Just the other week, I had the privilege of attending PubCon 2011 in Las Vegas. I went there to expand my understanding of where SEO is going, to chat with industry leaders about the best Social Media strategies, and apparently to lose $37 on blackjack. Massive monetary losses aside, many of the things I learned in sessions and in conversations with others at the conference helped me form solid thoughts about how the current and future landscape of digital marketing applies to car dealers. Here are my 4 biggest takeaways for dealerships from PubCon 2011:

Vegas Takeaway #1: Don't try to pass off 37 singles as a wad of 100's

1.  Do You Educate?

One keynote session featured Google’s Matt Cutts (who most of us know) and Amit Singhal (who is Matt’s boss). Amit knows more about the Google algorithm than anyone. Basically, he’s in charge of why your site ranks where it does. A Q&A made up the majority of this session, and the final question was the most telling. Danny Sullivan asked Amit to define a high-quality site in a Tweetable answer. The paraphrased response?

If you can send your child to a site and they can learn something, that’s a high-quality site.

This indicates a few things to me: Uniqueness is important. Depth of content is important. Presentation is important. Things I already thought. But I think it’s important to remember that Amit’s response was not: “If you can visit a site and get the best price on a Prius, that’s a high-quality site.” 

2.  Take Additional Ad Dollars to Mobile (not Alabama)

Mobile searches could be up to 20% of all searches performed in 2012. This is particularly relevant to car dealers. Consider the following:

• 20% of users who use mobile search for researching autos do so while travelling from one dealer to another
• 40% of those using mobile devices to research autos are doing so at home

It’s important that sites render well for mobile devices and it’s important that your site appears when consumers search on mobile devices. A car dealership should have a separate Mobile AdWords campaign set up so the message is tailored for mobile devices specifically.

3.  Consistency is Key

When it comes to local search, the volume, accuracy and consistency of online citations of your dealership are very important. If your dealership goes by a different name on lots of online directories, Google may trust all of those citations over your owner-verified edits.

This becomes particularly important for any dealers who undergo a name change or who may have SEO gaming business listings out there, such as listing “Dealer Name” and “Dealer Name BMW Service” on directories for SEO purposes. By the way, that’s not a good SEO tactic.

4.  Freshness is Relative

A lot of people are quick to try to interpret what Google algorithm updates mean. When Google announced that 35% of searches would be affected by its latest public algorithm change regarding freshness, it seemed like a big number, and action seemed necessary.

Freshness as a ranking factor applies primarily for topical interest. Google determines whether or not a query deserves freshness (QDF) based on a number of signals. QDF won’t be applied to the term used Nissan Altima for sale, but it probably will be applied to Nissan recall information and even Nissan Altima. Google will probably want to present pages that are  up-to-the-minute for the recall search because of its trending.

For the Nissan Altima, results would not need to be that fresh, but Google probably assumes the searcher is looking for the latest product information. Still, that broad product search term needs Google’s “local intent” tag to return a Nissan dealer in results, and we don’t really see that on desktop searches. I have noticed that Google mobile searches will often take a term like Nissan Altima and give it local intent.

Really, what it comes down to with freshness for a car dealer is that you want to be fresher than your competitors.