OK Car Dealers. Get Serious About The Internet!

While car dealers are amazing people, car salesman are among some of the laziest people I've met.

OK - let me clarify. They are lazy about the way they do their job UNTIL they get a lead. As an example, when I asked a car salesman for some content for his website, he flipped open a magazine. I thought great - He'll just give me a copy of his ad in a magazine to take queues from. NO. He gave me a copy of someone elses ad, and said "something like that".

So how does this apply to internet land? You can't take those sort of short cuts and expect good results. One thing stands in your way. The supplemental index. This is where Google and other search engines put the pages that they omit from their search results.

So, what gets you into the suplimental index?

1) Duplicate content.
1) Duplicate content.
2) Small descriptions. You want at least 250 words or so.

When you do a search for a car make and model, usually the first page displayed in search results is the company that makes the car - that's a given. After that, you get all the reviews. And then finally, the cars for sale.

And it is because the company that makes the car has bucket loads of information on the website about the car. Then the next most prolific writers are the car reviewers. Finally down the back of the pack are the car dealers who write gems like:

"No deposit finance at www......com.au. Credit issues no problem."

For every single car... hence duplicate content.

Old school thinking is that the less information you provide, the more likely the customer will call you to make their decision, which the salesman can then influence. Not anymore. People are deciding on cars based on what they are reading about them. They then shortlist and THAT's when they make phonecalls.

The thing is, dealers believe the less is more approach works, because they get more calls that are looking for more information. And that is because they only advertise using less is more techniques.

I'm going to start collecting some statistics on Find A Car to see what ads get more attention. Yeah, price is definately a motivator, but I think better descriptions will lead to more leads.