Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr are excellent sites for uploading pictures and videos. They make it very easy and user friendly to post and view great content. Here’s the problem. These sites are robbing you of building inbound links to your dealership’s website.
Here’s why: Let’s say you’ve taken some pics of a 1967 Camaro with NOS. Let’s also say you’ve decided to upload these photos to your photo galleries on Facebook and/or Flickr. You then broadcast via Twitter and Facebook that you’ve just uploaded these photos.
These pics then catch the eyes of people who blog about “all things Camaro”, “all things Chevrolet”, “or any car that’s red”, and they decide to link to where you have these pics hosted. For the most part, this is a good thing. It gets your dealership’s brand name out there and people get to see some cool pics.
Here’s where you’ve missed an SEO / Linkbuilding opportunity for your dealership’s website. The links that are pointing to your social media sites are doing your main website no good. No good at all. Remember, in the world of SEO, links represent votes. The “votes” those links represent are being wasted on sites that don’t deserve or need them.
My case in point:
The reason these pics and links are highlighted in orange is because of the tool SEO for FireFox installed in my browser shows and highlights all links that are “no-followed”
Here’s some awesome pictures of a ‘67 Camaro featured by Young’s Chevrolet in Layton Utah. They’ve decided to upload these pics to their Facebook photo gallery. Here is a missed opportunity for an inbound link to their dealership.
Here’s an example of missed opportunities with video. Preston Automotive in Maryland has missed over 800 opportunities with all the video they produce. Instead of only uploading video to YouTube and broadcasting via Twitter the link to YouTube, they should have created a post on their blog about each video and then tweet the link to their blog. One thing that YouTube does well is making it simple to embed your video to your site.
By creating content around this video on their blog, they would have tons more content on their blog that can be indexed by search engines, not to mention any number of inbound links to those posts. Think about it, they could have over 800 more pages in their website. They could implement a great internal linking strategy that could dominate their competition.
Here’s the solution for your dealership’s SEO/SEM solution. Put all images on the domain (website) within your control. If you’re creating video, upload it to YouTube but embed it on pages within YOUR WEBSITE.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Good thoughts. Couple of issues I see from a dealership standpoint. Time is tough to come by. A blog post with even a paragraph of content would take a good 10 minutes from start to finish, and thats with someone on a platform thats easy to navigate and someone that has knowledge. Most dealership websites dont allow for video and pictures to be easily added as unique pages. If dealership websites where easier to setup this could help, but a dealership would have to have a site with a good blog built in. Most dealerships I see use industry templated sites that dont allow for a blog on the site. Sure you could incorporate a Wordpress blog into the site but most dealership people who deal in online stuff have a hard time navigating Wordpress or a blog. I like it in theory but in practice this is difficult to implement time wise even for me and its my job to do this stuff.
Chris Theisen
Director of Digital Communications
Hare Chevrolet
Chris,
You bring up some excellent points. I happen to know first hand that most dealerships sites are templated designs that don’t allow for easy content creation. That’s a problem in itself by being trapped to a third party’s hosting/content solution. I see this issue with companies like Cobalt, Dealer.com, TK Sites, etc. There is way too much need for flexability and agility in marketing auto industry.
A simple solution to this content creation issue would be to hire a content writer in-house. I believe this could be a part time position that even a high school student with good writing skills could accomplish. With a little direction, this position would pay for itself in no time.
Chris, I appreciate your feedback.
Ryan Rose