Dealership Blogs and Their Purpose

[Jeff Kershner]

"Blogs" are still the hype, though it seems as if we have been talking about them forever here on DealerRefresh.

Should dealers be blogging?

My question for the community is IF you have a dealership blog, what is your main reason for the blog?

OR for some, what WAS your main purpose for your dealership blog?

You have to choose one of the 2 in the survey!

1. SEO to drive traffic to your dealer website

Or

2. To build transparency between your dealer and consumer

If it's 49% transparency 51% SEO, then your answer would be number 1.

Yeah, we know there are benefits to both but let's be honest..what is/was your true driver for even taking the time and resources to have a blog?

Another question to toss out there. Is your blog part of your dealer website or is it hosted with a completely separate domain and what do you believe are the pros ad cons of each?

 

[ghen]

What I wish it to be? A real blog maintained by someone on my staff with a passion for talking about minutae and customer relations.

What it is? SEO maintained by my website provider.

 

[Alex Snyder]

We have done a few different things. We originally got into blogging at Virginia Beach Dealers and that was mainly brought on because of DealerRefresh. We started that with SEO as a secondary motivation - customer engagement was the primary. It was mostly handled by our PR Agency and was pretty much a big experiment. That blog RSS-fed to our Group and the applicable categories fed to the OEM Child sites that were Dealer.com hosted. Cobalt and ReyRey basically laughed at me when I proposed doing this to them.

Today we have blogs on top of blogs. The whole goal is SEO. We have at least 3 blogs for each manufacturer, and blogs based on our name. We have a Dealer.com-built blog at Checkered Flag Blog that feeds to sidebars within our website. And I'm not even going to talk about some of our other blogs. Not to mention the websites that are built on blogging platforms (Wordpress).

I sometimes wonder if we're doing too much because I'll go back to revisit an old freebie blog we haven't updated in a while to find some customer comments on articles. With so much going on it is very easy to lose track of some of the pieces.

 

[joe.pistell]

Alex,

I am with you on the SEO value (blogs validate the main site). But I have a question that is a bit complex, have you had the chance to review all your blogs traffic and look into those visitors that were not visitors to CF.com 1st?

Did they make it to CF.com?
What % made it to the mother site (CF.com)?

Of your massive blogging efforts, how much of the traffic has no dollar value (read: noise) Also, what stands out, geo based SERPs, Make/Model or all kinds of misc SERPs.

This new Googe WebMaster tool improvement (impressions vs click trus) must be very interesting for you (It's making my head pop!)

 

[Alex Snyder]

Joe - most of it is noise. But there are other factors to consider beyond traffic to the mother site:

1. Branding
2. Engagement for a later date (read today, buy tomorrow)
3. Link building - I'm truly amazed at how quickly we can now push something to the top (even some very armored phrases)
4. Impressions on Google that could be considered branding (assuming they don't click the link but see the result with our name in it)

Yes, the Google Webmaster tools are definitely insane. I feel like we haven't even scratched the surface!

 

[Mitch Gallant]

Our blogs are maintained to create transparency for customers and it's gone a long way to help the culture at the store becoming more of an "Internet Dealership". It can be a huge black hole but can go a very long way to generate a great deal of credibility and professionalism. A very exceptional case is hopefully closing out tomorrow. We've got a customer flying into our city from over 900 miles away because of many many factors but she cited our blog as a reason she felt confident in coming to us.

I think she would have come anyway, the used truck they're buying is very rare and at an exceptional price.

The focus of our blog is the transparency element, the SEO factor is a big bonus.

Either way it's a win win!

 

[joe.pistell]

Mitch,

Google Analytics question.
How long does your blog visitor stay and how many pages do they look at? I look at my numbers and it's hard to get excited about "delivering a meaningful message".

thnx!

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Mitch,

Google Analytics question.
How long does your blog visitor stay and how many pages do they look at? I look at my numbers and it's hard to get excited about "delivering a meaningful message".

thnx!

Depending on how your blog is set up, your analytics can really differ.

Explain: Some blogs have the full posts on the home page without a "Click to continue". When you have this..many times the visitor gets what they are looking for (most recent posts) right there on the home page. No need to go any deeper. Therefore your page views and even time on site can report much lower.

Many commercial blogs use the "Click to continue" to improve stats, especially page views (increases impressions for advertisers).

Another important tool to have for back door entries (where many/most blogs get there organic traffic from) be sure you are using a "Like Posts or Articles Like This" plug-in to again increase click through/page views and time on site.

So when you are read your analytics - take into account on how you have your blog set up.

 

[Mitch Gallant]

@Joe. Our Ford blog is by far the most visited, the analytics i just looked at show a 2.18 page/visit and 1:37 avg time on site over the last 30 days. I'd agree there nothing to get excited about but I have faith, it's been fun to watch the numbers grow over the past year. They started out much much worse and it's been encouraging to see more employees jump on board and help out. We see an amazing jump each time we run a profile or personalized piece on a staff member and they do the work to help spread the word via their own FB.

@Jeff, I agree and we actually just addressed our "click to continue" approach, I'm hoping it creates a more flattering set of analytics come 6 months from now.

 

[joe.pistell]

Mitch,

That's almost an exact match to one of mine too.

You've probably already done this, but did you block all your IP's from your stores and content peeps? I look at my Visitor Loyalty #'s and I think I have a rouge IP or 2 fudging my numbers up.