Does your car dealership sell have more than one location?  If so, big news from Google Places.  In the past, it was difficult and cumbersome to create and manage more than one Places account.  To help their users, Google Places has created a new Bulk Listing Management Tool.

This new tool allows your dealership to edit one or more listing, search your listings (filtering by specific info or by listing with errors), and upload new listings from a data file or…

I recently found a great article that discusses very specific things businesses should be doing to help their Google Places Listing improve its ranking.  Bizible, a start-up that makes local marketing software for businesses, conducted a pretty scientific attempt to determine how best to improve the rank of your Google Places Listing.…

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I've written multiple pieces on how to properly set up and maintain your Google Places listing and account, but haven't touched on the mistakes you could be making, hurting your car dealership online marketing strategy.

Here are the places where you could really screw up your listing if you aren't careful:

Don't use a post office box. Even if this is where you get mail, make sure you use the actual address of your…

A study released in September shows how Ratings and Reviews has an impact on consumer shopping decisions.  They seek out what experiences other consumers had before they make their own decision.  This of course is different from general "social media" where they seek out commentary from their friends.

Some excerpts of this study include:"Data from “The 2011 Social…

Most people tend to focus a lot of their local search engine marketing for their auto dealer website on Google Places.  While it's true that a lot, if not most, of your search traffic comes from Google, it's still important to make sure your dealership is properly optimized for the other major players as well.

Here are…

Looks like Facebook is getting in on the reviews game. While checking in on the DealerOn Facebook page today, I noticed a new tool that I think auto dealers may want to keep an eye on.  Expanding on the simple "like" button that seems to be everywhere, Facebook now lets users leave recommendations for business pages.

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