Our subject is Rountree Moore Toyota, one of my clients, and their website, which can be found at www.RountreeToyota.com. When I first started working with Rountree Moore Toyota, they had so many things wrong with their website that it would take an entire post just to get through it. Suffice it to say, we were starting at square one. (Click here if you’re impatient and just want to see the numbers)

Our effort went through several major steps, and what’s amazing about the results I’m going to share with you a bit later is they were achieved on a site that was still a work in progress.  But here’s are some examples of the things we did:

The first step was to follow a lot of the guidelines I set forth in this post: Search Engine Marketing 1-2-3. I changed and updated meta tags, page headings and page titles. I submitted the dealership’s information to two dozen different search engines and directories.

That was just the first step. Then we undertook a significant redesign of the site, looking closely at what the then-current user behavior was on the site. We wanted to streamline a customer’s shopping process, making the site easier to navigate and highlighting key actions that customers would want to make. Consequently, we found a web site template from their provider that had some of the features we wanted, and went about modifying it.

We added a “Request for Quote” button to the top line. We stripped out extra links in the drop-down menus. We custom-built a new inventory page and landing pages for each particular model. We added descriptive free text to every page a customer might land on. We added content boxes at the bottom of the primary landing pages – the home page, new inventory and used inventory – to make them easier for search engines to spot. We added HTML links to the bottoms of several pages, both for ease of navigation and for optimization purposes.

We added a YouTube page, links to Facebook and Twitter pages; we tied their customer testimonials page into their DealerRater.com page, allowing them to embrace and manage their online reputation (as per one of my previous posts: “Online Reputation Management – The Future of Word-of-Mouth“).

As I said, there were lots of steps, lots of little details we addressed (far more than those I’ve mentioned), and it took a fair amount of time and thought. But in the end, the site is easier to navigate. More people come to it. They get more leads than they ever did before. But, to quote Reading Rainbow, “you don’t have to take my word for it.”

Here are the results from Rountree Moore Toyota’s web site for the month of May, as compared to their four-month average from January through April:

Without a doubt, those seem to be pretty impressive results. But there’s one question you have to ask: “I heard the auto industry was recovering; how do we know these results aren’t just happening everywhere?” I know I asked that question. Well, let me show you results from some other car dealers, during the same time period, using the same measures. This first dealership (”Dealership A”) is from a market of a similar size to Rountree Moore’s in Lake City.

OK, so you can see, over the same time period, Dealership A didn’t see any of the same sorts of growth that Rountree Moore Toyota’s site did. But then, I know there’s another question I asked. “Chris, these are small dealers. How did a dealership in a large market do?”

Well, me, I’m glad you asked. “Dealership B” is from a market almost ten times as large as Rountree Moore Toyota’s. They sell significantly more cars every month. Here’s what their results looked like:

So you can see, there was something that did change in May – there was an uptick in overall shopping. More people were looking for cars than did in the first four months of the year. Dealership B saw increases in traffic, leads, visitors, page views and search engine traffic. But what’s different between their results and Rountree Moore Toyota’s? They’re proportionate. Their site’s traffic rose with the tide, and not because they did anything to make their site more findable or more useful. The implication of this, to me, is that the results are scalable- if you can do it well in a small market and get increases, you can do it in a larger market and see proportionate benefits.

Rountree Moore Toyota’s site saw significant increases in what I call “usage statistics:” statistics that show how people used your site, instead of just whether or not they got there. Chief among these is, of course, form submissions (sales leads). Rountree Moore’s rose by 71% – far greater than the “rising tide.” Other “usage statistics” include page views and visit duration. For Dealerships A and B, there was no change in the amount of time people spent on the site – Rountree Moore’s went up by 25%. Page views for Dealerships A and B moved with the tide in their respective markets – Rountree Moore’s almost doubled (+80%).

What’s my point? It’s simple: this stuff works. If you performed this same analysis on a dozen other dealership web sites, you’d see the same things. Believe me, I’ve looked. Take a look at your business’ web site. Do you think you’ve done everything you can to make it findable, accessible, and useful? Do you think you get every sales lead you can out of it?

If you look at your business honestly and the answer to those questions is “no,” then maybe you should give me a call. I can help – the numbers don’t lie. All my contact information can be found here: Contact Us.

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Our paths to the outside world are many.

I just read a great post on Dealer Refresh about “Your Future Manager.” Here’s a quick excerpt:

Your future manager is a multi-tasking fiend. She or he will embrace every form of social media and communicate with staff by email or instant messenger. Technology use will be first and foremost on his or her mind, with an understanding that it doesn’t always work perfectly, but incorporating technology into processes is crucial. They will demand it!

It goes on to discuss how the younger generation (about age 30 and younger) has been bred into a multimedia cauldron – you may remember how “multimedia” was such a buzzword in the 90’s.  Now it’s just a fact of life.  Those of us from the “Connectedness Generation” are a breed apart from the past… the information age has infected us to a much greater degree.

Alex Snyder, the author of the article, describes his siblings and cousins and how all of them live lives wired (and now wireless) in so many different ways. It’s an experience that matches my own – as I type, I’m listening to the podcast of last night’s episode of Pardon the Interruption, keeping an eye on my Twitter and Facebook feeds on TweetDeck, and downloading last week’s episode of Lost, which I missed because it conflicts with two other shows I record on my DVR – Lie to Me and Mythbusters.

By my count, there are nine items in my house that are connected to the Internet, and that’s just for me – the dog is only seven months old and hasn’t figured out the Internet yet. And the truth is, to a large degree, Alex Snyder is exactly right. We should be looking for people with a talent and comfort level that makes them able to learn and adapt to new technologies and technological habits as they emerge.

The key is – and the first commenter on his article brought this up – is that many of the people who have this skill use it purely as a means of gratification and distraction. It’s a very, very fine line to walk, because what may look like unproductive behavior in one person may just be part of the creative process for another. Making judgements about someone’s level of productivity based solely on how “connected” they are compared to you is a slippery slope and can alternately lead to a group of people who are all unproductive or all unimaginative and out of touch.

On the other hand, as employees, these younger folks have to handle the distractions out there with aplomb. Yes, I have other things going on in the background and manage to remain productive, but I am smart enough to know that if I really need to concentrate (and it is against human nature to be fully engaged on a constant basis), items of distraction need to be muted or unplugged.

How do we test for these things when hiring? The interview is an inexact tool for gauging the work habits of a potential employee. And it’s easy for someone to sit in front of a computer and look busy while they’re not really doing anything productive.

It’s a fine distinction, but an important one – the difference between leading a horse to water and shooting him with the firehose.

My answer? Results. Managers, most often the folks who are most intimidated by this technology, need to take control of the process and demand real results. In my work with car dealers, they are often inclined to draw a direct line to sales when I say this, but it’s not that simple. Your management team needs to determine real performance metrics and goals on a daily, weekly and monthly basis that lead to sales. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one – the difference between leading a horse to water and shooting him with the firehose.

The problem, though, is that many managers are uncomfortable with technology and don’t know the capabilities of what they have in their arsenal, so they don’t know what to ask of their people. Too many just want to have someone to “handle it” for them.

So, when we think about hiring, think about this: a good manager (or consultant), will have a plan for how to utilize the items in his toolkit to motivate and maintain productivity from his staff, while providing relevant and timely reporting of his department’s results to his bosses. It should involve technology, to be certain, but a good manager will make those technological tactics serve the business, not drive it.

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"Billions and billions" of websites.

There are a lot of websites out there.  Like stars on a cloudless night, there are so many.  So many you may have flashbacks to Walter Cronkite narrating your trip through Spaceship Earth.  The truth is, there are too many to really know anything about most of them. 

So what do search engines do?  They use robots!  Robots that manually call up every website on the Internet and “read” it.  These “web spiders,” as they’re called, pick out items to categorize and classify websites in order to allow search engines to give you the results you want.  I google “Spaceship Earth,” and Google finds all the websites and images out there that fit that set of keywords.  The question we’re going to answer here is, “What are the basic items that search engines use to categorize your website?”

There are a lot of ways to answer that question.  First, let’s ask an even simpler question: “Why does a search engine care what results it returns to users?”  Of course the answer is elementary.  Search engines want to give you the best results so that you’ll come back and search with them again.  If you don’t come back, they can’t sell ads, and they quickly go out of business.

That’s what makes Google so special in the world of search engines.  Google has for a long time been regarded as the “best” search engine because they typically return the best results. 

So what are the “best” results?  Results that provide the user with a link to the page they were looking for, whether they knew it existed beforehand or not.  So, in other words, Google and other search engines want to determine how “useful” your page will be to their users, and for which searches.

So what makes a site “useful?”

1. Text that matches the search query.  So if someone searches for “yellow labrador puppies,” and you are a lab breeder, you might think about having those words on your site so that the search engine can pick it up.
2. Page headings that match the search query.  The title of every page on your site should represent what it actually is.  Many website providers and systems do not automatically do this for you.
3. Relevant metadata.  Meta tags are the information “underneath” your site that search engines read as part of the effort to classify your page.  They’re not used so much in the mainstream anymore (i.e. Google and Yahoo), but the “description” meta tag is still used to describe your site in search engine results.
4. Recency.  In other words, newer pages are better.  The example I always give my clients is this: if you’re searching for information because you just got diagnosed with cancer, which article are you going to read, the one dated 2004, or the one dated 2009?
5. Age of the page.  This may seem to be at odds with the previous item, but it’s not.  If your site is established and has a history of more clickthroughs, it will be served up more often in the future, especially if it has been updated frequently and/or recently.
6. Back links.  In other words, how many other sites link back to your site?  Because creating a link takes effort on the part of the website creator, it is assumed that if someone else links to your site, it’s because they found it useful.
7. Total clickthroughs.  This one is self-evident.  Search engines don’t care about fairness.  If your site is the most frequently clicked based on the search terms entered, it will be the first one displayed the next time someone enters them.

So how does one break through?  Be aggressive about the things you can control.  You can’t control the number of times your site gets clicked on directly – Google will catch on to that.  But you can offer your site up as many times and in as many places as possible.  You can create other pages that link back to your site (Facebook, MySpace, etc.).  You can update your page frequently, and make sure that all your page titles are appropriate.  You can spend on a pay-per-click advertising campaign to help improve your ranking on searches you’re not currently optimized for.

You can do all of these things on your own, if you have the time and the technical ability.  But a smart Internet marketer can not only help you check off all the items on the list, but help you make sure that you’re doing it all right.

No kidding.  But here we are – poised to begin exploring this new world.  We could start with a dissertation on why I love the Internet, but, really, no one wants or needs that.  The Internet is all things to all people, and in the end, that’s all that needs to be said.  What we need to concern ourselves with is connectedness.

What we have to learn, in order to make the Internet work for us, is how to harness that connectedness, because if we don’t, we’re either going to get burned, or we’re going to get left behind. 

So what does “connectedness” mean, and why is such an awkward word so important?

“Connectedness” means that the traditional boundaries that we have used to delineate different types of behavior and experience are eroding.  It means that, to paraphrase a song, “the Earth is moving under our feet.”  It’s an exciting new world, filled with new ways to talk to people.  New ways to learn about the world.  And of course, new ways to sell to people.  What companies need to learn is that in a world where people are connected to information and each other in an exponentially growing number of ways, you cannot rely on old methods to reach them.

This is a website about exploring the things that are necessary to win those battles for attention that are at the heart of Internet marketing and the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomenon.