Florida Car Dealers Are About 10 Years Behind

After working at a new and used car dealership in Central Florida, I came to realize how far behind dealerships are with technology. Knowing what I could do for a dealership excited me because I’ve been involved with websites since 1994.

I don’t want to mention any names, but the company I worked for had just signed a contract for over $300,000 for a 3 year website. I was horrified when I saw it, they basically threw their money away. This site had no SEO value whatsoever. It was a rock solid contract, but there was nothing we could do to get out of it.

My suggestion was simple. For $5,000 I can have the perfect website built for you that will get you hundreds of visitors a day for free. Myself and Patrick Bennet of Modern Blue Design got cranking away, and within 6 weeks we had the perfect dealer website which was a huge success with the search engines.

Within just 30 days, this website was blowing away their $300,000 piece of crap as it was getting about 10 times more leads. Soon after our car dealer website was done, all GM dealers were given a free website (On GM’s dime) from the Cobalt group. I cringed when I saw it, but I knew it was better than the big ones (SEO Wise).

I was able to tweak the content in all of the pages along with the Title and meta tags which gave me some control. I had that website doing pretty good in the SERPS and was now monitoring all three websites. Between the three of them, we were getting about 500 free unique visitors a day.

The problem was, this company was going downhill fast. The GM at the time resigned due to different views than the owner (who was a salesperson in the 70’s). This guy just didn’t get it. He spent most of his time traveling around to GM functions and coming back brainwashed with ridiculous ideas. As slow as the economy was, the former GM and I had managed to sell 57 cars during his last month. After he left, there was obviously a shake-up and the following month vehicle sales dropped to 25. We were at the point where we were getting no new inventory and operating on a “0″ budget.

To make a long story short, I gave them a 4 week notice, I wanted out of there. During that time, I still plugged away at SEO for their 3 websites. I had about 2 weeks left when I got a call from the Cobalt Group’s Self proclaimed “SEO Expert”. I ate him up for lunch…this guy had no idea what he was doing. It sounded like he was reading from a script. Anyway, he wanted to make some changes. I told him not to touch anything until the first of the month.

I continued to monitor my work after I left.  The changes he made were obvious and it sickened me. As crappy as that website was, I was still able to reel in some decent traffic. After I left, it took a complete nose dive pretty quick. To make matters even worse, they hired some inexperienced guy to run one of the dealerships. Amazingly, he was able to ruin it even worse. He put “MySpace” stuff on it and used cursive-type font all over the place. When the page loads, there is nothing above the pagefold and the most annoying YouTube Chevy Commercial you could ever see appears.

Last month this guy called me and wanted the site I did redirected to the other site. He actually thought that redirecting it would help. A redirect would do one thing…kill it. Redirects just don’t work any more. They hired him after I left so I wasn’t able to show him anything. He can’t edit or upload photos, he doesn’t comprehend basic html, so there is really not much he can do.

Needles to say, the website I built is still live, but it hasn’t been updated in 6 months. It has probably the worst, stale inventory in Florida on it. However, this site gets over 500 visitors a day. That’s right, 500! Their “Big Money” Website averages about 60 and their Cobalt site gets about 20, but the website Patrick and I built…the site which is not updated, still receives 500!

My point? Myself and 1 other guy blew away the big dogs. It mades me feel good! Since then, Patrick and I have launched a Lakeland Used Car Website, an Orlando Site, and next week, we will launch the Tampa Site. Then, the sky is the limit! The Lakeland site took off faster than we thought. We signed up a few small dealers to test it out, but they ruined it with poor grammar and laziness. We are currently letting a Lakeland Dealer post their inventory in there next week, we’ll see how things go. This is very beneficial to buy here pay here dealers in Lakeland Florida.

We have a few secrets we do, and unfortunately, we can’t tell anyone, yet sometimes I wish I could. OK I can’t resist, you’ve gone this far so I’ll let you see the crappy site that was made even crappier.

I’ll give you a few reasons why this will backfire on them:

1. FLASH: Search Engines can read flash, you’re better off with properly labeled images and text.
2. YOU TUBE: You should never link to another website on your homepage. If you do, you should place a “no-follow tag” on there. Exceptions to the rule are high ranking websites which have the same content as you.
3. SLIDE SHOWS:  The Myspace slideshow they have on the left, a huge No-No. It should at least link to the inventory, not some teenage slideshow website. They have now sent a valued customer to another website! Good luck getting them back.
4. SOUND:  You should never have sound on your page. We did that 10 years ago and realized it just annoys customers. The sound comes from the YouTube Video. Imagine someone at work trying to quietly browse for a new car, then all of a sudden, an annoying lady starts singing about a Chevy. Busted by the boss! She will bail and go to the next Chevy Website.
5. HOT LINKS:  Direct Email links on a homepage are asking for problems. Ever notice that just about any website you visit has a contact us form? Email addresses on websites (especially a homepage) is another huge no-no. You will be a spammers dream. There are thousands of email harvesters spidering the web looking for just that.