Post your blog - bloggers discussion thread

[Ryan Thompson]

I did this for one of my friends before the Fiesta came out. I really had no idea what I was doing at the time, and not sure I even do now. The problem is my site is not targeted to consumers so I received a crap load of bouncies. Still rank #1 here in Toronto though. Imagine if a dealer had wrote this ....

@ Scott - did I do good?

 

[Jeff Kershner]

This is a good convo. An off site or on site blog -- which is better? And a question I have asked myself many times. Ask Scott.

I do think many times that people outside of our industry forget that we need to sell cars and that's exactly what customers expect us to do - sell and service their car. In no way am I suggesting that we shouldn't build a "relationship" with the customer but how early in the funnel do you build this rapport with a potential NEW customer? Even more, how much time and resources do you place into this process on a blog? I'm not saying there are no benefits..you as a dealer need to decide on this but, I can tell you I have personally built relationships over years way early in the funnel only to find out the customer/friend/family member goes somewhere else to purchase their vehicle.

Clay, I hear you loud and clear. If I'm going to take the time and resources to write targeted content in order attract people in the market looking to buy a car, wouldn't it benefit me 100% to have that content on my own onsite/dealership website blog? They might just want to look at my inventory and find a vehicle of interest - go figure...

Also, if you are into social - one can use other avenues to build relationships, right?

There are some advantage to having an off site blog as well IF you're potentially looking for different results. As Scott points out - it might be easier to build out a relationship with potential customers from an off site blog. It doesn't exude the "sales" message. You would also benefit from having one more site out there for Google Page One defense. Some exchange of link juice is always a plus as well.

I've a fan of StudioPress themes on Wordpress. Get your All In One SEO plugin and rock the SERPS!

Here is a Studiopress blog/website I'm working on for my Nissan dealer - going after some geo targeted traffic. It's a work in progress so don't judge!!

hagerstown nissan dealer

I have a small affiliate account set up with StudioPress - If you are interested.

 

[DevBasu]

Hey Ryan - Thanks for calling me up to the stand. So here are my quick tips on SEO for Blogs and why bother with a blog at all (especially for dealers).

I'd blog for three main reasons if I were a dealer:

a) To create engagement by writing up in-depth vehicle reviews, geo-targeting offers, announcing local programs and incentives. Yes, you must create a relationship or pre-sell before you hard-sell.

b) To attract long tail search traffic.

c) To vary promotional and non-promotional content to past and future customers.

Like most things in marketing, the answer to any given question or best practice is more likely 'it depends' rather than a black and white yes/no answer. That being said, here are a couple of things to remember when setting up a blog with SEO in mind. Most of the advice I am about to give is what would work best for 'most dealers'.

- A blog is best maintained as a sub-folder on your main domain. eg: kiatoronto.com/blog.

- The biggest reasons for maintaining a sub-folder blog structure are to enhance the overall pages of content on the domain, and to increase overall global link popularity. This means if you are the first to break news about a new model or offer and your post gets a lot of links, then the overall # of links with the anchor text of the post goes up.

- A sub domain is not preferred because it is seen as a separate entity by the search engines.

- A separate domain is only preferred when you have enough time, resources, and money to pursue a content marketing and SEO strategy for said domain.

- Rather than creating an off-site blog as your primary blog, you can setup simple types of syndicated blog posts to go to 3rd party blogging platforms such as bloggers, vox, typepad, wetpaint etc. The purpose is not for customers to find these, but rather to build links back to your main dealer site and dealer blog.

- Social media and SEO have a great overlap. Make sure you connect your primary blog to your social networking profiles, so that they auto-update when you publish a post. This creates both awareness, traffic, and links from those sites back to your blog.

 

[TuneyFish]

@ Scott - did I do good?

I would say that it's helpful to understand and analyze the traffic and behavior of your visitors and whether you have what they want or if you can put them on the right path.

 

[TuneyFish]

Great, accidentally erased my post. Note to self: an iPhone is not the best tool for a forum post.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Hey Ryan - Thanks for calling me up to the stand. So here are my quick tips on SEO for Blogs and why bother with a blog at all (especially for dealers).

I'd blog for three main reasons if I were a dealer:

a) To create engagement by writing up in-depth vehicle reviews, geo-targeting offers, announcing local programs and incentives. Yes, you must create a relationship or pre-sell before you hard-sell.

b) To attract long tail search traffic.

c) To vary promotional and non-promotional content to past and future customers.

Like most things in marketing, the answer to any given question or best practice is more likely 'it depends' rather than a black and white yes/no answer. That being said, here are a couple of things to remember when setting up a blog with SEO in mind. Most of the advice I am about to give is what would work best for 'most dealers'.

- A blog is best maintained as a sub-folder on your main domain. eg: kiatoronto.com/blog.

- The biggest reasons for maintaining a sub-folder blog structure are to enhance the overall pages of content on the domain, and to increase overall global link popularity. This means if you are the first to break news about a new model or offer and your post gets a lot of links, then the overall # of links with the anchor text of the post goes up.

- A sub domain is not preferred because it is seen as a separate entity by the search engines.

- A separate domain is only preferred when you have enough time, resources, and money to pursue a content marketing and SEO strategy for said domain.

- Rather than creating an off-site blog as your primary blog, you can setup simple types of syndicated blog posts to go to 3rd party blogging platforms such as bloggers, vox, typepad, wetpaint etc. The purpose is not for customers to find these, but rather to build links back to your main dealer site and dealer blog.

- Social media and SEO have a great overlap. Make sure you connect your primary blog to your social networking profiles, so that they auto-update when you publish a post. This creates both awareness, traffic, and links from those sites back to your blog.

Dev, thanks for joining us and even more for clarifying. I agree with you 100%.

Yes, there are some different strategies with an offsite blog but I believe having it as a sub-folder on your main domain is the overall win. At the end of the day we want our customers on our website and who says you can't "engage" with a consumer on your dealership domain blog.

 

[Ryan Thompson]

Anyone have experience using "Thesis" seems to be all the rage. Would love to learn more.

 

[joe.pistell]

I've got a few hundred hours into WP themes for selling cars. I used my first WP theme about 3-4 years ago and not a soul had a clue what I was trying to do. This ones 3 years old Used Car Queen Post Topic 2006 Hyundai Sonata GLS v6! A+ condition Best Pre-Owned Deal in Upstate New York $13,990 Save $2000 off Kelly

I use Thesis for a few blogs. One example is: Owner's Manual Source ? Free Online Directory of Automotive Owner's Manuals. It's an eyesore, but I use it to train my sons on it (plus, its my sons car payment cash generator

What's way more impressive than the Thesis platform itself, is it's amazingly brilliant creator Chris Pearson. There are a butt load of WP geniuses out there, no one markets themselves better than him. It all started years ago, when CP was a recruited by: Online Copywriting and Content Marketing Strategies | Copyblogger (another Internet Marketing genius) to mod the copyblogger platform. It worked so well that CP took CopyBloggers marketing skills and started his own company. CopyBlogger started yet another popular WP guru site: StudioPress - Premium WordPress Themes

If your looking for WP gurus: WordPress Rockstar Showcase | WeRockWP

For me, I stopped attacking improving WP sites years ago when I couldn't get intuitive catalogue like navigation and inventory into it and then most importantly, make it convert. I've got most of it figured out now, I just need to shut the doors for a few weeks and get it done.

 

[Ryan Thompson]

Was hoping to spark this thread up again as I'm just as fired up about blogging as I was when I posted this 3 years ago!

Question:

"Has the rules/game changed with regards to your blog being a subdomain of your dealership website?".

I'm asking on behalf of a handful of dealers I'm friends with that are in a situation where their provider either:

a) forces them to use their CMS
b) Cannot integrate a Wordpress blog to their current site. Eg: 404 - Not Found

A few years ago Dev Basu mentioned that a blog being a subdomain was not ideal. Is this still the case? A lot of dealers are wanting to use Wordpress but are hitting brick walls.

Example - Honda Calgary Blog by Airdrie Honda Dealership

 

[craigh]

I can't speak for Google on this one, but we baked a blog into our CMS simply because we wanted to be able to automate a few things.
For instance, not only can we keep our blog separate if we want (ie: www.dealersite.com/blog), but we can also put "Latest Posts" on the homepage or link to "Ask the Dealer" on any other pages.

I'm a huge Wordpress fan in many instances, but having an entirely separate application for your blog doesn't make sense to me.
Each blog post is more of an on-site landing page for us now. Although Wordpress has some great SEO stuff baked in, I like the ability to carry those posts across our dealer site anywhere we want without having to query a separate WP database.

As far as the subdomain goes, I believe it's similar value to having it offsite. I think (but cannot say that I know) that Google treats subdomains as separate websites unless the sitemap dictates otherwise. Considering the weight of domains in good SEO, I would say landing pages and blogs should be on separate domains if the domain is sensible.