Car Dealerships and Online Reputation

Online Reputation Management For Car Dealerships

I will start this post by emphasizing the general offline reputation of car dealerships, its owners and employees. Personally, I have had some bad experiences with few of them (not because I’m a girl, and girls don’t know squat about cars), but always tried to give them a chance, mostly because I help other people fix their online reputation. Although there are some car dealerships that don’t know how to work with and for customers, there are many more doing their best. Only because of the latter ones, I will post some advice and tips on how to fix broken online reputation.

Since I live with an SEO expert, my first introduction into this field was my fiancee’s constant speaking about titles, metatags, proper content optimization, relevant keywords etc. Search engine optimization, in its true form, is a huge part of online reputation management. So whoever wants to fix their broken reputation or just manage their existent reputation online, they need to learn some basics of SEO. What’s the point of creating new, positive content if it ranks much lower than the negative one?

My fiancee made a useful list of 60 sites that Google trusts for car dealer business data. A good way to start your local SEO campaign is to make sure your business data is in as much of those sites as possible.

Although I talk about online reputation, I will also mention offline reputation. Most car dealers pay too much attention to their offline reputation, not knowing what big damage negative online reputation can do. There is nothing sadder than seeing a negative reputation when typing the name of the certain car dealership (or any company, actually). Well, it’s pretty sad when dealerships don’t  have a website, too.

To fix this, there are few steps that need to be taken.

First, a lot of energy needs to be put into creating quality content. Nowadays, many car dealers think that the whole content on the website should be few words about their business, and some cars. They’re wrong. You have to build your website in a way that will ensure that is perceived as an authority website in the eyes of search engines. The content on authority websites (by this I mean authority in car dealers niche) is always of high quality, filled with helpful information (information about different makes and models, list of new affordable cars, financing options, all sorts of useful tips etc.). This quality content and your website’s link popularity will help the website rank higher on SERPs, and possibly push out the negative content.

Next, you can always sign up for free accounts on social websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. Besides that, social media is something that would make any car dealer unique and remarkable to certain extent. Also, anything “positive” said about the dealer should be reinforced by improving link popularity of such content. But this is only a treatment of symptoms, not the cause. The causes of negative online reputation are always deeply rooted in customer service and ultimately customer satisfaction.

Another advice is to go ahead and encourage your satisfied customers to share their “satisfaction” with your dealership with the rest of the web. Suggest that they write a review of your business on Google Maps, Yahoo! local, and MSN. This will create positive momentum and will act as a counterweight to any negative reviews that you may get.

But, have on mind that the best way to have good online and offline reputation is to give your customers what they want – great service, great value and great respect.