This company built their offering by posing as dealer clients to potential competitors and then reverse-engineered their business applications. Therefore it may suggest that there is a lack of true innovation and work ethic with this company. Food for thought.

I agree with you Jeff,

I chose DealerOn at the beginning of 2006 for my last dealerships website: www.suzukiofelkhart.com. Their sites do a good job of converting traffic to leads and getting your dealership in the search results.

Like you, I felt the same way about the way Inventory is displayed. I hope to see an improvement at NADA this year... The SEO and Conversion makes up for it though. The guys at DealerOn were always really responsive to my wants and needs.

Of course this was a couple of years ago, so they may have become a bit smarter since!

Main issues I had with Dealerskins sites is that their URL's were hidden. Every page of your website had the same url and made for SEO nightmare. Not to mention when you wanted to link from blogs back to your site..all you could do was the home page, due to the one url.

I had to call into to them to get the hidden page names for our Credit Application, Specials, etc..so that I could link. This is why they are a huge SEO nightmare. After I did massive SEO work on the sites we were much better. But this is an issue that a big Dealer Webdesign Company should know better about.

We have used Dealerskins for over a year now. Their SEO seems to be decent, but their overall design lacks tremendously. I may be nitpicking due to my web design background but I feel we could do better. Their support is average thus far since I took over the position of Internet Manager. Ive contacted them twice about re-design options but have yet to hear back from a project manager of any kind. We are currently searching other options such as Dealer.com and Dealeron.com.

Dealerskins backend site manager is very archaic. The site editor is very limited for anyone with any kind of basic HTML experience. Their design optons would be good for a dealership who is looking to update from a site built in 1995, but if you are looking anything "cutting edge" you might look elsewhere.

Ultimately, you get what you pay for so be careful.

we need web site info and pricing

e-mail or 248 514 1115

hi my name rick malitsky with dylanmotorcars in hatboro pa. we would like to discontinue our website with u guys if u can give us a call at 215-442-9190 as soon as u get this email. thank you

I had used Dealerskins services before and found the same thing as well. The dealer website didn't come up a lot on the Search Engines. This was important for our store to come up so that we could get more customers coming to our site. The sites look great at first but we found out over time that many of the customers would not stay on the site long because of the loading of the flash.

Joe,

One more point I wanted to share. Usedcarking(dot)com sounds like it is not a franchise dealer. If I was to look for a service department or a new chevy, I would not click on your link and if I did by accident, I would click back since I would think you are not a franchise dealer, simply a note lot.

So, although content is king, your marketing message needs to be tailored to what your customers are expecting to find. I see at least one third of my traffic to be service related and I get more new car leads then used car leads (although I get more used car searches). Probably because they can see the price for used cars, they have to inquire for new cars.....

Hope that makes sense.

Joe,

True. If you look at only that it means absolutely nothing. My point was simply that the more pages the search engines know about, the better.

But first regarding your site and fxchevy(dot)com being better. Do you mean the number of leads or the amount of traffic you get? Cause I really think you should get more traffic then them. Problem lies maybe in your conversion ratio? You have to admit that your main entry page is not exactly what your dealerships' customer is expecting (do your know your bounce rate for this page? number of visitors that exit on the first page they see). Do you know your monthly unique visitors, unique leads, unique phone calls? and do you know the same for your competitor, fxchevy? let me know and we will see whether my point makes no sense.

Back to my point in my earlier post, my current provider has their website hard code inventory pages, so instead of having a page called dealer(dot)com/inventory.aspx?item=5 my site will create a page dealer(dot)com/2008_acura_tsx_vin_used.html and since google's algorithm looks at how often site content gets updated, having your inventory pages indexed is very important and helps your overall rankings.

Now all these fancy pants dealer website providers create fake content that is the same for each dealer and thus will not help your rankings. My provider is guilty of this too. You have to be the one to add the content if your provider allows you

Back to TKcarsites, their inventory is iframed into fxchevy and thus this does not help their site with search engine rankings and actually only helps getauto(dot)com that lists their inventory (just right click on their inventory tool and click properties in the dropdown). definately something they can see big results with if they change.

That said, I do agree that those numbers are not an accurate reflection of how you rank, it is simply a tool to help you improve. I would love to analyze the data from fxchevy(dot)com and usedcarking(dot)com to see where your problem is, if you think you have one. You can email me at oscar (at) goodosnacura(dot0com

PS. My site provider has problems too (too slow, too few pages, not flexible enough, etc......) but I get more traffic and higher conversion then with earlier providers.

Joe,

The "site:" searches on Google can be very valuable if the site was built correctly from the start. I did a quick analysis of your site and found that there is one major flaw in your design that would not allow great ranking even though you have a lot of pages cataloged. Also, with regards to fxchevy, the main factor that is having the greatest influence on the search ranking is something that is most likely being done by a 3rd party company and not TK.
They have a ton of external linking which is enhancing their relavance. This is most likley done through a local PR firm. If they were using a web vendor that cataloged better on Google and combined that with his external linking, he would really dominate that market.

James Kovacs
www.clickmotive.com

Oscar,
FWIW, site:yourdomainname.com displays a raw number of pages indexed and is one hell of a useless number (if left to stand on its own).

Example:
site:usedcarking.com = 5,120 pages
vs.
site:fxchevy.com = 14 pages
(a local competitor by TKcarsites)

The TK site totally crushes my usedcarking.com site (WTG Jim Rucker!) So... the number of pages indexed only gains leverage IF the site has SEO engineered into it from the ground up.

I'd bet ya 5,100 of usedcarking.com pages are in goog's dungeon (supplementals).

Joe

I agree with Brian. I used Dealerskins in the past at our dealership, but their websites are horrible what SEO is concerned. The main problems with their websites (although they look very nice) are that they are flash heavy and use frames to build the site.
Although most search engines have created robots that now have a work around the frames and flash, it does not help with optimizing.

I have since switched to Dealeron and you can clearly see that they worked on SEO compatibility. They allow you to optimize each page seperately (unlike dealerskins) and they have all our inventory vehicle pages indexed by the search engines which help a lot.

Easy check to see how many of your pages are indexed, type:

site:www.yourdomain.com

Now before I get to nice to dealeron.com they do have a lot of problems also. Their websites load slower then any other provider for dealerships and they limit the number of pages you can create.

When deciding on a webdesign, I look mostly at these four things:
1. SEO friendly
2. Conversion
3. User Friendly
4. Dealer friendly

but in the end it is all about leads, so any site that improves your traffic and conversion is a plus. When you can combine this with a look, feel and design that fits your marketing message, you hit to jackpot.

I have not found a single company that offers all those. Oh well, maybe I need to do this myself.....LoL

The Dealerskins flash website packages may look nice but score 0/10 for organic search optimization. The five Dealerskins flash websites that I worked with had an architecture does not allow for users to control page titles, keywords and descriptions on a page level. The platform also has other design issues that make SEO extremely difficult. For most Dealerskins sites that I have reviewed, the HTML tag is the same for all pages on the site which is a direct violation of Google Webmaster guidelines.

Examples of "stuck" page titles are: www.irvinebmw.net and shellybmw.com

The challenges with their platform required me to create clean HTML websites for my dealer clients who wanted to lower PPC costs and gain local leads organically. Today, the new HTML websites beat the Dealerskin flash sites for organics lead generation by at lease a 3-1 margin.

If they have an HTML platform, choose that one and stay away from their flash platform which I have found not be effective for organic search marketing. If you want flash for your main site and want to build lead collection websites outside of Dealerskins, that can work also I have demonstrated for my clients.

We've just started using DealerSkins for our website, maybe 3-4 months ago. It is a HUGE improvement over our previous website, which was pretty much just dead weight. We are receiving more leads by far. The layout of the website is great, and is fairly easy to navigate. There's buttons on almost all the pages where you can do a 'quick contact' and email the dealership your info. Customers can aslo submit credit applications which we receive in a matter of minutes. So far, we are pleased with DealerSkins. I would like to see what other dealers who are using Dealerskins have to say.

Dealerskins provides automotive dealers beautiful AND powerful web solutions that help them sell more cars. Our expertise comes from real-world dealership experience and a passion for listening and responding to our dealers’ needs. In fact, we designed, built, and used the first Dealerskins website while working at a top-50 dealership group.

We realize that automotive dealers require high-caliber, dynamic websites to meet car buyers’ needs. Dealerskins was founded in July of 2000 to serve those needs. Today, we’re bigger and better than ever and still focused on helping dealers use their websites to sell more cars.

Our SEO/SEM team consistently stays ahead of the curve. They’ve developed incredible methods to help drive traffic to our customer’s sites – and we provide the most detailed reporting on the results in the industry. This let’s dealers drill deep down on the effectiveness of their marketing spend.

We build the industry’s most beautiful and functional websites – period – using the latest Internet technologies including Flash. This helps us provide very dynamic, interactive, attractive websites that keep customers coming back.

Our products, services and achievements include:

* Customized, Branded Dealership Websites
* Ups! Search Engine Optimization and Marketing
* Autobahn Online Inventory System
* Red Line Suite of Vehicle Research, Display & Follow-up Tools
* Promotion Center Customized Online Specials
* Dealers’ Choice Awards Winner- 2004, 2005 & 2006
* AROW Award- 5 1/2 Stars out of 5
* Dealerskins Clients in Ward's Top 5 e-dealers 3 Years Running
* Largest Porsche and Maserati Dealerships in the U.S.
* Highest Sales Honda Dealership in the U.S.

We also partner with the best tool providers in the business to allow a dealer to have everything they need to effectively use their website. This includes vehicle videos, lead management, finance apps etc.

Thank you, Jeff, for giving us the opportunity to explain what it is we do!

anybody got the scoop on smart web concepts? Just curious
www.smartwebconcepts.com

Someone had mentioned dealer impact to me awhile back as a complete marketing package. Has anyone on the board used them?
(they even use a apples to apples comparison

As a buyer I remember taking my girlfriend car shopping not too long ago. She was looking for a reliable used car for a low price. For whatever reason we both agreed that one owner cars are better then multiple owner cars. We ended up paying slightly more for a one owner car then one that had multiple owners. Its doesnt really make much sense because that one owner could have treated the car like SH**, never changed the oil, never rotated the tires but there was still a sense of security in knowing only one person owned that car.

I think the one owner icon is a cool feature and it should be interesting to see it on the new DriveMB website. Stay Well.

xBMANx

Great column. Tracking every aspect of online and offline advertising is very important. Although many dealers do it, sending traffic to the homepage of their dealers website is like putting an ad in the paper without your address. Dealers need to guide their potential customers through their website by landing them on landing pages related to the keyword that got them there. Dealers are paying a hefty fee for each search engine referral so they may as well do everything in their power to ensure that visitor turns into a lead.

xBMANx

To see return from Google base we got a wait till it they integrate in car results into regular Google search results, just like products.

Here are some other free sites where you can send in your feed.
www.LemonFree.com
www.vast.com
www.edgio.com
www.dealerrater.com

Also for Oodle.com your listing appear on Lycos classifieds and tons of other sites that are pulling the feed from Oodle.com. So you may not actually see the referral come from Oodle.com.

If need help with the feeds check us out at www.autojini.com.

Thanks for the reply Jeff. I don't yet use eBiz Autos, but I'm going to look at it. I've sold a few things off Craigslist outside work; I just never thought of listing cars there.

I did go down the Google Base route awhile back, but manually, and with no results. I think we have to see what Google does with it ; that will make or break it.

Jeff,

Quick question re: Google base, Craigslist, and oodle. Do you have some sort of automated process to list your cars there, or do you just put up specific cars manually?

As a prior employee of Reynolds and Reynolds I cant state facts about the Cobalt buy-out but I can express my deepest sympathies for the current and employees at the new Reynolds and Reynolds Company. Back a few years ago I was a Field Service Technician with USC and after about 12 months of constant torture and verbal abuse hurled my way because I was the field "representative" for Universal Computer Services. After getting my tongue ripped out for going to my supervisor with customer complaints and trying to resolve them I decided to call it quits and make a move in a different direction. After about 10 years working with 2 of the major DMS providers I have had enough of that game and needed to move on to bigger and better things. I recently came to my senses and took a position at a local dealership group and I could have never made a better decision.

I can't speak for Cobalt, but can say with 100% certainty that Who's Calling was in fact purchased by UCS/Reynolds in December. As an employee of that company, I can most definitely confirm it!

Thanks Jeff!