If you set up your business’s Facebook account as a “profile page” and not a “business page”, this WILL happen.  It’s only a matter of time.

Here is why you need to switch now.

Against Facebook’s TOS

Maintaining a profile page to serve as your business page is against Facebook’s TOS (terms of service).

How are Pages different from personal profiles (timelines)?

Profiles (timelines) are for personal, non-commercial use only. They represent individuals and must be held under an individual name. Pages are for professional or official use, and allow an organization, business, celebrity or band to maintain a presence on Facebook. You may only create Facebook Pages to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative.”

Why is a Page a better solution than a personal account for businesses, brands and organizations?

Personal accounts are optimized to work for individual people instead of businesses, brands and organizations. Facebook Pages allow artists, businesses, and brands to showcase their work and interact with fans. These Pages come pre-installed with custom functionality designed for each category. Developers also build an array of apps for Page admins to add to their Pages. Unlike with friends for personal accounts, there’s no limit to the number of people who can like a Facebook Page.

How easy is it for your business’s profile page to get flagged? Just ask your competition.  All that needs to happen is for a competitor to report your profile as spam.

Access To Facebook Insights

Facebook pages give you access to various metrics through their analytics platform (Facebook Insights) to see how effective your business’s reach is.  Facebook Insights let’s you see how many people saw the post, how many viewers it engaged, and how viral it went.  With a profile page setup, you cannot see any of this.  Without access to these metrics, you have no way to determine an ROI on your Facebook efforts.

This feature alone should give you reason to switch your personal page to a proper business page.

So, if your business is running under a personal profile and not a business page, you’re probably in for hard times ahead.

How To Fix This

Shoot me an email or submit a comment through the contact form.  If you know my phone number, give me a call.

Additional Resources

Here are a few additional resources to look through regarding business pages vs. profile pages for business use.

Mashable’s view on Facebook Insights
Mashable’s view on Facebook mistakes small
Techcruch’s view on Facebook Insights

The post Two Reasons Why Your Business Needs To Be A Page and Not a Friend appeared first on .

Well Shelley, this one’s for you

The section highlighted in red are paid search campaigns.  Everything in green and below is organic search.

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So back to the question.  How do you build and acquire links?  You can either take the time to create some compelling content and market the heck out of it.  This, of course, takes a lot of time.  Or…. you can start calling in favors and do some bartering with people you know who have their own websites.  This calling in of favors takes less time on the front end, but will take up time on the back-end when those friends come to call in their favor.

The rough part of all this is after you’ve called everyone you know, you get to see your worth to those people.  There will be people you thought would jump to help and never call you back.  There will people who will give you say, “have you tried, x, y, and z” and not really offer to help.  And finally, there will be people who will call you back and happily say, “how can I help”?  Always be sure to cultivate those relationships.  It’s those relationships that will continue to help you personally as well as professionally.

There is a bonus of course.  If you’ve developed an extensive list of contacts on Twitter and Facebook and reach out, you’ll get those people you’ve never met in person who will volunteer to help you out as well.  Those relationships are worth their weight in gold.

So here’s the moral of the story.  Always be willing to help those who come asking for favors because you just never know when you’ll need one yourself.

R.R

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[polldaddy poll=3661988]

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The Fiesta Project has produced a number of videos touting aspects of the new Ford Fiesta.  Its professional grade video.  All that needs to be done by a dealership is to put together a couple hundred words about the video, embed the video and written content into a blog post, and announce this newly created content via Twitter and Facebook.  The dealership didn’t need to spend a dime making the video and they get a chance to drive some relevant traffic to their site.

Why do this?  It gives people who are even remotely interested in your dealership the reason to visit your site. Potential customers get to see something entertaining and the dealership gets some relevant traffic.

Now, if I was the dealer, here’s what I wouldn’t do:  I wouldn’t take the shortcut of finding a good video and sending people straight to the YouTube link.  The whole purpose of this exercise is to drive people to YOUR WEBSITE.  Not to YouTube.  Don’t get lazy.

Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.

The post How A Ford Dealer Might Leverage OEM Content appeared first on .

Here’s the issue.  Sherrell’s listing results show ‘www.chevrolet.com’.  At first I thought this was a mistake on Google’s part recognizing Sherrell’s Chevrolet’s actual domain name.  Then I decided to call Sherrell Chevrolet and ask them if they had a website.  The response I received was “we don’t have a website yet, but it’s on its way”.

So what does this mean? It means a couple of things.  If you have a website and it goes down for an extended period of time, Google may direct traffic to a site they deem an acceptable replacement.  It also means that you should keep a closer eye on your car dealership’s brand management.

A penny for your thoughts…

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Top 10 DOs for Auto Dealers & SEO

1. Thou shalt perform extensive keyword research before implementing or adjusting any strategy.
2. Thou shalt add your dealership’s address (in HTML) to every page of your site.
3. Thou shalt install and make use of a blog on your website.
4. Thou shalt routinely create / add content to your website.
5. Thou shalt install and use Google Analytics.
6. Thou shalt link out to other websites.
7. Thou shalt use keywords in all anchor text.
8. Thou shalt use real data to make SEO decisions.
9. Thou shalt use your own domain to host images and photo-galleries.
10. Thou shalt encourage local businesses to link to your website.

Top 10 DON’Ts for Auto Dealers & SEO

1. Thou shalt not have duplicate titles on your site’s pages.
2. Thou shalt not ever, ever use splash pages.
3. Thou shalt not target every city in your state for your homepage.
4. Thou shalt not be proud of your 100 keyword filled meta-keyword tag.
5. Thou shalt not be hell bent on ranking for “car dealer”, “auto dealer”, “truck dealer”, etc.
6. Thou shalt not hide text on any page of your website.
7. Thou shalt not be afraid of targeting competitor’s name. Just do it tactfully.
8. Thou shalt not use anchor text such as “home page” and “click here”.
9. Thou shalt not use “your gut” to make SEO strategy changes.
10. Thou shalt not need to use the services of a third-party SEO provider.

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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.

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1. Can you clearly identify your SEO strengths?
2. Can you clearly identify your competitor’s SEO strengths?
3. Can you clearly identify your SEO weaknesses?
4. Can you clearly identify your competitor’s SEO weaknesses?
5. Can you find the threats and opportunities that are in front of you?

Most Dealer Principals and Internet managers haven’t created a SWOT analysis for their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies.  The funny thing is that after you’ve created a SWOT, it’s clear as day to take actionable steps.

Here is what a sample SWOT may look like:

Here’s how to conduct an SEO SWOT analysis on your own.  Find the resources and tools you need.

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Do yourself a favor. Go to Google and search for the phrase “as your premier dealership“.  (But only with out the quotes.)  What do you see?

At the time of this write up, I see 9,560,000 results.  As far as I can see, the vast majority if not nearly all of these results are automotive sites.

Ok, let’s back up a second.  There could be a logical explanation for this.  So, let’s get a little more technical.  Click here.  This is a search for an exact phrase, “as your premier dealership”, [a wild card], and then the word “dealership”.

This will bring up is any page with the exact phrase “as you premier” [anything in between such as a Chevrolet, Dodge, Ford, etc], and then the word “dealership”.  How many websites pop up?  At this time, there are almost 49,000 results.  Maybe you’re saying, so what? If I was a dealer principal, I’d be asking why do so many websites have nearly the same text I do on their sites as me? I thought I was paying someone to create unique content for my website?

Why is this important?  This shows you how many other websites or pages that have very similar content to yours.  Why is this important?  Because Google does knock sites down and devalue them for using duplicate content.

Pick another snippet of text from your site and run the same tests.  You’ll probably be surprised at what you find.

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