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Are You Worried About Duplicate Content for Your Dealership Website? You Should Be.

It looks like you found what you wanted to find! Google is a genie in a bottle you release with your SEARCH click. And those dealers had it, the best were in the top 3 spots. What's to complain about? When in Rome....

Aside from this, nothing works better in digital than having a solid Adwords campaign, with your goal to dominate position 1 or 2.

From my perspective you were delivered the results you asked for.
 
Custom content that's specific to the dealership is not an option -- it's the only method. That includes every digital asset you have from your website to your Google Ads to your social media, and it's not even just the written word. Content is the message that you want to deliver and the means, modes, and methods by which you deliver it. So whether it's images or text or video, things need to resonate for the consumer and create a seamless journey from online to in-store.

Keep in mind that content isn't king. Relevance is king. And you cannot create relevance with duplicate and stock content.

Oh, and a side note while we're on the topic of content itself. It also drives me crazy when dealerships use "hassle-free" and "haggle-free." That's called negative priming, and it's a concept that's as old as advertising itself. They even wrote books about it in the 70s.

Negative priming, in this context, is taking language that evokes a negative emotion from a past experience or known stereotypical experience. For dentists, it's "pain-free dentistry." In automotive, it's "hassle-free" and "haggle-free." When you use that language, you think that you're letting consumer know that you're not the "typical" dealership. What you're actually doing is negatively priming them on your website. Guess what word out of "hassle-free" sticks with them? And guess what they start thinking about?

Now, does that mean 100% of your visitors will bounce today because of that? Of course not. But why even risk losing one potential shopper because of lazy or misunderstood copywriting?
 
There's an entire thread that talks about Dealer.com and how Google mistakenly started linking different Dealer.com sites together in their index.
There has not been one post yet that can convince me that it isn't because of this exact issue.
https://forum.dealerrefresh.com/thr...with-my-dealer-com-sites-in-google-srps.5623/

Dealers all had a service page with the identical content (Welcome to [Dealership Name] Service Department. Use the form below...) and Google just decided that they all looked the same, therefore they must be duplicate content. Now the indexed listing for a Toyota site might say Ford Service Department.

There are still many automotive companies and "bloggers" that are selling content, Wordpress blogs on subdomains, etc. It's all B.S.
When they say that valuable content helps you rank better, it also requires that the content is relevant to your business (as indexed by Google), the content should be speaking with "one voice", etc. You can't just write an article about the 2020 Camry and expect to sell more Camry's - Google has you indexed as a dealership or a service center, etc - they don't have you indexed as a news source or an automotive blog.
 
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Oh, and a side note while we're on the topic of content itself. It also drives me crazy when dealerships use "hassle-free" and "haggle-free." That's called negative priming, and it's a concept that's as old as advertising itself. They even wrote books about it in the 70s.

Negative priming, in this context, is taking language that evokes a negative emotion from a past experience or known stereotypical experience. For dentists, it's "pain-free dentistry." In automotive, it's "hassle-free" and "haggle-free." When you use that language, you think that you're letting consumer know that you're not the "typical" dealership. What you're actually doing is negatively priming them on your website. Guess what word out of "hassle-free" sticks with them? And guess what they start thinking about?

Dude... Carmax seems to think it's ok, and that it's not a bad idea to have that verbiage on the front page of their website.

upload_2019-8-6_11-4-55.png
 
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Dude... Carmax seems to think it's ok, and that it's not a bad idea to have that verbiage on the front page of their website.

View attachment 4242

You're killing me, Rick!

They packed them all into like a 20-word sentence. That's just lazy copywriting that plays on the worst of what people think about car dealers. At least they had the common decency to bury that nonsense down the page and not right at the very top. :)
 
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There are still many automotive companies and "bloggers" that are selling content, Wordpress blogs on subdomains, etc. It's all B.S.
When they say that valuable content helps you rank better, it also requires that the content is relevant to your business (as indexed by Google), the content should be speaking with "one voice", etc. You can't just write an article about the 2020 Camry and expect to sell more Camry's - Google has you indexed as a dealership or a service center, etc - they don't have you indexed as a news source or an automotive blog.

When we talk about content, it's primarily not about writing an article about a 2020 Camry. It's about consistent, high-quality writing across all of your channels: website, social media, email, programmatic, paid search, and so on. Whether it's a script, a headline, body copy, descriptions, alt image tags, or something else, there's a lot more nuance and psychology to copywriting than I think a lot of small businesses understand.

To your exact point, a subfolder (definitely recommended over a subdomain) on the website for a blog isn't a bad idea once you've addressed other major content, SEO, and CRO issues across channels, which can then become part of ongoing work. If the blog is useful to people -- say some "how-tos" or highlighting tech or introducing a new model -- and it has time-on-site or other on-page actions that indicate to Google that it was worthwhile, it can help with authority and Google identifying the dealer as a quality source for this and, thus, similar information, as well as freshness and frequency, which we also know plays into the algorithm.

Again, I'd emphasize that this is not any work that you'd do upfront to "boost traffic" or as an expectation that you'd sell more cars (I've never heard any agency make a claim that a blog would result in selling more cars) or even in the first few months of partnering with an agency as there are more important things, but I wouldn't say the notion of content is B.S.
 
I have worked for a digital marketing agency and our main product was dealership websites.

I like this thread because for me, there are some underlying issues.

As soon as you duplicate content like this, it becomes null in terms of SEO, but still serve the purpose if your customer is on your site.

Now, the correct answer would be to generate fresh & perfect 2000-3000 skyscrapers about every single carline & trim, every year.

If ANYONE here tells me the average dealership should be doing this, or is equipped to do this, I will know right away you are new to this business... Or not in it at all.

If you were to leave all pages blank and wait for someone at the dealership to start writing about the team, cars, experience, etc. Website would never go online. I'm not throwing rocks at dealers here, I'm just stating reality.

The reality is that models come and go pretty fast, resources are scarce in the average store & there are a million moving parts. Plus, most DPs or GMs don't understand this and/or don't put value over SEO.

Over the last 10 years, I have met a handful of owners that were way too savvy in SEO, and to be honest, I was worried because I'm sure this can't be #1 priority for a DP.

I'm not saying it's the correct answer to have 520 sites with the same Jeep Grand Cherokee description, but most managers in this business will tell you it's a matter of knowing where to cut corners...
 
When we talk about content, it's primarily not about writing an article about a 2020 Camry. It's about consistent, high-quality writing across all of your channels: website, social media, email, programmatic, paid search, and so on. Whether it's a script, a headline, body copy, descriptions, alt image tags, or something else, there's a lot more nuance and psychology to copywriting than I think a lot of small businesses understand.

To your exact point, a subfolder (definitely recommended over a subdomain) on the website for a blog isn't a bad idea once you've addressed other major content, SEO, and CRO issues across channels, which can then become part of ongoing work. If the blog is useful to people -- say some "how-tos" or highlighting tech or introducing a new model -- and it has time-on-site or other on-page actions that indicate to Google that it was worthwhile, it can help with authority and Google identifying the dealer as a quality source for this and, thus, similar information, as well as freshness and frequency, which we also know plays into the algorithm.

Again, I'd emphasize that this is not any work that you'd do upfront to "boost traffic" or as an expectation that you'd sell more cars (I've never heard any agency make a claim that a blog would result in selling more cars) or even in the first few months of partnering with an agency as there are more important things, but I wouldn't say the notion of content is B.S.


Great point. To add to your point, a blog can be a huge traffic driver, but only with a strong inbound marketing strategy behind. Otherwise, it's a waste of time, money and expectations.
 
As soon as you duplicate content like this, it becomes null in terms of SEO, but still serve the purpose if your customer is on your site.

It wasn't null in terms of SEO when it caused Dealer.com sites to be indexed with the wrong meta tags due to Google thinking they were all the same. Duplicate content could have a negative impact but rarely, if ever, has a positive impact.
 
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It wasn't null in terms of SEO when it caused Dealer.com sites to be indexed with the wrong meta tags due to Google thinking they were all the same. Duplicate content could have a negative impact but rarely, if ever, has a positive impact.

Makes sense.

I have ran a local business website outside the auto industry with duplicate content. The main difference was the local aspect as the city of the services were very clear. I can say I built a solid traffic out of it.