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The largest Wiki website for the automotive industry is located at http://www.CarDealerWiki.org and its amazing to see what innovative dealers are doing to leverage this platform.  First, CarDealerWiki is free to create, update, and add pages about your dealership.  You can create pages for sales, service, parts, new cars, used cars, and the possibilities are endless.

With all this power, and SEO value that this platform provides, it’s odd that so few dealers have leveraged the website.  Content publishing must be a part of a comprehensive automotive advertising strategy.  Free platforms like CarDealerWiki.org, press release websites, blogs, bookmarking sites, and social media tools can all be part of a low cost, high ROI strategy.

Capital Ford in Regina

There are many examples of dealers who have leveraged CarDealerWiki to increase the “paths” by which consumers can find their dealership.  One of the best examples of Capital Ford Lincoln in Regina Canada.  They have created a number of great pages to market their dealership and best off all their investment in content publishing is paying off.

You can visit their main Wiki page at:  http://www.cardealerwiki.org/Capital_Ford_Lincoln

Their main dealership page, demonstrates the power of the customizes automotive Wiki platform.  Their main Wiki page contains YouTube customer testimonial videos, their blog feed, customer reviews, and live inventory from their daily inventory feed. One of the biggest advantages of  CarDealerWiki.org is that is can accept RSS feeds.  That means you can feed in live reviews from DealerRater.com and PrestoReviews.com.

Members of the Automotive Advertising Network (AAN) can use this feature to create sustainable links to their dealership Vehicle Detail Pages because each night the cars that are displayed are updated by what is in stock.  This feature creates free “mini-sites” that help increase the visibility of the cars you have for sale.  Basically, members can create their own automotive classified pages, without limit.

Capital Ford Lincoln’s ability to make pages for each model year that they sell is also paying off. As you can see from the screen capture below, a year, make and model search for the city clearly shows the power of CarDealerWiki for Automotive SEO.

Anytime you use a free platform for content publishing, you need to check if the links that are being created are being respected by the search engines.  That is because some platforms place “no follow” tags on all outbound links.  CarDealerWiki.org offers strong Automotive SEO value and “follow” links.

Yahoo provides a link checking tool, and you can see that some of the pages that the dealership created are showing as trusted link sources to their main website.

CarDealerWiki in Competitive Markets

In competitive US markets like the Boston suburbs, innovative dealers like Marlboro Nissan use create CarDealerWiki pages to add additional paths for consumers to find their brand and be linked back to their primary website.

Creating an Account on CarDealerWiki

CarDealerWIki is free but accounts must be approved first.  Accounts must come from a dealership email address or from a company that serves the automotive industry.  All vendors that serve the auto industry should create a profile page for their business on CarDealerWiki.org.  Now that you know about a great content publishing and Automotive SEO tool, what is stopping you?  Create an account today for free automotive advertising resources.

Wikipedia made popular the technology used on many “wiki” websites which allows for web pages to be created and edited without requiring HTML programming knowledge.

The largest “wiki” website for the automotive industry is http://www.CarDealerWiki.org. This website is a great resource for dealers embarking on a Automotive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign and also for dealers who want to syndicate their used car inventory.

CarDealerWiki.org is a free website that is for employees of car dealerships, vendors of the automotive industry, and related automotive service and news providers. Getting started with CarDealerWiki is as simple as creating an account and completing the sign-up form.

It is recommended that you register with an email account from your business and NOT from Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail. Once your registration is approved, normally within 24 hours, you can claim your dealership profile page and create powerful content and backlinks.  Email accounts not associated with a business website will not be approved to reduce spam.

Creating More Automotive Backlinks

One of the most powerful ways a car dealer can increase the search authority of their website is to build quality backlinks from well respected websites. The more links a dealer has pointing to his relevant website content, the higher that page will rank in the search engines. Think of links as “votes” to your website pages.

It is a challenge to find free websites that allow car dealers to post original content and create backlinks on a variety of keywords and phrases.

CarDealerWiki is one of the best websites to assist dealers with content publishing and backlink building.

In fact, the site has a number of automated features that make content generation and link building very easy, some which are shown below:

1. You can drop in your RSS feed from DealerRater.com (view example)
2. You can drop in your RSS feed of new car inventory (view example)
3. You can drop in your RSS feed of used car inventory (view example)
4. You can drop in customer testimonial videos from Youtube
5. You can drop in your RSS feed from your blog

Capital Ford Lincoln in Canada has a very detailed profile page and sub-pages that integrates their inventory, videos, and their blog posts.  Take a peek by visiting their page at:  http://www.cardealerwiki.org/Capital_Ford_Lincoln.

Marketing Used Cars on CarDealerWiki

CarDealerWiki.org also supports the Automotive Advertising Network (AAN) data feed so members have direct access to their inventory with searchable RSS parameters so they can create used car marketing pages for any make or model.

The architecture of CarDealerWiki.org really empowers car dealers to build links to their Vehicle Detail Pages.  This is a significant competitive edge that is little talked about in the industry. Not all website providers provide a properly formatted RSS feed of car inventory, for those that do, dealers can really leverage this website.

Midway Motors in Kansas created a Used Car marketing page for Hillsboro Kansas and the cars shown on this page http://www.cardealerwiki.org/Hillsboro_Used_Cars provide not only more visibility for their cars but also links back to their main dealership website and Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP)

CarDealerWiki Pages Index For Automotive Search Phrases

The key with any SEO campaign is to see if Google is respecting the content and links generated from a third party website and in this matter CarDealerWiki.org is a superstar.

Take a look at the screen capture below for a search on the phrase “Nissan Altima Marlboro“.  Marlboro Nissan operates a dealership in Marlboro Massachusetts and the content pages he created on CarDealerWiki is helping to defend his PMA.

You will see that CarDealerWiki has two listing on Google Page One. In fact, 90% of this page is filled with search results that Tim Martell, Internet Marketing Director and founder of WikiMotive has implemented for his store.

You can also search for a Fiat Dealers in the USA with a term like “Fiat Dealers USA” and you will see that CarDealerWiki.org is on Google Page One for this national search phrases.  Type into Google “Regina Ford Service” and you will see CarDealerWiki.org on Google Page One for a dealer created service page.

Dealers Can Be Creative

The power of CarDealerWiki.org is that car dealers can create pages for new cars, used cars, service, parts, and warranty repairs in their local markets.  Well formatted content pages can link back to the dealer’s primary website to enhance the search authority of their main website.

So if dealers need more search visibility and links and content are a part of that solution, I encourage all car dealers in the US and Canada to create an account and get started building out content on CarDealerWiki.org for their dealership.

If you are a website provider or an SEO Consultant working on behalf of a dealership, you can assist your clients on CarDealerWiki.org as well.  Register with your business email address and complete your profile and your one login can be used for all your clients.

Now get to work!

Tracking Your Internet Content & Contributions

If you are actively using automotive or social networking portals to promote your car dealership I would like to suggest another way to measure the effectiveness of your work.  Most dealers have Google Analytics or a similar package in place to track inbound traffic, page views and the referring URL’s. 

However, trying to read through the “referrer URL” report and matching these cryptic URL’s with specific posts you are making on the Internet is practically impossible.   Yes, you can click on the links and see what the article was, but that is very time consuming.  Now image active Internet sales Managers or dealerships that are posting dozens of posts a month directly or through a consultant.

Tracking The ROI of Your Web Time

Finding which websites are linking to your website from post hyperlinks is easy.  The real question is what posts or topics brought the most traffic.  Did you hit any “nerves” with consumers with an article that drove more traffic to your website than others in past?   Did one type of car or one price point bring you the most traffic on Craigslist?   Did your parts managers reply to someone on a car forum drive more traffic to your parts website?

I have discussed in the past that good content is very important for search engine optimization and so are the potential inbound links and traffic that good content can generate.  This content can be on your own website or blog but it also can be on outside blogs and content aggregator websites.

So how do you try to equate your work posting on consumer forums, car forums or on your own blogs to specific traffic?  For this I would suggest testing www.budurl.com .  This service converts your cryptic URL to a simple URL that you can add to any website post.  You label the budurl in your account control panel so that you can remember the topic of the post. Then you can log into your account see how many people clicked on that link.

Links to Ford Dealer Specials Pages

For example, if you make a post on a community automotive forum to tell people about the specials your dealership was offering, the actually page link you would normally post would be something like this:

http://www.prestonford.com/coupons.asp?keywords=specials

You would replace this with a budurl that would look like this:  http://budurl.com/forddealercoupons

If you click on both URL’s you will see that they take you to the same webpage.  The trick is that you can now log into your budurl account and see how many people clicked on your link.  If you label your budurl’s carefully, you can create an instant dashboard of activity that updates in real-time.  So, if one type of post or headline generates 3 times the traffic of other posts, this data can help prioritize future content development.

You can also use budurl for LIVE tracking on specials or promotions you add on your homepage.  The possibilities are endless and the real-time stats can make testing different landing pages or promotional pages easy. There are third party statistics packages that offer similar features but I like the simplicity of this system.  Anyone can easily setup a BudURL and turn themselves into an Internet marketing maven with real data for tracking the ROI of their efforts.

One caveat:  I would not use BudURL for all my primary links since you do want direct links to important pages that can be good inbound link source to your primary URL.  For example, Google Maps provides you with free stats on how many people clicked on your map link so there is no need to use a budurl in Google maps.

Automotive SEO Ideas

If you found this article helpful, click here for more ideas on our Automotive SEO blog: http://budurl.com/automotiveseotips