Used Cars RSS Feeds - Click To View

This week Showroom Logic announced the addition of RSS Feeds to all participating new and used car dealers. Each car dealer will have their own personal RSS Feed which will show each used car and truck as it is added to our website.

Larger car dealers who send us their inventory feed will get this done automatically, and it’s a great way to add fresh content to used car dealer blogs. The smaller dealers who post themselves will also have this automatically fed. If you are a car dealership with a blog this is a huge way to make your blog more credible for search engines, they just love fresh content.

For those familiar with the internet car industry knows just how powerful this can be. Showroom Logic’s innovation passes all companies including AutoTrader, Cars.com and the thousands of other third party listing companies out there.

How do they do it? Simple. Showroom Logic has 2 founders, Patrick Bennett of Modern Blue Web Design and Mike Annable of PAWS Print & Web Solutions. Each of the two practice the latest techniques as soon as they become available. The larger companies like AutoTrader and Cars.com are so huge it makes them disfunctional. By the time they get consulted and roll out changes Patrick and Mike have already accomplished it, and moved on to 5 more. Yes, they are 5 steps ahead of the game.

“We are nothing like AutoTrader or Cars.com”, says Mike Annable. “Some dealers get great benefits from each, and if it’s not broken don’t fix it”. “We are not looking to replace what a dealer is using now, this is simply another source. And for $200.00 a month it makes it a no brainer.” Mike goes on to explain the benefits of having a dealers inventory on our website:

1. RSS Feeds: Each dealer will have their own personal RSS Feed, that will list only their inventory. RSS feeds can be imported into anybody’s blog, facebook account, etc…
2. The Power Of Twitter: Each Dealer can have their RSS Feed automatically fed to their Twitter Account. Each time a used car is added, your followers will get a “tweet”.
3. Craigslist Posting Tool. Craigslist is still a very popular website. Many people look for used cars on Craigslist. Our Craigslist Posting Tool can add a car in seconds, including all pictures and information for each vehicle. We also add a link to bring the traffic to all of your other listings.
4. All Phone and Email Leads Are Tracked. Each dealer on our site gets an extension from a toll free number. We do this to track how many phone calls a dealer gets. We also report all email leads. This is available to all dealers in our backend. It’s a great report to scan at the end of the month to make follow up calls and squeeze out a few more sales.
5. Top 10 Most Viewed Vehicles. This is a great tool when deciding what type of cars to buy at their next visit to the auction. It can also give you a good idea of your pricing. If you have a vehicle that’s been on your lot for 6 months and viewed 5,000 times, perhaps it’s time to drop the price?
6. Quality Leads and Local Traffic. Our traffic is targeted locally, and comes only from internet searches. Dealer’s leads only come from an actual car listing, so they are high quality. We do not have any gimmicks to attract a potential buyer.
7. No Adertising Banners. All of the other third party used car listing websites have banners all over the place, and bombard the user with ads. We do not do that. Why would we want to send traffic away from our website?
8. Keyword Tool. We have a keyword tool on our website, unlike others. This makes it very easy for the consumer. Let’s say I lived in Utah and I had my heart set on a Nissan Altima. I would simply put “Altima” in the search box and it would show all Nissa Altimas. Go ahead and try it, click Nissan Altima.
9. No Premium Placements: We do not allow dealers to pay to be placed higher than others. It’s fair game at Showroom Logic. Your inventory and pricing must sell itself.

Showroom Logic is now in 2 states, Florida & Utah. You can view each here:

Florida

Utah

Mike Annable can be reached directly at 863-812-6411

On our Lakeland Used Car Website, we find most dealers in Lakeland are lazy. They’ll sign on put a few cars on then never update it again. I would personally like to warn you about that. What they’re hoping for is the phone call so they can try to bait and switch you over the phone. I am in charge of the Lakeland site, and I do not tolerate this.

Today we had to kick off 2 dealers including Same Day Auto. We only want dealers who want to sell cars, meaning updating their inventory daily. We also expect any car sold to be marked as sold. We also don’t want any dealer who tries to sell their cars for more than bluebook.

There is one other used car dealer in Lakeland Florida doing a great job, and that’s Joseph Motors!

This wrap should be done this Friday, but here is a sneak peak at what the truck and boat wrap will look like:

This Truck Pulls The Bass Boat & Was Designed To Match It (Click Picture To Englarge

The Boat Wrap

This Is A 21 Foot Bass Boat (Click Picture To Enlarge)

Did You know that our wrap prices are an average of $1,000.00 lower than our competition?

“We Invite Your To Get 3 or 4 estimates for your next truck, boat, car or motorcycle wrap. We are confident we will beat them all! Plus, our wraps are guaranteed by the manufacturer for 3 years”!

If your looking for a vehicle wrap in Central Florida including the Lakelandm Tampa and Orlando area call Mike at 863-812-6411 with questions or contact us here.

A dealer that gets consulted by the right person can save 10’s of thousands of dollars every year because of the free traffic from search engines. But beware of who you listen to. These flash based template sites is what kills a car dealer. They have very little search engine value and force dealers to pay extra for people to find it.

Here I will list the top 10 dealers in Lakeland who have a shot getting decent traffic, and maybe you can get a great deal from them. I judge these sites for amount of backlinks, Alexa Rank and Google Pagerank. (See below for my opinion and explanation of each)

1. Lakeland Toyota: They have 222 backlinks from 35 different websites. Other than the Yahoo Directory most are weak, but this gives their site an easy rank because of the lack of knowledge in the car industry. Their Alexa Rank is 3,450,830 which isn’t great but better than most local dealers. According to Alexa, the average visitor only stay on there website for 1.3 minutes. That is too short, which means people are leaving the site quickly. Perhaps a redesign is in order. The Google Pagerank of Lakeland Toyota is 2 which is very weak, but it simply doesn’t matter anymore. Pagerank means nothing for serps (see below).
2. Regal Automotive: They have 215 backlinks from 46 different domains. They do have a juicy link from www.polktheatre.org. Many people don’t realize how valuable a link like this is to your website. Their Alexa Rank is 4,757,283 with the average visitors staying on their website for 2.6 minutes a day which is more than Lakeland Toyota. Their Google Pagerank is a 3, a bit better than Lakeland Toyota. This company should be number one if they followed Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. There are 3 things I would do to that site that would easily make them on top. The problem is whoever they get their information from is using tactics from a couple of years ago. This stuff changes so frequently you need to stay on top of the game. They really don’t have to worry though. One thing I like about their site is it’s not flash based like the others. Flash is dead, and people hate it.

OK, I have to cut the list short. Why? There isn’t another dealer that even shows up for quality searches. I just googled the search term “car dealers in lakeland fl” and went to page 10. The only dealers that came up were Lakeland Toyota and Regal Lakeland, along with Regals other websites.

One Lakeland Car Dealer that would have been on this list was Lakeland Automall, but they made a change that killed their internet presence. The last website they had used to have them show up on some Long Tailed keywords. Looks like they got beat by the smooth talking salesman, whoever sold them that.

Personally I can make this easier by just saying who the 2 worst car dealer websites in Lakeland are (In No particular order):

1. Jenkins Nissan: Pop up alert! How annoying. You go to their website and you get a pop-up coupon. Anyway, besides that they have a better amount of average time on site per visitor according to Alexa with 4.3 minutes. Their Alexa Rank is 9,962,582 which tells you everything, they have a sloppy website.
2. Central Florida Eurocars: I’m not sure if they’re trying something new, but their current website isn’t bad. A little too much white space in it, other than that I think they have a shot at selling cars online if they can get some traffic to it. It looks like they have their current domain redirected to na new one, which they just bought in April of 2009 (fieldsmotorcars.com). I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that Fields BMW bought them out. That’s another company that can’t be found out there so I doubt this change will make much of a difference. I believe they have another dealership in the Orlando area, but I’ve yet to see them pop up. Whoever makes the decisions for that company isn’t Savvy at all.

Above I was mentioning Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank and Inlinks. If you don’t know what they are, I will briefly explain:

Google Pagerank: Don’t be fooled by this. As long as you have a 2 or better you will be fine. It has nothing to do with SERPS (Search Engine Results Page). If you are trying to get a link from another website this is where it comes to play. If you can score a link from a Pagerank 4 or better website pointing to your site, it will help your site get crawled more frequently and it will increase your pagerank. Google only updates your pagerank every 3 months or so, so don’t bother checking every day. Technically they update it daily, but they only show you an update quarterly. Pagerank starts at n/a, then goes from “0″ to “10″. If you can get a 4 or better that is fabulous to brag about, but remember it won’t help you search listings. Let me give you a prime example. Car Dealers with Cobalt websites will automatically become a pagerank 4 because of a link they get from Chevy.com. The main site is a pagerank 7, and if you have a Cobalt site they will link to you passing pagerank. But, how many Cobalt sites come up in searches? Not many. Besised BZ Results and Izmo Cars, that about as bad as you can get.

Alexa Rank: Alexa Rank isn’t very accurate, but the number tells you everything. The higher your Alexa Rank is the worse you website is. If it’s greater than 2 million you need to fire your internet director and call in a pro.

Backlinks: This is the most important factor on how your website ranks. The more links you have pointing to your website from other websites will give you “authority” thus making your properly formatted website show up in more search results from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Many companies buy links from other websites, but if Google catches you they will de-index and ban you. Many car dealers donate to local charities. If you do ask them for a link, it will benefit you huge. You won’t see results overnight (it takes time), but after 2 or three weeks you will see a difference. How would you know? I hope you look at your stats, and I’m not talking about server stats. You need Google Analytics. Insist the website company you use installs this and gives you full access to it. The server stats they show you measure spiders making you think you’re getting more visitors than you think. One last thing…when obtaining links be sure it is a “dofollow”. When the link is placed, go to that website. Right click and “view source”. Now you will see the code. Find your link, if there is a “rel nofollow” next to it it’s won’t help you much. That’s telling Google not to flow any pagerank to your website.

To end this I’ll briefly explain who I am. I’ve been working the internet since 1994 selling many things online. The most important thing I learned is how to get traffic to a website. I started out selling seafood online for other companies. One was in Boston and one if Florida.

I started my own website that sells business cards online about 2 1/2 years ago. Because of the large amount of traffic I was getting I was forced to open up a storefront in Lakeland Florida where I am now. 90% of my customers are in other states, and I now sell T-Shirts, Promotional Products and Signage, including Vehicle Wraps. My printing website gets 800 unique visitors every day, and I don’t spend one dime in advertising!

Last year I took a job at a car dealership in Florida who had 3 rooftops. Myself and Patrick Bennet built them a killer search engine friendly website that blew away all of their advertising including their $300,000.00 piece of crab BZ Results site they had. We were on the road to right directions until the GM resigned so I bailed myself. The car industry is too cut throat, and the new guy coming in was a dinasour when it came to the internet.

Our latest venture is used cars listings for large and small dealers. Our test site in Lakeland became so successful we recently launched in Utah and Sacramento California.

You want to see 2 dealers in Lakeland that know how to sell cars? Check out Lash Auto Sales and Joseph Motors. These 2 dealerships know how to do it, and obviously they get more leads from our site than any other dealer (including the dealers on our Orlando and Tampa site.