you're a group and you had another store somewhere else, you certainly would want to go to a tool that logged you in your IP at the location that you were going to search from. And there's plenty of tools online to help you do that.

Perfect. Okay, so our first one is we need to define the audience and kind of their journey. What's your second tip, Steve? For us as dealers in our SEO, to master our game here.

Right? So once you kind of figure this out and you know the key phrases, the keywords that journey, then we need to make sure that our website is relevant to those phrases. Really relevant. The intent really needs to make sense. So understanding that audience journey, who that audience is and what they want. Now does your site say that and does it say it? Really up front is the messaging, the reviews, the ratings, the tags that you put in the site, the content that you're saying, hey, come do business with us, you found the right place through your search is really important here to making sure that when the customer does click on your ad, does click on your website listing from an SEO perspective, that they actually are going to have a higher rate of conversion or percent of contact. To you, they're going to fill out a contact form or make a phone call, and all that is a score of relevancy to Google. Okay.

Yeah, basically. Sorry, go ahead, Luke.

And that's such a good point there, Steve, is that you've got to make sure that your message matches, your website matches coming in the front door of your office. It's all gotta, it's all got to be the same. And I've seen so many dealers, you know, let's say, let's say a dealer was buying, buy here, pay here, Columbia, South Carolina, whatever they were doing, and they got people to their website. And then you got to the website, there was no, there was nothing saying you were buy here, pay here. Right, or whatever. I've seen this disconnect a lot. And honestly, we had this disconnect for a while because I was so against the word buy here, pay here. I didn't like it sounded icky. It took me a long time to just swallow that pill and say, hey, I am a buy here, pay here dealer. There's no way to change it. There's no way to spin it. People know what it is. And when you come to our website now, it's, we finance you, not your credit. We're buying here, pay your dealer. This is what we do. Very, very important point Steve is making.

It's a valuable service that you're providing and they need to see that and not to be, you know, it can have its negative connotations. But let's tackle that, let's tackle that with your messaging so they understand and know that they can move forward with a good, reputable organization that's going to take care of their problem and their issue that they have. Right, exactly. So, so as you kind of go through here, I, you know, I wanted to make sure that, hey, kind of the next step is location. I live in Lexington, South Carolina. So a customer then goes, well, I don't want. I'm still looking for a car loan. I got bad credit. But what's in Lexington? Everything changes now. Okay. Although the map comes up first. Remember on this, ads came up first. So intent to Google changes the listing page structure. And you need to understand that now everything is organic. There's not even an ad on here at all. There's a dealership. Here's the dealership. Here's the dealership. All of a sudden things change because dealerships, typically, your website is really founded on a location. Okay?

That's when it was. So if a dealer, if a customer is putting a specific Location intended search. Your dealerships are coming up because of your Google my listing page and the content inside your website, right? You need to be writing in there. I service bad credit in Lexington, South Carolina in. So you need to be peppering your website with the cities. And I think a lot of dealers forget that too. They're just like, yeah, I'm bad credit auto loans. Well, where. You know what's so.

What's so funny is that cars on credit, if you go to their. If you Google that it says permanently closed. Like Google has it permanently closed. Why is it even showing up anymore? That's so funny.

It's purely organic here because.

Because their organic site is so strong.

Must not have been look specifically now is the location. So you'll see a lot of this. These types of phrases would near me or you know, like when you're on a map and it says, hey, you're looking for, you know, a hotel. And then we'll say, well, other hotels in the area. Google's really smart about that. They understand your search term before you even do and represent the listings differently based on what you're probably trying to do, right? Which is find a place at that point. Now let's just say that the customer doesn't. Still doesn't really, you know, this doesn't really make sense to them. So they start to change their key phrase, okay? And in this case, it's a slight change, but they add a intentful word like need. I have bad credit and I need an auto loan. Okay. All of a sudden, guess what? Google changed this whole format again. It came back to ads, okay. It came back to some of the same content before. Okay, you see here that it, it provides a totally different search, right? At, at this, at this point. Now let's do that same search. Instead of putting Lexington, let's put near me. Okay? Now all of a sudden your maps start popping back in, right? And now you're, you know, these are the same stores, but now there's different locations. There's loan agencies and things like that. This whole time, though, this customer really needs a buy here, pay here dealership, right? So it does make sense for a buy here, pay here to understand this type of process, build content, location messaging and so forth so that they will show up in that. In that process. Just like you said, Luke, that, you know that it was a little bit of a stigma to say that. Well, customers don't like typing it in either that much. They don't really quite understand what it is. They don't want to necessarily admit that that's exactly what they, that they need. But when they do, and in this case I put just straight up buy here, pay here, right? You have some very similar things. You had drive time show up in ads and almost every single step of the way there. They built their ad in a way that, you know, shows their ratings at site links, it's way at the top. So you're definitely going to get a lot of traffic here. Now look at the maps. Now the map's a little bit different, okay. And same sort of question. And there you go. Organically, number one, but that's strictly on the word buy here, pay here, right? So there's a lot of content, like you said, that you're now generating. And then all of a sudden, although someone could use the maps, use ads to jump you, at least from an organic standpoint, you are number one in the area. And you can also see that everyone else is a dealers.

Yeah. So to Luke's point, he embraced the buy here, pay here in his dealership, in his dealership's website, the wording, the text, the content, the blogs, links, whatever he's got going on. So his website is now matching what Google wants to see.

It took us, you know, it took us years to, and I wanted to touch on this a little bit earlier, Steve, you said something that triggered this, but it changes over time because you may find a phrase that works really well right this second. But as Google search gets better and as lingo changes, it changes too. And you've got to make sure that you don't have your website stuck in the past, right. Because it may work great for six months and then it may not. So like he was telling you to start with, you've got to go back and make sure that it's still showing where it's showing, right?

So let's say you win this and your fem, you're doing ads, this might cost six or seven dollars a click through. Well, if your website is really designed well with this and you have a good call to actions and you're converting, you might, you know, you might convert 25 or 30% of them to a lead or a phone call or some sort of, you know, which really makes this a, you know, a nice, nice program to build your business off of. Now, they didn't look for you, they didn't type in, you know, your store's name, right? So this is very conquest nature. So there is going to be some costs to this, but it's very highly relevant once, once the Customer kind of falls into this area. But here, this is what I want to show you is once you start kind of moving this through, not only does Google start to suggest this, but even things like buy here, pay here will start to show up. And that's how you know you're on the right path. So knowing your audience journey, knowing getting the relevant content is really key. So then you can get involved with this not only organically, but also from an SEM basis. There's no. You might be able to buy bad credit, need auto loan for $3 instead of $8 for buy here, pay here from a competitive standpoint. And instead of getting 25% because the customer knows that, wow, I had a list. All I got to do is close that store, go back to the list and call the next company. Something like this actually may provide a stronger conversion rate at a lesser cost. So that's an important thing to understand when we get to another key point, which is I'm going to make which is all the adjustments, understanding the analysis of this and whatever you do, do not set it and forget it. This is an ongoing process. As much as, you know, even on a showroom floor, when you say activity and breeds activity. Well, this is the truth in Google. When you do adjustments and you're constantly changing and you're constantly testing new keywords and key phrases, that activity just breeds new activity, which is ultimately what you want.

And it does. And you know, you can use. Jeff was joking earlier. Maybe he wasn't joking about how you might see my face on TV at odd hours or this, that other. But when we're on tv, we're saying we're buy here, pay your store. You know, we finance you, not your credit. We were saying these things over and over and over again and we're saying go to our website, that's, you know, we use TV to brand ourselves. We use TV to force people not to, not to call us. We force people to go to our website and we reinforce with traditional advertising, all we're doing is trying to get leads to our website. And so, and it's just if you keep that rolling, it gets clicks and the clicks create Google love. And that's really what it's about.

So Steve, take us to number three, step number three. What do you recommend?

Mobile. Ah, site the site, whatever you, you know, if you're building landing pages, which there's some advantages to that or your, your own website. Google is evaluating two very, very important things about your site all the time, as how fast it is and how mobi mobile friendly it is.

Okay.

So eight, you know, although Word I'm doing this on a browser, it's only represents really about 15 to 20% of the searches. Okay. Over 80% of the searches are going to be done right here, you know, from the smartphone. Okay. And the real and the way they designed the listings on the browser is different, still very similar, but at the same time, they're not going to recommend you or put you into the list. Right. If that's the game is to get on the list. 80% of these customers are searching you mobile. And if your site doesn't meet the speed requirements and the mobile requirements, forget it. Google knows it's a lost cause. You'll either they'll select it, the customer will leave it immediately. They won't, you know, then Google's not going to list you anymore. I mean, you'll be listed, you'll just be listed so far down that no one's going to find you.

They still call that bounce rate, Steve. Is that still the term?

Yeah. So bounce rate is, you know, really the quick exit out of your site. And that can be done on every page. And what you're looking at is a bounce rate on your landing page. Right. So if you have an ad and you would say the ad is get approved, Right. You know, this is buy here, pay here, we'll take care of you, you know, and then they click on it. You don't want them to land on a homepage with your service and this and your, you know everything about your dealer. A lot of our dealer sites, kind of like the kitchen sink of every type of message that you want to get in front of a customer in this circumstance. You want to get it relevant to relevant. Right. So that landing page is probably where you're going to have, right up top, your, your conversion, your lead form, your finance application, your messaging about, you know, how the approval works, you know, giving them some messaging to kind of calm their nerves and help them realize that you're the place to go to. Right. And that page based on a bounce rate is what you're going to want to look at, right? Yeah. Specific to what goes there. Right. So a bounce rate coming from an ad, if it's high, then you didn't design that page very well. Right? It didn't, you know, so. But that does. It's a little different than measuring a bounce rate inside a general website journey. So if someone went to your homepage and then click the get approved button and then left that pretty quickly, it's not the same meaning as if you drove them there by buying an ad in a, you know, in a Google search list. Right. So, so that's important and that the analysis that you get from Google, and this is probably one of the big keys, is you need to invest some time into learning the tools, learning the reporting, learning to understand what's really meaningful to the performance of your program. Right. So there's all kinds of recommendations, suggestions and at the same time, Google doesn't exactly know your business. So you're going to have to input some strategy into it and do some testing because you know your business better than they do. But, but they know exactly what happened from every click, the time, the effort and the conversion if your site is set up to do so. So the next tip per se is that call to action. I see it, a lot of dealers have it buried in a link, a pre approval or they have, maybe they, it takes up the whole page and it's 55 Fields and you know, they want to get as much information and qualify the customer as much as they possibly can. Which is great because if someone does fill out a 50 page form, 55, you know, field, you know, it's going to be a pretty intentful, you know, lead that comes through, but the number of them is going to be not what you're looking for. So where you place that is going to be very important. So you know, you talk about reading a newspaper, people read from top left, right. You know, you need to have your call to action, your forms, your phone numbers, your really driving content that says do this and you'll be in contact us and we'll help you. Needs to be right there on top. And Google reads that the customer responds to that, which is all gonna help your conversion through that. And the next kind of point to that is once you have that established, all that conversion data, how many phone calls you get, how many forms are filled out, all that needs to get reported back to Google. They're going to. If you can help them establish that intent relevant conversion cycle and show that you're doing a very good job at it, Google will actually subsidize your efforts in the search listings. This is how you win. At the end of the day you said, well I can't outbid Carvana, I can't outbid drive time, I can't outbid them. Yes you can if Google wants you to. You don't even have to spend as much money as them. You just have to perform better than them. And in order to do that you're going to have to prove that by reporting your conversions back. So that's an important factor if you get involved with that. Google has all kinds of tool sets, analytics to help you set that code up, pixels, tracking mechanisms that you're gonna put on your site, your landing pages that will report back. And that's really a real important step to this. Otherwise you're just kind of flying blind, you know. You know, through, through a lot of this.

So, yeah, so much of this conversation is based on the premise that dealers, you know, well, to back all this up, you're using a good website provider. You know, this isn't your cousin's uncle brother that built you out one, in my opinion. I don't know if that's the best route to go. You know, sign up for one of the reputable, maybe out of the box ones. I mean, I had issues too. To speak to your point earlier, Steve, I was always looking at my website on my computer, always. And I never picked up my phone to look at my website until one day I did. And I realized that like, the buttons were oversized. And I was like, what in the world? Like, you can't even click on these buttons because they're all over top of each other. So I got on the phone with my website provider, was like, what the crap's going on? And this was before they really had a good, you know, mobile optimized, what do they call those now, digital whatever type websites that sizes with this, with the platform.

Responsive.

Yeah, yeah, responsive website. And so they just switched me over to the responsive site and I was like, well, thanks a lot. Glad I had to find that. But. And then making sure that that website is. Has the speed too. You know, you're talking about the load speed and your pixel is installed in the website. So this whole conversation is based on those premises. You're using a decent website provider, you've got the pixel installed.

Dealers are so cost conscious on things they shouldn't be, right? You should spend money on your website. $199 a month is not going to cut it. And that's when I was on Facebook more often. I would see that, well, what are you paying for your website, guys and girls out there? There are providers in the automotive industry that are really garbage. And you don't know this until you have a better site, right, Jeff?

Yeah.

And it comes, you're gonna spend a little extra money, but every month you may have a call with that company to help you maximize your vision of the site and your vision of your dealership. It's not a set it and forget it. Like we just said earlier, Alexa spends an hour plus a month on the phone making sure everything is optimized properly on our website to make sure that it meets our message of digital marketing, our message of traditional marketing, so that we are getting repeated on Google and we are getting found and people aren't bouncing. So if you're spending 5, 600 bucks a month on a website, honestly I don't think that's outrageous. So just make sure that your website is doing what it needs to do. People aren't coming to your website typically to find a car. People who are in the buyer pay industry, other dealers, they may be, but they may be coming through a third party provider. But even if they are coming through your website to find a particular car, make sure that car's VDP looks right. Make sure it looks right on your phone. As Jeff was talking about as Steve we're talking about make sure that when it loads, if you've got a hundred pictures, make sure they load properly. Make sure they load fast. Because if they don't, even if you've got the best car at the best price, somebody's not gonna stick around to find out that 50th picture that they really want to see. It takes five minutes for the load. They're not gonna, they're not gonna stay, gonna go to the next person. So spend money on your website.

And especially when it just takes them a second to go back to that original search and start at another store. I mean you lost them, you lost them for good at that point. So it's really important to invest in your website and your digital marketing as a core strategy, as a facility. In essence, it's, it's as important as your, your brick and mortar, if not more as far as capturing traffic and growing opportunities for, for your business.

I think it's more important than your brick and mortar today. And it's gotta look good, it's gotta match, it's gotta do everything it's supposed to do. If not, you're totally wasting your time and your salespeople's time.

Yeah.

It costs so much money to get a customer to your website. Make sure that your website works.

Yeah. What's interesting is so many people rely on CarGurus and Cars.com and Facebook Marketplace to be their store's website website, you know, oh, I've got a Facebook page. I don't need a website. Hey, guess what? You don't own that page. You don't own that traffic. You don't own that stuff. When Zuckerberg decides to charge you a million dollars or gurus jacks up your rate and you built everything on the back of their platform, you're up a creek. So, Steve, to wrap this up, give us tip number five. What do you got for us?

Yeah, so I kind of molded a lot of these in here. So just to kind of quick, quickly review the five is, you know, know your audience and your audience's journey so you can truly play the game in the listings. And it combines SEO and SEM and understanding the difference between that is, is. Is. Is key. The next thing is, you know, we just discussed how important that site is, how important that messaging is, you know, making sure that it matches the intent of the customer is going to do business with you. You want them to see that and go, that's a winner. I need to give them a call and so forth. But you're not going to get there if your site isn't fast enough and it's not built for the environment in which the consumers are searching, which is the mobile side of things. And then the fourth one is the call to action. Make sure that that is easy to use. There's vendors and companies out there that specialize in making sure that that happens securely and that you can capture more of the customers that actually, that you're acquiring from that it's going to make a big difference in your cost of sale, cost to advertise if you can convert more. And part of that too is reporting that conversion back to Google here to make sure that you can continue to subsidize your growth with higher performance. But, you know, the fifth one, we touched on this throughout the whole thing is all those, you know, the tools, analysis, the adjustments, making sure that you just don't set it and forget it. It needs to be a core strategy, an everyday strategy, a process, something that you're with your teams and managers that they're aware of, and they're also bought in and understand the value of it as well, and that everything is new and changing, you know, and you need to catch it, and you'll catch opportunities as well. And you need to be ahead of it, and you need to be on top of this as far as a, an understanding of how it's going to impact your business. And it's certainly not going away. So it's continued to drive more and more.

Steve, give us the honest opinion here. So just to wrap all this up, there's a lot to this. There's so much to this. You know, like, I feel like I have somewhat of a grasp on it and I only know 10% of what Google AdWords and Google Analytics and Google my business and how that ties into my Facebook and my Instagram, all that stuff.

Right.

We can learn some and we need to learn the basics as a dealership, right. If you're selling 10, 20 cars a month, 30 cars a month, figure it out for yourself, Write a little policy on it, what you're going to do every Tuesday morning and check your listings and update your blogs and blah, blah, blah, then assign that to someone else. But at what point do we need to contact someone like you or anyone else that does this and hand it over and say, hey, I can't teach this, it's beyond me. I need professional help. When do we get to that point?

You have a vision first, a vision of growth. I can't think of any, anything that I've been involved with in the, in 20 years of marketing for dealerships and everything that's more important to get right than at this point, search engine marketing, it's so impactful. So if you have a vision to truly grow, and that means conquest, you have to find these customers that aren't. They just don't know you out of the blue. It's almost like a myth. Well, they'll find me or I hear. So I would have had that customer anyway. Well, probably not, not according to search engine marketing because this is happening tens of thousands of searches a week in everyone's area that they're not in front. And so if you have that vision of growth and you know, dealers. But it has to be a, hey, you know, I plan on going not just 30 units, I need to get to 40 units, I need to get to 50 units. I need to reduce my default rate. I have a, you know, a strategy to grow my portfolio over, over time with better paying customers. We need to have that sort of first and foremost goal. And then you need to get with an organization, a strategy that can encompass everything that we just talked about and make sure that you're getting good feedback that can talk to your team, that understands the nature of the business and your business and the customer and what happens on the, on the showroom floor and reporting back so you can get better and better. That's the difference. And so it's not, you know, it is a, it's not something, I mean you can dibble and dabble and get some growth for sure. But if you really have that vision to move forward, that's when you Said, hey, look, I need to find someone to truly help. And even if it's for a short period of time, as you set up an internal team and you just want some guidance, you know, to get, to get the ball rolling. But I think it starts there. And that's where I, you know, I get a lot of calls and I listen to the, to the dealers and if they, if they, if I really feel that, you know, hey, this is something we're going to stick to. It's not just something that is, hey, yes, I'd like to sell more cars. You know, I have a, I have a plan to do this. That's when you really want to get, get involved with, with a specialist. Because we, I've tried very hard to stay out of the technical side here, but there's, there's a lot.

Yeah, we could go real deep, that's.

For sure, that, that we get into and our teams get into to make it happen.

Well, thank you, Steve. Yeah.

How do we get ahold of you? How do dealers contact you if they want to get more of your expertise?

Right. So we, you know, like everyone else go to. Our website is the best. So as far as explaining, you know, what we do and the type of services we offer. But, you know, we have a ability to schedule demos right there on the website, you know, select your own time. We're here to serve you. So if there's what makes sense for your time, just go onto our website, schedule an appointment and a demo, and we're off to the races. Yep.

What is the website, Steve?

It's payhermarketing.com all one.

Hey. Heremarketing.com.

Awesome. Thanks so much for your time.

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