While working on my presentation for Digital Dealer 13, I really wanted to effectively show folks how to get into the minds of our modern day car shoppers. The answer is really quite simple to see, in fact it is right under your nose at the place most car shoppers begin their car buying process – Google!

I spent a lot of time creating some example videos of how people search on Google, and I would like to share my summary video with you.

Without question, the greatest change in the history of the automotive retail industry has been the introduction of the Internet, and how it has changed the car buying process. Before, dealerships held the power of information, and shoppers had to visit the dealership in person to get the info they desired to make a car buying decision. This encouraged most dealerships to adopt selling practices that discouraged sharing any information over the phone, and created one of the most common lines that can still be heard in the dealership today – Just get’em in!

The Internet has made information readily available to car shoppers, to include dealer invoice and cost, as well as what is to expect as a competitive price in the marketplace for the new or used car they are shopping for. The power has transitioned from the dealership to the car buyer in the shopping process, and now, more than ever, dealerships must know how to get into the minds of car shoppers to learn exactly what they are looking for, so that dealers can best meet their needs and earn their business.

The Internet has also brought great value to dealers in this area as there is a wealth of information now available that enables us to see what type of online shopping behavior car shoppers exhibit. You can see this in several tools, including Dataium.

There are also great reporting services such as JD Powers and Associates that do extensive research to gather the information that dealers seek to better understand our shoppers. There is, however, a much easier and eye-opening way to look into the minds of your car shoppers.

Have you ever noticed that while searching on Google, the search bar will start to “complete” your searches with other commonly searched phrases?

This feature is known as “Google Auto-complete” and it is a very useful tool to see what other folks are looking for. Google Auto Complete will prompt results to your search phrase based upon millions of searches made every day – allowing you to see what other car shoppers are looking for, and what they think about us.

Take a minute below to look at the short video I made of making some searches on Google from my computer. Look closely at the results.

Unfortunately, you will quickly see that our reputation is still poor.

I do feel that while many dealers are very unhappy about how the Internet has leveled the playing field with our shoppers, this change will benefit us as an industry as it will hold all dealerships’ behavior to a higher standard. Once dealerships realize they can no longer get away with “old-school” tactics that would alienate our customers, they will be encouraged to maintain high standards of business to be successful in our modern market.

Did you look closely at what car shoppers are looking for?

Now ask yourself, would they find that information on your website? If not, how would they find your dealership in the search results if the information they are looking for is not even present at your “virtual dealership”?

Would a searcher find your dealership if they searched for whom the best car dealer was in your market?

Did you notice that when I searched for “the best car dealership in Cincinnati”, the result was wyler.com? Have you taken the time to tell your shoppers why you are the dealer they should choose over others?

You are more than welcome to utilize this What car shoppers search for video at your dealerships for training. There is a wealth of information to identify and act upon in what Google Auto Complete has to show us. If you want to do this yourself, just clear the cache on your browser and set the location to where you are at. Look closely at what you see inside the minds of your car shoppers – and then act to meet those expectations and needs.

Kevin Frye

If you're going to talk about some death, you might as well do it on Halloween.

Jeff just called me to point out an article I wrote about the death of SEO (call it SEO 1.0) over two years ago. I forgot I wrote it, but it is coming true right now.

SEO is migrating to lean more toward site architecture and social presence than tags and on-page content. Rereading the article, and drawing on development challenges I see daily I think even the new SEO model will be short-lived.

In order to understand this we need to first understand the way the Internet works. It was originally created as a way to share static data (digital text…hypertext actually). The addition of pictures and video and forms and ecommerce and all the other things that have been incorporated into websites were not a part of the original design. In order to avoid all the technicalities, let's just say the foundation of the Internet was designed to be really "flat" and static.

Today, we have an Internet that is getting less and less "flat." It is getting more and more interactive, but most importantly it is moving away from being a website delivery system and is becoming more of an application delivery system.

Take Facebook.com for example. Facebook is not a static website. It pushes new updates to the news stream, notifications, new comments, friend requests, and even advertisements. A static website would not change based on new data coming in; you'd have to refresh the whole page. Facebook behaves more like an application.

What about the systems you use daily to merchandise your inventory, edit your dealership's website, and to create digital advertisements? Aren't these all examples of applications; not static websites.  And the most glowing example of an extremely dynamic application delivered into a browser is a web-based CRM system.

We are growing more and more reliant on our web-delivered applications: Google Docs (Drive), iCloud, GMail, Microsoft Outlook Web Access (for us Exchange users), and the list goes on and on.

I think about sales managers and all the tabs they have open in Internet Explorer…..one could argue that's a whole role that can no longer function without web applications.

Click to expand...

How does this relate to SEO? Completely! If the Internet is migrating from website delivery to application delivery how does a search engine now find relevance? Does it fully work on reputation? Even that is being gamed just like SEO 1.0 was. Is it about a social presence like SEO 2.0 is becoming? Maybe. Facebook is killing fake likes faster than the Orkin man kills pests.

I bet you're asking yourself "how does my website become an application?" That's going to happen in time. You might not even realize it has happened until someone points it out a few years from now. As a consumer you'll just see it as the natural evolution of the Internet. One day Amazon.com is a webpage, as it is today, and the next day you'll start to see it act more like an app you have on your iPhone.

As a dealer, is there any action for you to take right now? Nope. Just know that what you think is a constant today probably isn't going to be tomorrow, but tomorrow will gradually occur just like SEO is changing now.

The interesting thing will be whether the entire Internet protocol (HTTP) system changes because it was not designed for the road we're on. And another interesting thing will be whether this article creates the same controversy my last one did in the comments string….those old comments are a great read by the way.  The old Article:  Is the death of SEO coming soon? – DealerRefresh  And thanks for the reminder Jeff!