Best idea for dealership buyouts

[lfinney]

I think my dealer maybe looking to buy some other locations around. Anyone have any quick tips on how I can be prepared to quickly get new dealership name and information online. I want to be prepared and ready to impress.

A few years ago we moved locations and getting our old address offline was a much bigger pain than I thought it would be. In fact, I found it online again a few days ago... it haunts me like crazy.

I keep all of our stuff in a Google Local Business account and that works well for changes but getting all these little sites that use dealerships name to rank in searches are very hard to get them to update.

Any words of wisdom would be great...

 

[Billfred]

I'll be watching this thread as well--I've been battling this for-freakin'-ever. We've changed brands a fair bit over the years--first it was Oldsmobile, then Olds-GMC, then Pontiac-Olds-GMC, then Pontiac-GMC (the first one that the internet seems to remember), then Pontiac-GMC-Suzuki, then Pontiac-GMC-Saab, then Buick-Pontiac-GMC-Saab, with another change seemingly inevitable now. (And the Buick dealer we bought out still shows up as a suggested search!)

There's part of me, though, that worries less about them. Are folks really going to pass over a half-dozen or more of our sites on Google to find a hanger-on that still says we're at some other address under some other name? (Cue Pasch coming in here with a ton of data saying yes in 3...2...1...)

 

[Brian Pasch]

Lori
When you expand and open a new franchise there is a different plan of attack than if you purchase an existing brand. One of the key mistakes in buying other existing dealerships is to modify their Google Maps listing instead of deleting it. In most cases, there any many bad reviews that you don't want to be associated with so starting clean is better.

Another thing is the phone number. You can keep the old franchise phone number but just have it forward to a new number you assign. New dealership names without a new phone number may not trigger a business listing to refresh on some IRM websites.

Expansion is all about GPOM, which there is a good article on DR which covers why you need to protect your brand name(s). So if you are planning on purchasing another dealer, you should lockup key domain names BEFORE you start negotiations so insiders don't buy them up and hold you over a barrel.

Once you are locked and ready to launch, you should have a strategic online marketing campaign that updates some listings, deletes others and gets the message out in PR, Blogs, etc. The intensity of this work depends if the dealership had a bad reputation and if you are changing the name of the franchise.

We have had a lot of experience with this and if we can help you in 2010, please let me know.

 

[ghen]

Basically what it is going to take is a concerted effort on your marketing / SEO team to really pound the new name into the internet.

The old one will never go away, you just have to make it less relevant.

 

[KoreyB]

Basically what it is going to take is a concerted effort on your marketing / SEO team to really pound the new name into the internet.

The old one will never go away, you just have to make it less relevant.

Completely agree Ghen, be less concerned with removing every last trace of the old dealership's data and more concerned with getting the word out about the new dealership data.