The real trick to content writing is knowing where to put things. I see a lot of dealership websites with massive navigation options because they have so much content they want to show-off. The regular customer can easily get lost in that clutter. A blog is a great solution for pumping out content while keeping your website visitor's experience clean and simple.
A little after Checkered Flag first got started with
Virginia Beach Dealers we hired a PR agency to write 5 articles per week. You can dive into the archives (
Virginia Beach Dealers: Archives) to see some of the older stuff. They were great as they visited our service departments to interview customers, walked around the stores with a camera, and even tried a few podcasts. They really helped us pioneer things. Eventually, when the economy slumped, we had to discontinue using them and switched to an internal process with Christine Knowles doing most of the writing (she is the woman in the Checkered Flag videos).
During this period we also discovered that an integrated blog (
Checkered Flag Blog) did a lot more for more search engine referrals. The downsides to more traffic is typically a higher bounce rate and lower conversion rates, but we did see a slight increase in form submissions and more customers mentioning things about the blog when calling.
Since I left Checkered Flag, Christine has taken over the online marketing side of things and no longer has the time to write the blog articles. She hired her sister part-time to handle things, and that is how it is done today.
Things to concentrate on:
- Integrated blogging platform within your own domain
- Consistent writing schedule - 5 articles per week was ours
- 4 to 1 content where at least 1 out of every 4 articles is specific to your locality (most customers don't like to read about cars)
- Backup blogs to help push SEO (we used Vox, but it isn't around anymore) with a good linking strategy.....this is getting a bit more advanced and should be something you approach long after you are comfortable with steps 1-3
.....actually, I'm beginning to smell a DealerRefresh blog article in the works.