Starting and maintaining an online presence in a local Automotive market is not as simple as buying a website and hoping that consumers will just mysteriously show up at your site and stand in line to buy their new cars and trucks from them.

Local search marketing has a format just like any other form of media used to entice the elusive customer. Day by day and year by year the online automotive market is growing by leaps and bounds and if local dealerships want to be able to continue to grow they will have no other choice than to get into the online marketing game.

Local search marketing has 4 basic components to it that some dealers credit with up to 60 % of their gross sales revenue to. If used in tandem with each other to maximize the effects of local online marketing a dealer can bring in new customers for direct sales of automobiles , Increase Parts sales and generate service department customers and at the same time build a solid foundation with current and future customers.

The website is one of the most Important factors in the process and visibility of it runs at the top of the list. There are many good web design companies on the market that can provide custom websites that will make the customer experience a total pleasure and seal the deal so to speak.

The next component is actually getting visitors to the site for them to see their website. This is where most dealerships drop the ball and never seem to be able to pick it up. It is a field that scares the death out of the most aggressive dealerships and for no reason. There are 3 areas of online marketing of a dealership website.

Natural Seo is the top quality way to get qualified shoppers to a website. On a local basis, brand names of automobiles are some of the most searched phrases for any given city or town on the internet. Dallas Ford has about 450,000 searches per month on Google, Yahoo and MSN. This can bring in a lot of visitors to a dealers website on a daily basis once their website reaches the top 10 of natural search results.

Next is Pay Per Click. This can be an expensive way to advertise as you are bidding on keywords for your local market to get visitors to the website. This method can be very effective if managed properly and can be a cash drain if not managed properly.
The 3rd way to get traffic to a dealers website is to use 3rd party advertising sites like cars.com. These sites have heavy traffic and can send a lot of qualified buyers to the dealers website.
The final step is setting up online relationship management and sales material. The most effective way to do this is a bi weekly newsletter. This can be one of the most effective advertising mediums that a dealership has available to keep their parts and service departments full and at capacity at all times. To give you an example of how this works, get your sales team, service writer and parts department to collect email address from all who come on the lot. Then send out a bi weekly newsletter to update new arrivals, recalls, upgrades and awards that the dealership has attained. Then in the bottom of the email you do a short plug about the special on oil changes you may be running, a sale price on tires or even a lube special that is going on.

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John Alzamora is an Online Automotive Marketing Specialist that has helped many clients take advantage of the local internet marketing to produce much needed new customers and maintain their current clients with Amazing Results