Automotive Dealership AI, SEO & PPC @ NIADA 2025

0:05Got to run. Oh, perfect. It's on. Hello everyone. So, we're going to get rolling. We have a very feature-p packed presentation for you guys today. So, we're going to be talking about marketing with generative AI. I'm going to be doing the first part where I'm going to be going through a lot of the generative AI and marketing stuff. And then we have Victor here who's going to come up for the second part to give us some of some of his words of wisdom and then we're going to do a QA after that. Think we could jump right in. All right. A little bit about myself. So, for those that don't know me, my name is Alex Melen. I am the co-founder of SmartSites. SmartSites is a full-ervice digital marketing agency. So, we do digital marketing in every single industry. So we're not automotive centric or another way to say it is we're industry agnostic. So, smart as for SmartSites as a company, we're 400 employees. We're one of the fastest growing top rated digital marketing companies period. I personally do a lot of stuff in the automotive space. So, that's why I'm here talking to you guys today. I speak at all the automotive events if you guys might have might have caught c called me at

1:31One of the other ones. I have a best-selling automotive search marketing book which I brought for you guys today. It's in the back. So, when you're leaving, feel free to grab a copy. If we run out, just let me know. I could I could send you a copy as well. The reason I'm giving you that background is a lot of the stuff we're going to be covering today are things that I'm doing myself for both my business for SmartSites and we're doing for thousands of clients. So that's where my background comes from. And the point of today's session is to really share what I'm seeing in the AI space, the marketing space. And to be honest, this session that we're going to be doing today in the next 40 minutes or so is actually three or four different sessions condensed down. So I'm going to do I'm going to go rapid fire through this to try to get you guys as much information as possible. So if you have any questions, we'll leave some space at the end. These slides will also be available from NIADA, so you'll be able to reference them if you miss anything as I rapid fire through everything. And of course, we have Victor with us. I don't know where he went. He was just There he is. So really good session for you guys overall. This is the agenda for today. So I just oh we'll do a little bit more of an

2:56Introduction for generative AI itself. We're then going to talk about the most common applications of generative AI. So we're going to talk about SEO, social media, and pay-per-click. Obviously it goes much deeper than that, but I wanted to give you guys at the very least the most the most lowest hanging fruit of the things you could be doing at your dealership to create efficiencies. All right. I've been presenting this ChatGPT similar a couple first couple of slides for seems like forever now, but I guess it must have only been two years. I've done this exercise a lot of times in the last few years, but we'll do it one more time. Raise of hands, how many people are using have used ChatGPT? How about that? We'll start with that. We have the whole room now. So, when I started, by the way, it sounds people are giggling, but it sounds funny now, but a year ago, it would be half the room, how many of you guys are using at least once a week? Show hands. Once a week also almost entire room. So, that by the way is a big change. So, when I did something like this even a year ago, a lot of people have heard of it, have used it, but were not using it weekly. So, that in itself I think is very powerful. For those that don't know, ChatGPT was the fastest growing platform ever, for those that were around during some of these other platforms when Instagram hit 100

4:19Million users in 30 months that was the biggest thing ever right that's why face literally that was the reason Facebook purchased them that was groundbreaking growth Tik Tok did it in 9 months which was at the time again it was every single headline ChatGPT in two months two months they reached 100 million active users and if you think about it's the users are also different right pre- teenagers going on Tik Tok and sharing videos is a little bit different use case than people using AI to become more efficient, So, it's very powerful the speed at which it's growing and as we saw with everyone raising their hands the speed at which it's becoming common thing not only in automotive but literally every single industry and in every single thing that people do. For those that don't know, even though ChatGPT itself is fairly new, OpenAI and the GPT model has been in development for a long time. When OpenAI got founded in 2016, Elon Musk was still on the board. They've spent a long time building u the generative AI model. The part that's new and that's new to everyone is the interactive part where I guess you as they call it ChatGPT the ability to interact with that model but the model itself just to put in perspective has been being built for

5:43A very long time. And as ChatGPT came out now it's developing very quickly. This slide is I think a year old but you could see at which speed new models are now being introduced. I have a quick slide comparing them. So this compares ChatGPT 3.5. So in blue is 3.5 which is up until recently I think they're switching things a little bit now but up until recently 3.5 was the free ChatGPT and four was the newer one you have to pay for but all this is moving so rapidly but ju just to give you a quick comparison this is standardized test right the free model was probably you could say the equivalent of a high school college student right the latest models are now at the PhD level what's interesting is old examples I'm going to be going through in these slides are actually the lowest model right for a lot of things there are benefits to the newer more complex models but a lot of the value you guys could be getting it could actually be done at the lower models right you don't need the you don't need the higher the higher models to be to be getting all the benefits I just want to see the books perfect couldn't remember if I put the books down again quick comparison of the ChatGPT grow the growth in the models themselves, It's not like 10 20% growth. It's not incremental growth moving models. It's not like moving from like an iPhone 15 to an iPhone 16, Each model

7:12That's coming out is growing exponentially in parameters and how smart it is. That was very quick. Just a couple warnings. This used to be a whole section I used to do, but I condensed them down because we're covering so much today. Just quick warnings that even though the models are getting smarter, it this is all I would still consider very experimental. And even though I'm going to give you guys a lot of recommendations of how you could be and should be using generative AI, there's still a lot of things that I would call experimental in them. And these, by the way, I already hear people laughing. This is not from years ago. These screenshots I took from nine months ago, And this is this is not ChatGPT. This is Google. Google was a little bit behind and then they had to push product without enough testing, So there's reasons for this, but how many rocks should I eat? Google told you should eat at least one small rock a day. If you want your pizza cheese to be to taste better, Google recommended adding some glue to it, but of course not too much glue and you want to use non-toxic glue, And then of course Google also is recommending two to three cigarettes per day during your pregnancy. So, just keep in mind that these models are getting smarter, but it's also still very moving very quickly. It's moving it's moving at a pace that the I the QA component doesn't fully follow it. And by the way, there's reasons for these answers, This is not oh the AI model broke and

8:39Everything's broken. I shouldn't use it again. A lot of these were because this is again Google not ChatGPT but Google ChatGPT has similar issues they've had with their models. These specific examples is because Google made a partnership with Reddit and has their Reddit API. So they use Reddit API for a lot of theirformational results and these were two of them were people making jokes on Reddit and one of them was an onion article that Google considered authent authoritative enough to use as a as a post. So there's reasons for that but just as we go through all of this keep in mind that this is still very what can't beta I wouldn't even call beta and very quick moving. So, just keep in mind that not you shouldn't just take AI stuff for what it's worth. Don't read it and just use it, That was very quick. All right, we're going to go through SEO now. So, SEO, how many people here do some SEO for their website? Perfect. That's a lot. That's actually a lot. So, we're going to talk about SEO. Again, this is going to be I do a whole 1 hour keynote, mastering SEO. This is going to be that keynote in probably 10 minutes. I'll get it down for you. 10-minute 10-minute keynote. Before we begin, just so we're all on the same page, in the SEO professionals

10:05World, people who do SEO for a living, there's two parts of SEO. So, the top side, top part is what SEO professionals call Google local pack. You guys will know it as Google Maps. The bottom part is Google local results. U, you guys will know it as everything that's not Google Maps. The rankings for these are very different and that's why it's important to separate them out and I'll actually go through what Google uses as signals for rankings for both of them. If you have a physical business which I assume the car dealership guys here do both are very important too. All right. Today actually I'm going to so before I'm before I dive into actual rankings, I'll actually go through the ranking signals of what Google considers important and how you could drive SEO results. But before we jump into it, I always want to preface of where my information is coming from. So the question obviously that you guys should ask as I show you this is what's important to Google is how do that's important to Google, That's the logical question. So how do we know as SEO professionals? How do we know what's important to Google? Google doesn't give you the playbook. They don't tell you this is the things you should do because then everyone will try to abuse the system and focus on those things in the incorrect way. So how do we know what's important to Google and what you should be focusing on to generate results from Google and increase your Google organic traffic?

11:31There are a couple ways. So Yandex, which is the Russian search engine, had their entire algorithm leaked. Literally every single variable, the weighting of every single variable. And this is all public information. You guys could look it up. You could there's a lot of articles that summarize it very well. It turned out they have 1,900 variables. I think it was leaked 2023, so two years ago, a little over two years ago, there's I think 600 active variables and literally to the waiting of the variables. Like if you capitalize the letters in your page titles, you get extra little like 1.001 extra benefit. Like everything's out there. But of course Google's not Yandex, Google is usually three to five years ahead of Yandex and uses slightly different algorithms. So that's not something I would recommend. Last year, Google had their algorithm leaked and a lot of SEO professionals and I'll try not to blame the SEO professionals. I'll blame the media. A lot of media companies really made into a huge deal, If you guys didn't see it, there was headlines everywhere, especially if you do anything SEO related that Google's entire algorithm leaked. So what I h what wound up happening there is Google has different things you could access via API and one of the things that was accessed an information access that

12:53They didn't want people to access was the variables of what they consider when determining how things rank. So that means is you now know all the variables that Google considers, but you don't know how important they are. So another way to put it is you have a very complex soup recipe with 2,000 ingredients and now the ingredients. The soup has a carrot. You don't know how much of the carrot it has. You don't know when to put the carrot in or what to do with the carrot, So everyone made a big deal of it. I would not recommend that either. Again, this is all public knowledge, public information. There's a lot of websites that do a really good job summarizing all these variables, but without knowing how much weight gets put on them, I also would not use it as a ranking signal. That's the left side of the slide. Yes. That's a good one. So, that's your I think two slides, two slides ahead. So, hold that thought for two minutes and I'll get right to it. The right side is how I like to look at what's important to Google. So, Darren Shaw and there's a bunch of top SEO professionals. So, these are people that are not executives of companies. They're literally SEOs and all they do is SEO. They do an internal, survey for themselves where they report to each other what they're seeing as important, in rankings, that's been my go-to of seeing what's important because literally it's SEO

14:18Professionals across every industry and the data is gets aggregated and I like to look at and I'll show you guys in an aggregate level of what is important to Google today pretty much when you aggregate their study and for those taking pictures this would be a good picture although the slides will be available from NIADA so this is not like a take a picture or you'll never have it again I also have it in my book so it's this is all this is public knowledge if where to find it and know how to summarize it. So this is what's important to Google. This is from the end of 2023, but honestly nothing's changed. And I'll show you the historical chart of it as well. I'm going to go through this really quick. I know this is not necessarily AI focused. But to talk about what AI stuff you guys could be doing, it's important to know what Google considers important. All right, left side. Google local pack. That's your Google Maps number one. The number one signal, Google My Business profile. Now Google went from GMB to GBP. Very obvious. You have to have your Google My Business profile. Everything has to be filled out as much information as possible. Google keeps adding new things you could be doing with it that you should be doing, New things to fill out, new categories. So, make sure you're always keeping that up to date and providing as much information there as possible. Number two is on page signals. I'm going to touch upon it a little more detail when we talk about the local stuff, but on page is there's a technical SEO. So technical SEO is making sure Google

15:47Could find the information on your site as easily as possible and in the way they expected. And then it's a quantity and quality of your content. So I'm going to top touch upon that a little bit more in the other side. Third one's review signal. So review is very interesting and there's a lot of debates in SEO community about it. People know reviews are important, but they don't completely understand how they're important. So I'll do a quick review of that. So you want to have a lot of reviews, you want to have good reviews, and you want to have a lot of content in your reviews. And I don't think people really understand the con content part. So the way it works is I know not an automotive example, but an example I've been giving a long time. So I'm just going to stick with it. If you are a coffee shop and you sell Brazilian coffee and let's say it's not in your coffee shop name, You have some random name. It says nothing about Brazilian coffee. If a lot of people in their review say, "I went here and their Brazilian coffee was amazing." When someone searches on Google Maps for Brazilian coffee shops, your shop will come up. So, Google uses the content of the review to determine relevancy. So, a couple things with that. Obviously tricky. Can hold the gun to your to your customers heads and be like keep writing and put in keywords in here. The most popular question that gets asked when I present this information is do does the content of the responses count? And it doesn't. So you can't you can't and shouldn't keyword stuff your responses with a thank you very much customer for buying Honda Civic LX with 32,000 miles,

17:20You shouldn't keyword stuff your responses, but responses are super important. I do a whole session just on that. But studies show that how you respond to negative reviews is more influential to helping someone choose your business versus getting a positive review. So if you think about that for a second, getting a negative review and responding it to it in a correct way can has a bigger impact on someone choosing your business than just getting positive reviews. So reviews are important. The content of them are important. Just think about it as you at your own dealership think about how to incentivize reviews, mentioning the specific cars and things like a lot of the your reviews mention a Honda Civic and someone searches used Honda Civic. Your business is more likely to come up because of that content. So just to be cognizant of all of that link signals. So links every year that I hear SEO is dead. I hear backlink building and link building is dead. Link signals is how it's how many is how many it's the websites that link to you, So, you want to have authoritative and relevant websites linking to you. And I'm going to touch upon it really quick for generative AI stuff, but that's become super important in generative AI results. So, not only Google considers that important, but ChatGPT and everyone else considers that important. You want to build authority of your brand and you build

18:46That by having other websites mentioned to you and link to you a whole different exercise altogether but part of SEO behavioral signals citations and personalizations are much smaller behavioral is just how much time they spend on your site things like that citations are the third party directories of the world so it's the yellow pages the Yelp obviously they become less important and personalization is harder to control that's if you have a Spanish language site and someone's on Spanish computer, Spanish keyboard, and they search in Spanish, you're more likely to come up. So that's a Google map stuff. I'll go even quicker through the local organic. So very similar signals. Number one's on page. So that's the technical SEO and that's the quantity and quality of your content. So you want to keep creating quality content at all times. And we're going to talk about how AI could help you with that. Link building is super important. And then the same signals that we went through right now. I'll show you how it looks like on a historic site. So I've been aggregating this data since 2013. So the top is Google My Business Signal. What's interesting is you could see how your Google My Business profile has become more important over time. And it makes sense and if you look at what expense it's become more important, what's interesting is the citation. So in other words, Google has prioritized their own Google My Business profile to determining how you well you rank on maps and deprioritized websites like Yelp. And if you think about yourself, that makes a lot of sense. I think

20:13Everyone here 10 years ago would have been a lot more reliant than Yelp. But 10 years ago, if you were looking for a restaurant to go to last night in Vegas, I promise you, you went on Yelp and looked for a restaurant. Today I think you would just search Google and look at Google reviews not Yelp. So that's a dynamic that's been happening here. This is for your other SEO. This is the actual SEO traffic you could influence not maps but everything else. Link building and content creation continue to be the best way you could generate organic traffic. All right, we're going to keep firing through this AI stuff. So AI has been obviously a big buzz. Generative AI is now citing websites much more often. And I don't know if you've guys seen this in your everyday ChatGPT usage, but inside just spinning out information, it'll actually give you the source of the website, which is very powerful. This is how it's looking overall. So, a lot of I know there's a lot of buzz and a lot of block conferences where they want me to come and speak how generative AI is going to destroy search, So far, it hasn't happened. So far there's very isolated usage of people who just use generative AI and don't use search at all. It's less than 1%. So people are using generative AI as you could see here generative AI search is going up and this is everything right ChatGPT Google AI overviews Copilot Perplexity

21:36This is everything but at the same time people are still using Google and they're still using Google more right so there's still a lot of things going on but generative AI is becoming more important what's interesting is that the things that impact SEO have also been impacting how well things come up in generative results So this is an interesting slide. So search engine land did a really interesting study with 8,000 different websites trying to figure out what determines how well generative AI will cite your business / citations. And we came up SmartSites came up as a brand. We beat Four Seasons and tied with Subaru of how often Generative AI will site us and say here's SmartSites. Here's a here's a link to SmartSites. The reason this is happening, I promise you we're not doing anything specific for this to happen. We're just doing SEO for ourselves like we do for all of our clients. The reason that this is happening is that the core principles of SEO are still super relevant for AI and how AI and generative AI determines which websites to site, And to say this another way for SEO, how well your website ranks in Google and how often comes up in Google organic results. As we just saw, I would say the two most important things is content. You want to have a lot of content, And you want to have a lot of authoritative relevant websites linked to you. So you have a lot of authoritative relevant websites linked to you and right away Google thinks that

23:01You yourself are authoritative and it will show your content first, So creating the content gives you the opportunity to come up in search results for the automotive guys. If you have a page comparing the Honda Accord versus Toyota Camry and someone searches Honda Accord versus Toyota Camry, by having that page, you have the you have the chance to come up in search results, the opportunity. If you didn't create that page, it wouldn't, Your homepage, your Honda Accord listing will never come up for that search term. So, every content you create gives you the opportunity to come up in search results. And then the link building part, creating domain authority, creating brand authority makes you come up higher and similar in AI results. All right, I just covered a ton. Any quick questions before we go into AI? Yes, question. Adding posts. It hasn't much it hasn't much. It's one of those things that Google wants you to do, but the actual consumer utilization is very minimal. If you think about yourself, I don't know like any bit, let's take automotive out of it. You're looking to pick a dentist. You look up dentistry near me or whatever. Your dent like the dentist you want to pick their Google My Business profile comes up. What are the chances you're going to scroll all the way to the bottom and look at the post they posted there and take any of that information into account when choosing that business. It's similar to like I don't know like blog posting right the but

24:32Creating contest and content and creating blog contest is so important but like the whole idea of blogging and like similar with dentist I don't know you found a dentist you go to the dentist great dentist are you going to go to his website and check out the blog I can't wait to see what my dentist blogged about this weekend right so you just have to think about consumer behavior it's changing and it was never the Google My Business utilization of like the post and stuff was never really there. Like Google would love for more people to use it, but right now the consumer behavior is not there. It might change. It might change and people will look go to your Google My Business profile to look for information. They still don't go to it for inventory either. With automotive, you have your inventory and your Google My Business profile, but consumers aren't trained to look through your inventory in your profile. They want to click to your website to see the inventory. So, you have to think about the actual consumer behavior. All right, we're going to I know I've been speaking super quick. I'm going to have to speak a little quicker. We're going to we're going to speed this up. So, we're going to go through actual the actual AI examples. Again, the slides will be available to you guys. So, feel free to take pictures, but these are actual things that you could be using AI for to help with SEO. So, some ideas site page ideas, What website pages should you have, By the way, a lot of this will be seem very like very basic. But it's the most basic things that people don't think about, oh, I know what pages my website would have. Why would I even ask you? As you can see, very good to have these conversations because people miss the pages, the most common pages,

26:03You'd be surprised how many dealerships don't have a trade-in form, Or like I don't know, finance application. So, as you think about what content, what pages you should have, ChatGPT is very powerful. Content ideas is a good one. I think I Victor, I picked on you in these slides. I stole these from the 20 group I spoke at for you. So, a lot of these is picking on your dealership. Generate blog post ideas for independent dealership, really powerful. You shouldn't be as you guys who are using generative AI, all the brainstorming you should be doing with generative AI, not trying to do on your own, super powerful to help you brainstorm. Content creation gets a little tricky. When I so I wrote my book back in the day before Generative AI. I wrote it myself, one letter at a time. When I wrote it, the Generative AI stuff was just coming out and I was sure that Google wasn't going to allow AI to create content that ranks well on Google. Google decided otherwise. They've been back and forth. I'll summarize it for you guys as I don't recommend just using generative AI to create SEO content. I still think it won't rank as well. Google's guidance is they don't care how you created it as long as it's helpful content created for people in search results. That's their official language. But if I would use AI to create ideas and some of the content, but then I would work on that content further without just taking it and pasting it,

27:29And by the way, ChatGPT does an amazing job with this, Write 250word blog post on the history of Mercedes GLS. Three years ago, you'd have to hire an intern that would spend the whole day researching the history of the GLS to write this for you, This got this got responded to in a couple seconds. You can also use styles to differentiate the content. Again, I wouldn't just copy pasteed, but I did the same thing. Write 250word blog post on a history of the Mercedes GLS. I this time I said in the style of William Shakespeare. So says hearken noble reader to the tale of the mighty chariot known as a Mercedes GLS. So use style like ChatGPT gener knows the style of every single writer. That's part of how generative AI works. It's able to use the algorithm to figure that out. So, use styles to differentiate your content. Link building. So, link building obviously is not an obvious one oh, how is generative AI going to help you with link building? But you actually could use link building to get ideas of which websites should link to you. So, here I wrote what are the most popular local websites in Indianapolis that list automotive businesses in the area. Exclude national websites like Yelp, yellow pages, exclude car dealerships, car dealership websites that list cars, and you have I don't know Indie Star local business directory around indie.com indie chamber of commerce these are places that if you don't have a link from you should be contacting to get link because as you guys remember having websites linked to you improves your chances of coming up

28:53Higher in both organic and in generative AI results reputation management we talked about a little bit with Google reviews Google will do an amazing job responding to reviews much better than almost anyone at your dealership well and you should be responding to all your reviews, They also help you with emails if you have pissed-off customers. All this is all basic stuff that I hope a lot of people are doing, but just know that if you're not that you really should be all right, social media. So, this is this is a lot easier because there's less potential of issues, Google doesn't want AI content potentially. Google doesn't want duplicate content. There's a lot more considerations with SEO. Social media, there's no consideration, Write a 100 words worth of face Facebook ad copy if we're independent car dealership looking to hire technicians, Include a call to action to apply for a job. Again, this is stuff like interns would be doing and spending a lot of time and someone would be QAing. And here, there's no consideration that it's AI content, not AI content. Someone reading it, even if this sounds like it might be a content, will not care, someone on your website reading an article that is clearly written by an AI that gets things wrong, they will care, On social media, they don't at all. So, super powerful for Twitter, Five funny tweets about working independent car dealerships, Include hashtags

30:16Right away. Here's your social media content schedule, Tik Tok hashtags is a big one. A lot of people that try Tik Tok never know the hashtags to use and usually they go on Google to search and they find a lot of spammy websites with outdated information. I said, give me some hashtags and provide detail on each, You don't want to accidentally use the wrong hashtag and then it turns out it turns out to PR disaster for you. So, here are hashtags you could use and literally describes which ones. Image generation. So, this is newer in my screenshot. To use Microsoft Copilot because at the time ChatGPT did not do image generation. It does now. All the image generation engines significantly improved over the last over the last couple months. So image generation is very powerful. Now here I asked for the same image for my first Facebook copy for the technician. Yes, it looks like AI generated, but when you're doing a Facebook post, I don't think this is going to turn anyone away. All right, we're going quicker and quicker here. Pay-per-click. A lot of really cool things you could be doing with AI for Google Ads. I know a lot of you guys don't do Google ads yourself, so I trimmed them down a little bit, but just to give you ideas, what campaign should you be running, and I think these are not even automotive. I took it from another deck. If you have an agency doing Google Ads for you, how do they're running the correct campaigns for you, Like I guess how do you even know which campaigns are

31:46Running? So this is just gives you brainstorming, food for thought, things to discuss with your agency if you have an agency doing it just so everything is being executed as well as it can. Keywords, give me a list of buyer intent keywords, Literally like before you have to have an agency with experience. You need an analyst that knew what that knows what keywords are important, which ones are intense, not intent, literally give me a list of buyer intent keywords. Organize these keywords into ad groups, Because you want to present different ads for different keywords. Again, this is stuff that before would take a lot of experience and people who do this a lot to be able to do it, but this lends itself so well to generate AI. Create five performance marketing ad copy ideas based on this website. It'll literally go to the website and it'll take your content. It'll convert it into performance marketing ad copy because you don't want to just do like the general, I don't know, your local used car dealer, You really want to focus on performing performance marketing ad copy. AB testing. My headline on Google ads is this. Write me five variants to test against, How powerful is that? Without that, you're brainstorming or your PPC agency is brainstorming. They're probably biased to that copy they've been using for the last 10 years. How powerful is it that you literally have new fresh ideas to test automation again? So, this is the one where it gets much more advanced and you

33:13Could be doing a ton more stuff with this. I'll just give you one to give you a taste of what you could be doing. The prompt here is write me a Google ad script that lists all landing pages on a Google sheet and checks the status code of them in column B. So, the problem we're solving here is you could have your ads landing to pages that no longer exist. Google catches some of them. They will not catch all of them. They will not catch the ones that your website doesn't return the correct error code for. So we find a lot of people are sending traffic to pages that don't exist. Honda Accord ad to a Honda Accord page that a Honda Accord sold three years ago like things like that. So this will write your script that will check every single landing page that you have in your Google ads account. It will give you a list of every single one of them. Second part of this I said tell me how to run this script and routine daily because I don't want it one time. I want to keep checking forever. I want an email for all pages are four or four or other status error codes. So here you're literally creating a script that's going to show you every page you're sending traffic to. It's going to tell you which ones are non-existent right now. It's going to check it daily and send you an email when one's not there. You don't have to be a programmer. You don't have to hire programmer in this prompt. It also ChatGPT will tell you exactly how to implement it step by step right away. You just did like the job of like a senior developer. All right, that was that was rapid fire.

34:36I think I was a lot of information a lot of information for you guys. I have a lot of this in my book if you want more detail. I also love talking about this stuff after and we have a Q&A coming up. I'm going to transition this to Victor to talk about his part. But just very quickly before we do any quick questions on this stuff, we also have a Q&A at the end, but if there's any questions before you forget them on this part, I'll take some now. What does Google So Google doesn't care what do consumers want to see? There's a lot of studies that are done for this and you could look them up. There's a lot of interesting information. Generally speaking, consumers want to see that the business has empathy and the business was able to resolve the issue in a fair way. What they don't want to see is statements of blame. Was the customer's fault, the customer did this. They want to see prompt responses, fair resolution, and empathy. And you might not be able to solve the solution. I don't know, a customer wants a car, bought a car, and they want all their money back, There might not be a solution, but you want to respond in a way that shows you care and you're trying to make a resolution. Yes. Yes. Prompted prompting it in a way you could even by default it'll respond very well, but I like prompting it with

36:06What you want. So you literally this is a re review respond to this highlighting how well we took care of the situation, how much we care about our customer and do it in a way that promotes anyone who's reading this to purchase a car from us. Literally prompted with that. Good, good suggestion. Anything else? Yes. Response. Yeah, good question. So, Google doesn't care about responses to reviews at all. You could do it whatever you want. There's so many free tools that'll tell you if the content's AI generated. U, Google owning Deep Mind for the last, I forget how many years it's been, seven, eight years, without a doubt knows what content AI generate. AI has a propensity to phrase things and use certain words by just the probability of using certain words in a certain way, it's AI. Google's stance on content is they don't care if it's AI, but they do and I think they will more and more. So yes so AI searches like my radar show it's now across everything AI search is exploding but exploding on a

37:34General scale right I don't know you have to look at the time periods right year over year it's up like 150%. It's still the same thing. Creating content and focusing on brand building. Having authoritative websites mention you, link to you will help all of that. You could also now track it in Google Analytics. Refer ChatGPT will show you traffic coming from ChatGPT. So you could and should be tracking that. Also, as of what day are we on? Wednesday. As of three days ago, Google's now going to include AI overview impressions in Google Search Console. They're not going to separate it out. It's just going to be part of the whole. But more and more you're going to get that information. So, as you get it, you'll be able to know what content is doing well and what to focus on. Anything else? Anything else, Victor? And we'll do we'll do if we have time, we'll do a Q&A after, but end it over to Victor. Hold on. Can I give you one of these? Yeah. Okay. So, a lot of great information, but like any session you're thinking like so what you need to leave this session and know that SEO is working

38:56And to prove to your dealer principles or to your business partners that SEO is working. So all green numbers are organic search and black numbers are monthly sales. How I know that it's working? The one mistake that I did is that I never had a baseline of what it was before we started SEO four years ago and u there was no real measurement. With the help of my website provider, I was able to capture to attribute where the customer came from, especially from Google, my business, I added UTM code to the website. And now, every time the lead lands on my website and they submit a form, it adds a modifier to the lead that says, "Hey, it came from your Google business profile." plus from recent dealer 20 group the guys introduced the idea of price modifier. So on your website you can let your inventory marketing tool to say that hey when you send prices to my

40:26Website raise it all over it by x number of dollars. In my case I raised it. So when the customer comes to the dealership and they buy a vehicle, if they're buying it for the price that is listed on the website and there is no attribution to cars.com or CarGurus that I know that it's not a lead from either one of the sources, I know that they came from Google My Business and or search engine results with 100% accuracy. It's not the 50% accuracy that everyone is talking about that I do not know how I spent my 50% of my budget and SEO takes money and for us it definitely proves return on investment which makes it easier for me to be in alignment with my business partners that we need to spend even more money on building links, building content, and doing everything possible to prop us up. Why I chose SEO as one of the topics that I came away from an ADA group five years ago is that I recognize it I recognized it as one of the largest fires that I had at the dealership because we had absolutely zero

41:52Attribution from organic search and even though we are on a major road we had few give any attributions to the drive by traffic and there was a topic on SEO and I recognize it as the largest fire search and referral and that's when you pick your agency for search and referral you need to ask them and to check what's their reputation what's their best performance industry knowledge what's their online reviews because there are a lot of agencies at the conferences and you have to pick up to pick the best one because you will be making significant investment in this. In conclusion again making a case for SEO and we use generative AI to write articles. Why we even switch to generative because it was the biggest fire. I could not generate enough content just sitting and writing it myself. Neither my content writers could generate it without generative. It was biggest fire. We used it. We use some tools to clean up what we wrote. So it does not look like generative.

43:18We decided what will be our KPIs and our KPIs are simple. How many sales we generated from posting organic content posting content that gets us in organic results. Just for fun, you can Google used cars Indianapolis and Indianapolis is a town of 900,000 people. When we ask for reviews, we ask people to put what cars they bought, where they came from, and to mention that they came to the car dealership to buy their car from and then you need to decide who will do it and why and why is apparent. You've seen my results and I believe that you can achieve same results in your dealerships and you need to dedicate one person who you can trust with putting this content and not taking your time if you're dealer principal or taking your time if you are marketing director. And luckily we have five minutes for Q&A. I know that Alex answered a lot of questions, but if you have questions, great time to ask right now.

44:46Any questions? Any other questions? Yes. You can we use vAuto and I just call my performance manager or support and say hey I need to add price modifier for my website and for example Capital One and they will add this price modifier And the prices will go out with a different price to this two marketing platforms completely automatically. Thank you. Connect with us with your phone. Literally put your picture right and I think we're out of books but connect with me or email me. I'll more than happy to send you guys any other questions. Well, I think you guys are questionaction.

46:18I'll go first by a lot this time. I mean, it is a lot. It is a lot. What can I say? You have a lot of other responsibilities learning, keeping up with this, especially the like I industry moves so quick since then. I like suggesting to partner with agencies and people who could guide you on it because at the end of the day I think time is most valuable running your business to think about where is my value ad or like my value ad way value could be becoming an SEO expert value ad could be I will become the best automotive SEO expert and great think about where is my value ad where's my time best and everyone else you have to partner with and like best in the industry to help you. I think that's can't do it's not just SEO. There's so many components to running a dealership, Can't do everything could do everything yourself, but you'll probably do not the best job. Victor could comment on this because he actually does

47:41Know a lot of this stuff and does a lot of stuff. My advice would be to check reputation of the all the agencies that you have and ask them for people who they helped with search engine optimization on their websites and really I mean you can connect with me with Alex and say hey that's what I got do you think it's for real or the information that I received is not what you would be looking for and we would be happy to help but again asking about Hey, like u who is a dealer who you helped and what keywords you optimized for would tell you whether they really doing good job or it's just a snake oil and there's a lot of snake oil there is more so than other industries by the way I work in every single industry and I speak other industries there's an automotive feel like a little bit more in the franchise than that site, but a lot of them are seeking advantage. And maybe because there's a knowledge gap, maybe because dealers are doing so much that they don't have the full understanding, but so much so much bad stuff gets done. But yeah, I think Victor and I page this that got to partner with trusted people. Why do you

49:04Find that? That's the I know big got a lot better than 20 groups seeing what other people are recommending, but I'm big on reputation. I work with tons of companies and that's always my goto. Yes. Yes. That's a good one. That's actually a very complex question these questions so Google does not allow let's say let's say that allows they do not allow either buy links or treatments so link building becomes a very manual how do we how do we do it is literally the key that my team that does it is out it's outbound because the way we do it is for example and the way this the starting this is the starting I haven't done anything so far. Look at the keywords. Look at what websites rank for them. And there's a lot of free tools that tell you what links they have. You can look up public information. Put in a website. Here's all the links they have. So, put up a competitor of yours that ranks very well, see them, and then go to those websites, go to those companies, and ask for a link. And I'll give you a great example. We have a limo company in New York City that we work with. They when we did this exercise we found out

50:30The JFK airport website links to a couple limo companies but not to theirs and links from JFK is so powerful because it's very authoritative right aside from the traffic which they get from them into but it's very authoritative it took us six months of emailing calling texting sending letters like there was a point where the guy our point of contact that we found there was like I'll add you the link I just don't know who has access to the website they're like we have no idea who has access So it's a very manual link building effort with a lot of outage a lot of with JFK where we how we got the content is we actually send a letter so it's like very old school manual but that's the best way there's a lot of the black cap they call it gray hat where like submit the sites and ways I would not recommend but that the best starting point is to see what sites rank and then it's a very easy outreach like hey you link to this car dealership should add me to. There's also a lot of local stuff you could be doing, If you're sponsoring a local high school sports team or whatever, add me to our website about sponsor. I'm more than happy to sponsor it, but we put this on the school website. So there's a lot of things you could be doing, but I think it's going to become more and more important every year. I really believe that it's dead and all that, but it's helping generate AI cite your business / citations a lot. Well, the study shows I think it's going to become more important. Yes.

52:02Doesn't care. And they've got images have gotten so good in the last couple months. Videos, images. Six months ago, the AI was still creating videos and images with like eight fingers like three toes. That's how it's AI by the way. And a lot of celebrities like AI-doctored pictures and if you zoom in, they have like an extra finger. That's how it's AI. AI had the hardest time with fingers and toes. And it's interesting for me because I speak a lot about AI see how this is developing. There's these like small I would call them like fringe pieces. So for example, you ask AI images to give you an image of a watch. It'll always show the time of the same I think it's 3 p.m. Because that's the that's the most visually appealing way to present the watch. So if you go to any watch website, they're always present the same. The five the arrow hands are always you can fact check. You go like Rolex whatever every watch company has images that show the clock the arrow hands the same way. Because of that AI can't do it differently. You can literally tell it that I want it differently but I can't because there's no references. All the images out there don't have the clock the watch. So for me it's very interesting seeing all these fringe cases the AI being so smart and struggling but image generation has become a lot better for Google they don't care Alex yes question

53:42I would I try not to personally recommend any tools because I have friends with a lot of owners of these tools and I recommend one and not the other and they get mad at me. But if you Google like there's a ton of them. They usually have to pay a little bit but they'll give you like a little bit for free. They're like they're like the drug dealer, They'll let you do like five checks for free and then you have but almost all of them have free trials or something free. So I would just Google and they're everything that comes up at the top of Google tools. But there's it's all