Auto Advice - Used Cars in West Palm Beach

1.) You know you’ve gone too far when the inside of your car looks like some nasty muppet from sesame street.

This post is going to deal directly with buying a used car, truck, van, or any other vehicle in south Florida, but the tips we will provide for you here are applicable in most areas of the country.

To begin, let us acknowledge the vast number of choices you likely have when you set out to purchase a car.  Whether its a used car or a new car, you’ve got everything from the very large corporate dealership, such as an AutoNation dealership like Maroone, to smaller, family owned dealerships like Auto Advice in West Palm Beach.  Additionally, in an area like south florida, when buying a car you’re not really confined to your immediate area.  For instance, if you live in Jupiter, you’ve literally got options from West Palm Beach, to Ft Lauderdale, to as far south as Miami.  And there are a very great number of dealers to choose from in this kind of expansive radius.

What you’re goal is, with this in mind, is to find those dealerships who have based their business model upon growing their business by providing value to their customers as opposed to growing their business through sheer volume.   We have all run into that typical sleazy car salesman that we feel is only interested in getting his commission and us out the door in the fastest manner possible.  This is no indication of a company that is truly interested in its car buyers needs, and is indicative of the type of dealership that is truly only interested in getting sales volume up.

To be honest,  this is the way that most dealerships run.  Its the type of car dealing business that takes the least amount of effort, and provides the most immediately seen returns.  But its a business model that in the face of difficult times, and likely in the long run, will fail - because it neglects its customers needs, de-emphasizes the need for adding value to all of its products, including the service it offers with each car it sells, and forgets the most important part of a car sale - building loyal customers that will become valuable referrals.

So, when you go out car shopping, remember that you are the key to each dealer’s success.  Good companies and good car dealerships are not BS’ing when they say that every customer is their most important customer.   For them, they reputation of their business, and nearly all of their recurring sales will be based on the loyalty of their customer base, and the desire of their buyers to promote them and help them sell more cars.  When you create a dealership that is focused on the customer, you create an atmosphere where sales will materialize and business will boom.  So if you’re in south Florida, anywhere from Miami to Ft Lauderdale, to West Palm beach, we encourage you to check out the little guys.  Check out the businesses that have grown because of their commitment to their customers and the value of the products they sell.

Dealerships like Auto Advice personify this kind of mentality.  They are family owned and operated, and as a result have demonstrated a long standing commitment to the work ethic necessary to build a loyal customer base, and have learned the great business strength of adding value to products and services, while building bigger business with referrals from happy customers.

Here at Auto Advice we look at each an every customer not as one potential possibility to create happiness through a good deal on a great car,  but as an infinite number of chances to meet people ready to take advantage of the great inventory we have, and are truly excited about helping those people find the car or truck that is perfect for them.

So make it your mission to discover a car dealer that takes selling cars to the next level.  Look for a family owned place, or a smaller dealership that is truly reliant upon good service for their very survival.  Look for an up and comer like auto advice, whose reputation continues to shine, and whose passion for service and good deals only increases with time.

Scamming body shops removing airbags for profit, stuffing rags and other junk in its cavities.

“Unsuspecting drivers may be in for an incredible awakening that could be deadly.”

Although the data is incomplete about how widespread this problem may actually be, there are many warning signs pointing to alarmingly high numbers. Analysis has found that body shops around the country have been stuffing thousands of unsafe, fake, or re-manufactured airbags into cars throughout the country.

“Replacement air bag systems may range from $1,000 to $3,000, maybe more if the dashboard shell or other dash components are damaged by the force of a passenger-side deployment,” says Larry Gamache of Carfax. “Dishonest mechanics can generate a lot of money taking advantage of the unsuspecting consumer.”

Google Now Showing Almost All Your Backlinks in Webmaster Tools

What has long been a frustrating limitation of google’s link:domain.com command is that it has long shown only a very limited number of the backlinks that google knows about.   As you are probably aware if you are in the SEO field, backlinks are an integral part of keeping or getting your site high in the SERPS for your keywords, and until recently, determining which backlinks Google was finding was a bit of a guessing game.  On one of my client’s sites, for instance autoadviceoffl.com, we were only registering one backlink with the link:domain.com command.   By logging into Google’s webmaster tools and checking out their “links” section, I was able to see that Google had actually registered over 150 backlinks.

Using this tool you can also make sure you’re being linked to by the domains you have actively sought links from, and can diagnose possible reasons for your sites decine/increase in rankings due to an increase or decrease in links, or links from possible bad neighborhoods.  In any case, this is a more than welcomed tool that is definitely going to help this webmaster start taking some of the guesswork out of our link building efforts and our questions regarding our ranking on Google.  This is great news

How To Decrease Your Chances of Dying in Car Accident By Nearly 1000%

1.) Wear A Seatbelt.
Everyone always hears that they should wear a seatbelt, and yet anywear from 30-50% of drivers and passengers continue to either forget or refuse to wear their seatbelts. Whether its due to discomfort, lack of habit, or simply a total disregard for one’s own mortality, not wearing a seatbelt is one of the surest ways to double your own likelyhood of dying in a car accident. Statistics have clearly shown over the past few decades that you are almost 50% more likely to die in an accident if you are not wearing a safety restraint.

2.) Don’t Be A Male Between The Ages of 15-18 years old.

It has been shown that the group most vulnerable to traffic accidents and fatalities is males between the ages of 15 and 18 years old. This demographic obviously has a number of negatives working against them. For one, this is the age one begins learning how to drive, and so these drivers have the disadvantage of having little to no driving experience. Additionally, these drivers are more likely to be driving at high speeds and without a seatbelt, compounded by their higher likelyhood of driving an older and less safe vehicle. Fitting into this demographic increases your chances by an unbelievable 5 times.

3.) Don’t Drive On Saturday

According to Government Statistics from 2005, there are twice as many traffic fatalities on Saturday as there are in the beginning of the week. This is most likely due to the number of people on the road, in combination with the increased consumption of alcohol (and the obvious increase in DUI’s), which has been shown time and again to be the number one risk to drivers. If you drive between the hours of 12pm and 3am, you are increasing your risk of encountering another driver who is intoxicated by 50%. Furthermore, if you are speeding or in the vacinity of a speeding car, your are 3 times as likely to encounter a drunk driver.

4.)Don’t Be Native American

Surprisingly, Native Americans have a traffic fatality rate of almost threee times other minorities. The reasons for this have not been fully investigated, but it has been shown that for the past decade they have remained the group most vulnerable to traffic accidents that result in a fatality. Possible corrillates to this data me be types of vehicles driven, as well as the locations. (certain states have significantly higher traffic fatality rates) - possibly due to local roads, laws, and ordinances, as well as police enforcement and DUI penalties.

5.) Don’t Live in Puerto Rico
As previously mentioned, certain states have much lower percentages associated with traffic fatalities. Connnecticut was rated lowest in 2005, with a 0.86 %, while Puerto Rico (while not a state, but included in government statistics on the subject) ranked about three times as high. Again, this could be the result of the driving conditions, in combination with the safety of the vehicles involved in roadway accidents, but this statistic remains a very frightening one.

6.)Don’t Drive a car that is over 11 years old.

Vehicles don’t just depreciate in value as they age, they also become significantly less safe, and your chances from dying in a car crash increase greatly as the vehicle ages. While the increasing safety of new vehicle features and technological advances may somewhat skew these statistics, they cannot account for the great drop off seen after 11 or 12 years of age. Any vehicle that reaches this age (and is likely in the mileage range of 120,000+ miles) is twice as likely to kill you in an accident than in years past. Because of this, perhaps it isn’t the wisest idea to purchase a car over this age, or go by the motto of “running it into the ground.”

7.)Don’t Drive a Corvette

It has been shown that Corvettes are the most dangerous cars on the road. This does not necessarily mean that Corvettes have historically performed the worst in crash tests. In fact, there are certainly many cars that have performed much more poorly, but there is much data to suggest that simply driving a corvette means that you are much more likely the type of driver that speeds and takes risks. As the result of this fact, Corvette drivers get in more than twice as many deadly accidents as the average motorist.

In Other Words: Don’t Be This Guy:

Lets face it, nothing beats actually being on the car lot and being able to see, feel and smell the car you’re thinking of purchasing. The reality is, however, if you’re looking for a used car, you can still weed out a great number of cars before you actually go to see them, and if you’re smart, you can avoid the hassle of going to see a car that may not be what it was portrayed to be. Here are a few guidelines to follow.

1.)Beware of Stock Images

Often, used car dealers will use stock images as a way of getting pictures of the cars they’re selling online without forcing them to make the effort to actually take a picture of the car. This is often misleading to customers because the stock photos are not always labeled as such, and if they are, are sometimes overlooked. Stock photos are not actual pictures of the car, but are professional images taken of a stock car that is meant to be representative of the car one may be considering. To avoid this, look out for the stock label on the used car pictures, and look for some sign that the pictures were taken outside of a professional studio and actually on a lot somewhere.

2.) Beware of Low Quality Images

While low quality or lack of images may not necessarily be a sign that the dealer has something to hide, it also doesn’t really help you get any kind of qualifying idea about the condition of the car. Generic text or descriptions are often unhelpful in gleaning any real information. It is much better to seek out dealers online who offer multiple clear pictures of their cars, cataloging the vehicle from many angles.

3.) Beware of 360 Degree Views

These sales tools are nearly 100% stock panoramic movies. This means that the 360 degree view you see of the used car is absolutely not the vehicle you are considering purchasing. It is instead a stock view of a model car inside a studio. Just because the interior or exterior of the vehicle shown on the panoramic view looks in pristine condition does not mean that the car you are considering buying is in such condition.

4.) Utilize Carfax

Carfax is a powerful tool in assessing a used vehicle. While it costs a small amount of money to run a vehicle history report on a vehicle, the information is invaluable in determining where the vehicle has been in the past, and how it has been used. Some dealers, such as auto advice in west palm beach florida, have contracts with carfax and can provide free reports to their customers. It is a great idea to take advantage of dealers offering this service, as you can be sure the car you’re getting is in the condition it appears to be in.

More tips coming soon….

Technorati Profile

We’ve noticed lately that our customers looking to buy a used car are often lead to the stage where they might submit their credit application in order to be approved for financing on their used car.  What we’ve found is that, surprisingly, a large percentage of people still feel quite uncomfortable submitting personal information over the internet.  With the hype created around identity theft, its quite clear that people have been conditioned to believe that their personal information is ripe for the taking as soon as they are foolish enough to submit it online.  Perhaps the apprehension comes from the fact that those customers looking for used cars in west palm beach might be slightly less tech savvy, due to their demographic, and the further high incidence and exposure through the media of any crimes involving identity theft.

The truth of the matter is, however, that you’re always at risk to have your information stolen online, but it is more likely that your information could be stolen or your identity stolen through a much more insidious means than a simple application on a used car dealer website in palm beach Florida.  What is much more frightening is the likelihood of having even more personal information stolen from your computer through back door programs and Trojans…as well as spy ware you may have inadvertently installed with software that seemed harmless.  The real truth is that when you submit information online, it is usually encrypted, which offers a very high level of protection.  Your raw keystrokes, however, which are easily obtained through spy software, are not encrypted in any way, and fully represent everything you are likely to type into any secured form out there on the internet today.

The automotive industry is on the cusp of a great change in the way its marketing dollars are going to be spent. Each year more and more of the marketing budget is allocated away from traditional media, and towards internet advertising. Perhaps the most crucial among the forms of internet advertising is Pay Per Click, but for those with little experience, there are many pitfalls that can render your internet marketing campaign impotent. Primary in creating an effective PPC (pay per click) internet marketing strategy is choosing the appropriate keywords to best reach your customers. For this reason, I have put together this guide for creating an effective and well rounded keyword portfolio to help you generate more leads in less time.
In Pay Per Click, organization is King. Without an organized keyword portfolio, building an effective campaign will be next to impossible. Keywords must be organized into groups with a similar theme. These theme based groups of keywords are known as AdGroups. In my experience there are 6 essential Adgroups that comprise an effective PPC campaign. They Include:

1. Branded Keywords
2. Product Keywords
3. Location Based Keywords
4. Long Tail Keywords
5. Misspelling Keywords
6. Competitors keywords

1. Branded Keywords:

This will simply be any keywords related to your company name. So if my company name is Bill Smith Toyota my AdGroup might look something like this:

bill smith dealership
bill smith car dealership
bill smith Toyota dealership
bill smith Toyota
bill smith used car
bill smith car sales
bill smith auto
bill smith automotive
bill smith used auto
etc… Try to build out as an extensive list as possible.

The important thing for this category is to try to envision any way your customers might be looking for your company online. For many dealerships and online retailers that also do traditional advertising, this AdGroup can account for up to 50% of their traffic. One pitfall to look out for is if you have a very common company name. In the example given, I would not want the keyword “Bill Smith” because a good deal of searchers would be looking for the person Bill Smith, and not the Bill Smith car dealership.

2. Product Keywords:

The product keywords AdGroup will include all of the products your company sells, usually coupled with location. Using Bill Smiths Car Dealership as an example here is what I mean:

Honda CRV Miami
Honda CRV Fort Lauderdale
Honda CRV Boca Raton
Honda CRV West Palm Beach
BMW Z4 Miami
BMW Z4 Fort Lauderdale
BMW Z4 Boca Raton
BMW Z4 West Palm Beach

This AdGroup should be very extensive including all of your products and all of your locations combined in as many permutations as you can. An excellent online tool for creating these permutations can be found at Seobook.com. The biggest decision when it comes to this adgroup is whether or not your product keywords should be coupled with location. If you are a national business, you may want to leave off specific locations. The caveat to this is, BE CAREFUL of accidentally choosing keywords that would generate extensive but poorly targeted clicks. Think of what would happen if I as a local car dealer were to bid on the keyword: “Honda CRV”. I would see a good deal of traffic (at a high price), but very poor conversion rates.

3. Location Based Keywords:

These keywords include all keywords related not specifically to your products, but to your overall business coupled with Local and or Regional identifiers. Using Bill Smiths Auto Dealership:

Regional:
Florida cars
Florida used cars
Florida car dealership
Florida used car dealership
Palm beach dealership
Palm beach car dealership
Palm beach used car dealership

Local:
West palm beach cars
West palm beach used cars
West palm beach dealership
Boca Raton used cars
Boca Raton cars
Boca Raton used car dealership

As with the other AdGroups, try to build as an extensive list as possible. A great tool for building out these lists is the Seobook.com permutation tool. Use this tool and envision as many locations and variations as possible.

4. Long Tail Keywords
In Pay Per Click, one of the most cost effective ways to generate traffic is by targeting what is known as “the long tail”. Simply explained, the long tail consists of keywords that relate to your product or services that are very specific, generate little traffic, and are thus very inexpensive because of their low competition. They key to being successful with the long tail is VOLUME. By having a large list of long tail keywords, we can generate significant amounts of traffic at a low cost. Examples of long tail keywords would include:

Cheap used cars in west palm beach florida
Used Toyota car dealership in Miami
Find used cars in south florida
Miami florida Toyota used cars

5. Misspelled Keywords
An often overlooked group of keywords are misspellings. It is important to have an adgroup with common misspellings of your high volume keywords. For our car dealership example we might have a misspellings adgroup that would look like this:

Usd car sales
Used car sals
Car delership
Toyta dealership
Use auto dealer

6. Competitors Keywords
The last of the possible adgroups that I am going to suggest has the potential for generating a great deal of traffic for your site at a low price, but definitely has questionable ethics. I am referring to using your competitors brand recognition to your own use, and stealing their would-be customers by targeting their branded keywords. Using Bill Smiths Toyota Dealership as an example, we would create an adgroup consisting of the branded keywords of his competitors. Some examples could be:

John Doe Toyota
James Brown Toyota
Bev Morey Toyota
John Doe Toyota Dealership
James Brown Dealership
Bev Morey Car Dealership

As always, try to build out an extensive list.

I hope you have found this organization helpful in creating the beginning of what will be a well developed keyword portfolio. Just remember, you can never have to many well targeted keywords, but having keywords for the sake of volume alone makes little sense. Frequent evaluations of AdGroup and keyword performance will make or break your return on investment. Take the time to weed out those ineffective keywords and develop bidding strategies that maximize the effectiveness of keywords that produce conversions. Please visit again soon for more advice on Keyword Portfolio management.

Print, Radio and Television advertising are most often thought of as the status quo in advertising for the automotive industry.  Huge budgets go into new and innovative marketing campaigns through these media every day in an effort to attract large audience of people looking to purchase a car.  Flipping on the television, you face a deluge of car commercials, either directly from the manufacturer or from the dealers themselves, tempting you with one incentive after another, one feature after another, one added bonus after another.  For many of us, this deluge has resulted in us tuning out, not because we aren’t interested in purchasing a car, but simply because we are burned out.  We’ve been overloaded and our circuits have shorted out.  This phenomenon occurs, of course, in many other industries, but I believe the car industry is different in that there is an untapped resource, a solution to the apathy created by advertising overload.  In order to understand this solution, I believe it is important to discuss the change I believe takes place when apathy sets in….the change that is setting in throughout the auto industry and in many other industries.
When we are first offered a product or service through traditional advertising, we take to it quickly if it suits our needs.  We are happy to have been offered a product that may in some way improve our life, and we don’t see the offer in a negative light.  We see the offer as a solution, a promise, a benefit.  We are not weary of the product except insofar as we are unfamiliar with it.  The offering of that new product does not feel like an attempt to convince us away from a decision we might have otherwise made if left to our own devices, and so we feel free to choose it or not choose it.  When we are offered a product or service, however, such as car, we immediately recoil, we immediately see the offer as inherently decieving, designed not simply to offer us a benefit, but to convince us, to manipulate us, to make a decision for us.  Offers so “unbeatable” we have no choice but to buy, or interest rates that are good for “this weekend only,” are devices that while calling us to action also attempt to make our decisions for us.  This effect, this pull, this explosion of advertising methods and experiments come through loud and clear as nothing more than an attempt to move us toward purchase with gimmicks and manipulation.  While this ever increasing push to purchase has made us bitter, a new medium has emerged that is finally beginning to offer a new way of advertising.  This medium is, of course, the Internet.
The original purpose of the internet was to share information.  It was a new and exciting mode of communication for the military and academic institutions alike.  In the early days, internet usage exploded as a result of its ability to connect people to information.  Its purpose has always been for the sharing of new ideas.  As the net grew in popularity, it obviously also became a fantastic new avenue of exploration for consumers and businesses.  And it has grown exponentially to this end, becoming now almost more of a consumer based world than an information based world.  With this consumber culture on the net came the traditional methods of advertising, the attention grabbing signs, the sparkling banners, the trickery and promotional incentives encouraging us to buy.  But just as the deluge in traditional advertising in the auto industry has caused a great deal of apathy, so too did the traditional forms of advertising on the net.  The result of such apathy resulted in what has become an almost worldwide blindness for certain previously heralded internet advertising methods.  Of such are traditional email marking (mostly as the result of email spam), and the ever declining efficacy of banner advertising.  In its place have come pay per click advertisements served by companies such as google and yahoo, which work only insofar as the modicum of relevancy they offer in their relatedness to our searches or to the page we may be viewing.
So now, in only the past year, we are finally seeing what is to become of the net;  the net is to become again a place based upon the exchange of information.  The exchange of information offers us freedom.  We have begun to turn away from the bias of large media sources and are falling back on the free exchange of news and ideas between individuals.  Such expression is exemplified by sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us, which give us control of the information we receive.   The increasing efficiency and accuracy of search engines such as google have propelled such companies into some of the most highly respected and promising companies on the market.  So we are seeing a shift in the desires of consumers to make their own decisions based on a variety of unbiased sources.  Even more importantly, we see this trend mirrored in the declining effectiveness of traditional advertising methods.

So, with this in mind….what could the solution to this problem be?

I believe the only solution is to give people what they want: true, detailed, clear and effective communication of ideas, products or services that truly have value.  Now, this is bad news for those tricksters out there who rely on advertising to misrepresent products or services (hint: infomercials).  But for those companies who have built their business on quality products or services and for those who stand behind those products or services, this is fantastic news.  It means that word will spread about the quality of those products or services.  In the new world of internet advertising, the most money is to be made by entrusting those consumers with whom you have already proved your worthiness.  It is the individual that holds the power on the internet.  The individual has the power to discern which information is valuable to him, and now has the power to encourage others into making the same discernment.   This means that your new methods of advertising lie on any avenue where information is freely exchanged.  Instruments like viral videos have become explosive because they have enabled the individual to choose what he likes, and then spread that information softly.  This soft push of what is almost always frivolous material has resulted in extreme exposure of content.

These are just some preliminary thoughts….what do you think?

Some additional ideas to come, especially more info on what this may mean for the future of used car dealers and the auto industry in general, or specifics on the advertising opportunities in our area, west palm beach florida.

When there is an initiative to increase a company’s visibility on the internet, Google seems synonymous with internet marketing. An aggregate view of the companies who offer ad word advertising on the internet shows that Google is by far the most saturated. This saturation is having vast negative repercussions on the small to medium sized organizations. Popular keyword bids are ever increasing out of the budgeting range for a small to medium sized company and into the budget of larger firms. Some firms view this as their demise on the internet but that’s definitely a faulty assumption.

Any average internet marketing manager would view this competition as a time to diversify their internet marketing efforts. Consider this, Google is the largest player in the internet marketing sector however search engines such as Yahoo and MSN aren’t too far behind them. Also, some would argue that depending on the type of product you’re marketing, one search engine could provide more relevant traffic (keyword research is necessary to determine this). With the search engine market share in mind, look at slightly less competitive search engines and take advantage of the lower prices and valuable traffic. This would effectively cut the total cost of your internet marketing campaign and pacify your company until the search engines your diversified to become saturated.

If running away from the stiff competition is not something you’re interested in you may want to set your website up with a company who provides SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services. SEO is the more invasive cousin to Pay per Click marketing. Instead of paying Google, Yahoo, MSN or any search engine to promote your site via adword advertising, there are effective ways to build, structure, and maintain your website. Methods suggested by SEO firms will set your site up to be naturally recognized by the search engines as the most relevant content per your keyword search. These results will sustain themselves unless another site is more relevant than yours rather then someone out bidding you with their marketing budget.

Research:

SEO (organic)

SEOmoz: www.seomoz.org

Pay Per Click

Yahoo: searchmarketing.yahoo.com

MSN: adcenter.microsoft.com

Google: adwords.google.com