Reputation management has grown in importance for car dealers (along with everyone else) since the birth of the Internet. A single customer with a bad experience and a computer can seriously damage a dealer's reputation. This damage is often easy to create (as simple as going to one of the many websites online that allow users to leave reviews and ratings for car dealers) but can take significantly more effort to correct.
Some managers of car dealerships are asking why their search traffic is down when compared to previous years, and some ask why this traffic is down when compared to last summer. They seem to share the notion that there's a set amount of search traffic to capture every month, and year-to-year. It's important to acknowledge that search traffic fluctuates every month, varies over the years, and that this traffic does not exist in a vacuum.
A number of variables influence the competitiveness of an industry in search engine optimization, and it appears that a "perfect storm" is brewing that will greatly affect SEO for car dealers in 2008. Here's an overview of some of those factors, and how they'll contribute to the automotive SEO field.
Link building is extremely time consuming, and can at times be quite frustrating. So I've put together a list of some of my favorite articles out there on link building to help others searching for quality information. Feel free to add your own in comments.
