Google has repeatedly stated that it is trying to deliver the best experience in search to it’s users, and fast loading pages is very important to that experience. Take your design ego out of the equation of how your website looks; since page load speed is probably going to happen at some point, it’s much better to deal with it earlier than later when it may negatively impact your website page rank and traffic.

What do you need to improve your page load speed

• Stop using automatic loading videos on the home page of your dealer website. Let your customers choose if and when they want to see your video.
• Do you really need that pop up? How many auto dealer websites use a “talking head” that loads automatically? Once again, let your customers choose the play option for this feature.
• Is it really necessary for “Live Chat” to start when your home page loads? This is no different than having the salesperson standing “on point” waiting for the customer to open their door when they drive into your lot. Give then a second to catch their breath. If you have a well designed website, your customer can find what they need without being shuffled along.
• No Flash. Flash is not search engine friendly, and is way too graphics heavy. Flash will do nothing but slow your page load speed down and make it difficult for the search engines to crawl your auto dealer website.

If you start thinking like a search engine and your customers, you begin to understand the importance of speeding up the web. In addition to page load speed becoming a ranking factor in organic ranking results, also consider Google’s recently introduced real-time results and the importance of including social media in your online marketing strategy.

Social Media Marketing for Auto Dealers – Where do I Start?
Before you jump into social media marketing, clearly define the goals that are important to your dealership in this medium. Can you use Twitter and Facebook to service more vehicles and sell more cars, most likely you can. But remember, the social area is more about share of mind than taking action now. Using a strong social media strategy for auto dealers allows you to interact with your local market in a positive way and manage your dealership’s reputation. The most important thing you can do here is START WITH A PLAN.

As a business owner you want to control your social media message just as you do with any other marketing you do for your dealership.  After all, it’s your dealerships’ name and brand on the line. When your dealership starts down the path of engaging in social media marketing, you are putting your business and brand online for all to see. Your past and future customers can leave messages about how awesome or awful their customer experience was.

Social Media Strategy For Auto Dealers – Step One
Ok, you have decided to give social media marketing a try, so where do you begin? The first basic step in developing your social media strategy will be to determine how you’re going to generate and publish your content for the medium. Content generation and social authoring isn’t something to be taken lightly nor should it be left in the hands of your Internet department. It’s very easy for your Internet sales team to assume that “Twittering” all day is the same thing as selling cars, but it’s not. Responding correctly to inbound phone calls, walk in traffic and email leads is their primary responsibility and needs to remain their main focus. Posting Tweets and sitting on Facebook bypasses your sales processes and the hard work of actually selling cars.

Dealers that have become active in social media have quickly learned that an effective social media strategy can benefit just about every department within the dealership. Before you embrace a social media strategy for auto dealers, decide how it will be managed and who will be responsible for the content generation and placement.

Bing.com recently started listing Twitter feeds, and now Google has jumped into the fray with “real-time” search. Now that real time search is here, how does it impact your online presence, if it impacts it at all? If you haven’t tried social media marketing, now is the time to get started. Real time search is here, and social media marketing for auto dealers needs to take notice. In the past, it might not have been so clear a need to engage in social media, but with these recent changes in the search engines, the relationship between social media and search engine marketing is clearly in focus.

Much more than catchy buzzword, “real-time search” is a concept that has been around for a while longer in some form or another. Fresh content has always been a driving force in Google search results, and the results from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other social sites can’t get much fresher. So now these social streams may appear right in regular SERPs.

It’s now up to the search engines to deliver relevant quality using key factors like author quality, probability of relevance and “query hotness,” all very subjective and fuzzy.  So how do you protect your dealership brand image? Start first by getting a basic knowledge of what real time search is and what it means for you and your company.

Using Google as an example, real time search for them is not a replacement for their regular google search results. in the case of Google, real time search is added technology and factors in the search algorithms that display ALL results within a standard search page. This means that content from Twitter, news sites, blogs and other social sites will appear on the same page as “regular” results.

Following closely on the heels of Google’s fairly recently launched universal search results, the addition of real-time results is just one more challenging obstacle for the much coveted high organic rankings on the top of the results page. Paid search engine marketing for auto dealers is a common tactic used to combat real time search. A well optimized paid search marketing campaign allows you much more control over where your brand or company will appear on SERP’s.

Social Media Marketing For Auto Dealers

The most obvious way to get in the game is to use your own internet marketing strategy that includes social media marketing. Your strategy might include:

• keywords in your content, titles, and your posts,
• mentioning current events that are relevant to your brand, business, or industry,
• topics that people are interested in – spark a conversation,
• a “call to action” to share your content.

In real-time search results, you may show up at the top of the results page, but that may or may not be a good thing. Using social media marketing for auto dealers is a great way to manage your reputation online and present your dealership in the most favorable light possible.

With these recent and ongoing changes to real-time search results in SERPs means you can’t afford to ignore social media. As you become more active using social media marketing in your automotive marketing campaigns, you generate more relevant content that may have find high placement on Google SERPs that display real-time results.