How To Use Twitter In The Quick Service Lane
A Honda dealership was having trouble notifying customers about the quick service lane wait times. Sometimes the quick service lane was completely open and other times it would back up rather quickly. The dealer thought about using email to notify the customers with appointments, but that would not be as responsive of a solution as using the real time capabilities of social media.
The recommendation was to use their Twitter account to post current wait times in the quick service lane. A couple of times a day the service manager tweets the wait status. This was also another way for the dealership to grow their customer base that was following them on Twitter. Another concern from the dealer was how to handle notifications to those service customers without social media access. The solution was to add a Twitter widget to the dealer website home page and the Twitter feed into the dealership’s Facebook account. This greatly increases the reach of their message while making it more accessible.
A side bonus to this arrangement was to generate business when the quick service lane slowed down. The dealer now is able to post service specials from their Twitter account that offer unique specials such as $19.95 oil changes from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM for one day only.
Posts Tagged ‘Automotive Internet Marketing’
The difference between on-page optimization and off-page optimization
Search engine optimization is one of the first key steps that will help improve a dealer’s website. Many companies offer services to do this for a website, but not all of these service providers are created equal. SEO is a generic term thrown about by many and understood by few. Often auto dealers are sold SEO as a service but it’s never clearly explained what they are getting for their money.
There are two main components of true search engine optimization, on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is what is done on the pages of a website to maximize its reach and performance in the search engine rankings for targeted keywords. On-page optimization factors are related directly to the website content (what the user sees) and structure of the website (what the search spiders see). This is commonly sold as a complete SEO package and one of the reasons users see many automotive dealer websites jammed with crappy content stuffed with keywords.
Off page optimization is everything else that can be done off the website and website pages that maximize search engine performance and rankings. This is much more labor intensive and challenging and is less likely to be easily manipulated. For this reason, most search engines discount the weight given to on-page factors and value off-page factors more highly. This is also why off-page optimization is much more important and valuable for overall website performance.
Some of the key factors in on-page optimization include:
- Relevant keyword research and selection
- Original unique content
- Keyword density
- Clean code
- Unique index-able URL’s (page names)
- Page title optimization
- Meta tag optimization
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3)
- URL structure
- Internal text linking (page rank sculpting)
- Sitemaps (XML and Text)
Some of the key factors in off-page optimization include:
- One way inbound links
- Deep page linking
- Keywords in anchor text
- Various page rank sites
- Directory placement
- Site submission
- Social media
- A variety of links
- A gradual long term improvement process
Another easy way to think of this is to consider introducing yourself during an employment interview. Your resume (website), your portfolio, your appearance, and your words are all carefully crafted by you to put your finest forward and represent yourself in the best possible light. While it carries a lot of weight, the employer (search engine) will still not just take your word for granted. The employer will do a background review and check references (read inbound links) to find out what others have to say about you. This confirmation process is what builds credibility that you are an authority on the subject (relevant keywords).
On-page optimization and off-page optimization go hand in hand and to do just one piece and not the other is not the wise solution.