The Dealer Playbook
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Greg Gifford: Why Your SEO Strategy is Failing
There’s a good reason that many companies have SEO experts on their teams and spend resources and money on using the tactic in marketing activities. Well, in this episode Greg Gifford is here to help us understand why that is and why we should too.
Greg Gifford is not just a name in the SEO world; he’s a force to be reckoned with. As the COO of Search Lab Digital, Greg has shared his expertise globally, helping businesses enhance their online presence. Known for his engaging and practical approach to local SEO, Greg is the go-to guy for anyone serious about mastering the art of search engine optimization.
What We Discuss In This Episode:
In this episode, Greg Gifford and I dive into the ever-changing world of SEO. We kick things off by talking about the evolution of SEO and how it's been as unpredictable as the Marvel Universe, emphasizing the importance of staying agile and innovative to keep up with Google's algorithm updates.
While there's a lot of buzz about AI's impact on SEO. Greg demystifies these claims, explaining why AI tools are not the ultimate game-changers some believe them to be. "AI isn't the magic bullet for SEO. It's a tool that needs careful handling and human oversight to ensure quality."
Content is king, but context is the emperor. Greg stresses the necessity of creating valuable, relevant content that answers your customers' questions. "Anticipating customer questions and providing those answers is crucial," he says. We explore beyond keyword stuffing to a more holistic approach, aiming to help your business stand out and foster deeper engagement with your audience.
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Speaker 2:Really the way that SEO works in today's world is you need to anticipate the questions that your potential and current customers are going to be asking and have those answers on your website. That's really all it takes.
Speaker 1:Hey gang, on this episode of the Dealer Playbook, I'm sitting down with my pal, greg Gifford. He's the COO at Search Lab Digital. We're talking all about SEOmageddon, seopalooza Stay tuned. The car business is rapidly changing and modern car dealers are meeting the demand. I'm Michael Cirillo and together we'll explore the best strategies, ideas and tools to create a thriving life in and out of the business. This is the Dealer Playbook.
Speaker 1:Hey buddy what's going on? How are you doing, my friend? Can you believe it's already been five years since the last time we did this.
Speaker 2:Has it really? I couldn't remember. I didn't remember I'd even been on the show before, but like I mean, that makes sense. It's five years, seems like never. I mean, yes, time flies, man, especially like five years in digital land, like pre-covid, and that that like year to two year gap of just not getting out and seeing people at all makes it really hard to go. Oh, it was this long ago that something happened.
Speaker 1:It's, it's not it's the thanos snap yeah, it really is. I got so sick of saying pandemic and COVID, I just started calling it the Thanos snap.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Speaking of comic books, I cause I see the room you're in, I I know you're. You were big into board games and just before we hit record I was like are you in a comic book? You and a comic was. You're like, oh, comic books are all of it. So I have to ask your, your take your reaction to Dr Doom Announcement being played by RDJ.
Speaker 2:I mean I'm curious to see how they pull it off.
Speaker 1:Like where are they going with it?
Speaker 2:You think, I think they're going with. They were desperate to figure out something to do, since Jonathan Majors was not going to be Kang anymore, and clearly this is the direction they went, because the, you know, the first of the next Avengers movies was going to be Avengers Kang Dynasty, followed by Avengers Secret Wars and now it's Avengers Doomsday. So I think they're just. It'll be interesting to see if they even mention Kang again or if they're just dropping them like a hot potato. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Was there controversy around him?
Speaker 2:Do what?
Speaker 1:Was there controversy around the guy that plays Kang? You didn't know that. What did I miss?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, he apparently was very abusive towards his girlfriend and beat her up in a cab in New York and she sued him for it and this the negative and he was found guilty. So Disney dropped him and everything dropped him. His agent dropped him, like he's like pariah in Hollywood now. So they were scrambling because he was like like the thanos was for the first round of movies, like he was the next big bad, that everything was going to lead up to this big battle, but they already had introduced the multiverse.
Speaker 2:It would have been just as easy to just cast somebody else and have it be okay, this is a variant of him, but now they're going with this, which clearly, for the people out there that aren't comics nerds, victor Von Doom and Tony Stark are very similar.
Speaker 2:They're very ego driven, intelligent, highly intelligent guys. It's just Stark is a better person than Doom was, so he kind of went a different way. I feel like it has to be a Tony Stark from an alternate universe that went bad instead of good, because there's a lot of cool things they could potentially do with that where, after having him die sacrificing himself to save the world, now they have to fight against a guy that looks like their best friend who saved the world, who isn't. But also like, do we ever even see him without his mask, or is he just going to be, from the beginning, introduced as this masked guy and you just see his eyes? I mean, there's a. There's still a lot we don't know. I'm kind of excited about it. I would have preferred they brought him back to be a variant of iron man from another universe, but you know, we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1:Somehow oddly, this all ties into what I want to pick your brain on today Because, like everything you just said about this the story arc, the possibilities, the Disney having to change the course and change the script and introduce a new script and then pull back on it and then go is kind of like how I feel about google this year right kind of like google forever out to save the world.
Speaker 1:At one point now we're all realizing we have to come and fight against it. Yeah, um, you obviously are. Um, I'm just gonna say it it You're a world renowned SEO. You've literally spoken in the four corners of the planet on SEO.
Speaker 2:Mostly not quite all four corners, but yeah, I mean enough American Airlines places.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got enough American Airlines points to enjoy some good travel.
Speaker 2:I'm burning it all this fall man. I got a conference in Bali and we're taking the kids and we're going to stay for like three weeks and wow yeah.
Speaker 1:Bali. That's insane, that's so cool. But I mean you, uh. I mean, when I was kind of breaking into the scene, it was like who knows SEO? Oh, it's Greg Gifford. It's like Rand Fishkin and Greg Gifford. And then there was a morphing of like. You were like, oh, these two dudes are so connected. And then it was like you know, there's so many things happening this year where I feel like the script got flipped and then it flipped back and then I got it's like flipping flapjacks with, with SEO. Oh, seo is dying. Just kidding, it's alive and well. Hey, don't ever do this. This isn't SEO. Oh wait, yes, it is AI and SEO. Don't do it, do it. There's so many different things. And then, leading up to this leaked document, that LinkedIn has had a heyday over working at an SEO firm. Being in the SEO industry for as long as you have been, as you have been, what's your take now? We got your reaction to RDJ as Victor Von Doom. What's your reaction to the SEO landscape right now?
Speaker 2:Honestly, I don't have much of a reaction. It's really been this way forever. Every year something happens that is going to kill SEO and it never dies. Every year there are people saying don't do this stuff, that then the same people will turn around six months later and go oh wait, maybe we were wrong, maybe you should do this stuff, or vice versa. It's just I think this year it's been much more public because of the document leak and because of AI being the big hot thing that everybody's talking about.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people are able to see that kind of infighting and back and forth in SEO. That's always been there. It's kind of been behind the scenes to the general public. I think now it's a little bit more obvious that that stuff is going on. That being said, I mean it's kind of just the status quo. I mean I don't really think anything changed. I think the document leak was interesting, but a lot of people took it to mean something that it didn't mean and a lot of people made conclusions from it that are patently incorrect. Even if you just look at what's there, the stuff that these people are saying is incorrect, but a lot of people took it and said this is game changing for SEO. Okay, maybe the people it was game changing for was all the people that sucked at SEO, but the people that were really good at SEO.
Speaker 1:It was like okay, I got to ask you on this because I I kind of have I rarely have a set list of questions that I want to ask, but it's like, how often do I actually, even though we're kind of neighbors, quasi neighbors- I mean for Texas, it pretty much is neighbor neighbor? Yeah, based on the size of Texas.
Speaker 2:But like, how long have you been here now? We still haven't, even, like, had lunch or drinks or anything that that kind of sucks.
Speaker 1:That sucks, that does suck. Long have you been here now?
Speaker 2:we still haven't even like had lunch or drinks or anything that that kind of sucks, that sucks that doesn't affect that we we do need to fix that.
Speaker 1:Wait, what part you're? You're like frisco area, right, I'm alan. So like right now, okay, okay, cool, oh, that's easy. Probably down the other 35. Hit across, yeah, one of the toll freeways, yeah, or, as my daughter calls it, spaghetti highway, because all the overpass you have different. Obviously there's always so much to debate when it comes to SEO. You have those in the industry that say car dealer websites are shopping websites. You have others who say, no, shopping websites are websites that you can actually transact on. I know it's semantical, but I want to get your take on right out of the gates, just the first approach to a car dealer website. Those that say, no, it's a shopping site, like Amazon, like Best Buy, like, et cetera, et cetera. Those that say, no, it's not. Of course it's semantical, but we know Google loves semantics. So what's your take on a car dealer website? It a shopping site? Is it a research site? Is it? Is it a hybrid? Is it?
Speaker 2:kind of a hybrid. I mean, sure, if you really wanted to like be super nitpicky. But the days are gone of you just show up at a dealership and go, hey, I like fords. What do you have? Like you know, when you get to the dealership it's either there's a certain car you want or it's down to one or two that you want.
Speaker 2:You've done all that research on the site. Just because you didn't actually do the transaction on the site doesn't mean it's not a shopping site. But it's also more than just the vehicle listings on the site and a lot of dealers don't think about that. A lot of dealers think, hey, I've got all my cars listed and all my photos and everything. Okay, it's great. But that's only for the extreme bottom of the funnel, when somebody's ready to buy and they know exactly what they want to buy. But most dealers just in general, whether they're doing SEO or not, forget the fact that people are going to come to your website a whole bunch of times before they submit their information as a lead and you need eyeballs on your website and your dealership as early as possible in that research process, which means you've got to have helpful information on the site outside of the vehicles, and that's where a lot of dealers really screw it up.
Speaker 1:Hey, I hope you're enjoying this episode of the dealer playbook and before we hop back in, I want to thank today's sponsor, autofi. Autofi helps dealers like you sell smarter, not harder on your dealership website and now in your showroom too. Autofi solves the everyday problems dealers actually face, like bottlenecks at the sales desk, customer distrust and decision overload. Their all-new showroom solution includes deal estimation desking, lender routing and an F&I menu all in one powerful platform. Dealerships with Autofi sell cars faster, with higher satisfaction and more profit. In fact, dealers make an average of $641 higher back-end PVR on Autofi deals versus their non-Autofi deals. Go to autoficom forward, slash dealer playbook and start selling smarter today.
Speaker 1:All right, let's hop back into this episode. I've attended so many of your workshops where you illustrate this ecosystem of not just to your point, not just VDPs and search results pages and things of that nature, but the actual tie-in intentional tie-in to things that are happening in the community, and maybe it's backlink outreach or whatever it might be. You talk a lot about local SEO and things that you can be doing to Google business profile and citations and all these sorts of things, and to your point, I think, is there are those that are just saying, ah, I got my website and I should be OK. There's also those that I've heard this argument come up recently, which is there's no point in doing what you just said, in making this, this content, available on your website, because there's no way you're going to be able to compete against some of the national outlets Jalopnik, car and Driver, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So how do you say to those people? That's right, exactly, but we shouldn't be trying to compete with Car and Driver and AutoTrader and these big national authoritative sites. And that's the whole problem is that, again, the vast majority of people out there, even outside of automotive, have more of a checklist approach to SEO. I need to put a keyword in a title tag, I need to put a keyword in that heading, I need to have the keyword on the page, I need to have an image on the page and I need to have content about what I sell. And that's as far as they take it. And really the way that SEO works in today's world is you need to anticipate the questions that your potential and current customers are going to be asking and have those answers on your website. That's really all it takes. It's not about I want to show up for Ford dealer Dallas, so let me go put a page up that says Ford dealer Dallas 15 times on it. Like that stuff is honestly asinine. And yeah, that car and driver thing. I use that example all the time because people will go right. Here are the features of the F-150 King Ranch in Dallas, texas, which is stupid because the features aren't different in Dallas than they are everywhere else. They're the same F-150 King Ranch. They're adding in Dallas, texas, because they're like oh, I need to optimize for local, but that's not the right way to do it.
Speaker 2:And then again, like you said, car and driver or the OEM site is going to outrank you a thousand percent of the time because you probably put up 250 to 300 words of BS content just to have that topic on your site, versus car and driver, which has customer reviews and walkthroughs and expert people that review cars talking about what the benefits and pros and cons of that vehicle are. Where you're like, hey, we have this car and it's awesome and it's black and it's got this and, okay, come buy from us and that's all they have. Like, that page doesn't help your customers make a decision. So why is Google going to rank that page? So it's more kind of correct, but also kind of incorrect in that if you're creating content, you should really be creating content around the concepts that you don't show up well for, or at all for in search results. And if you're selling an F-150 King Ranch, you're going to show up for that if you've got it in your inventory, right? So bottom of funnel covered when somebody's looking for a black F-150 2025 King Ranch, if you've got that on your lot, you're going to show up.
Speaker 2:But the people that are like I think I want to buy a truck. I'm. I've got an RV that's a fifth wheel, so I need something that can tow a fifth wheel. It's got to have a certain towing capacity. I'm not really brand loyal. I just got this new trailer and my old truck died, so I need a new one. That I'm going to like Do I want a Ford? Do I want a Chevy? Do I want a Toyota? I don't know. And OK, I do want a Ford. Do I want to an F-450 or like what do I want?
Speaker 2:That's the kind of content you need to be writing, not the. Here are the features of the F-150 King Ranch, but here's the difference between a 150, a 250 and a 450 and what you need and what you need it for and what's it going to do for you. That's the sort of content you should be writing. But then a lot of people forget too that Google really, at the most basic level, is just pattern detection. So, at the most basic level, is just pattern detection. So if you're a Ford dealer in BFE, kansas and there's not another Ford dealer for a hundred miles in any direction, you don't even need to write that content at all because you are literally the only thing out there that satisfies the pattern.
Speaker 2:If somebody is looking for a Ford dealership or anything related to Ford Now, if you're in Dallas, where it's the most dense Ford dealership market in the world, yeah, you got to write that content because you've got to stand out from the competition. But if you're the only Ford guy or the only Toyota guy or the only Mercedes guy in town, you don't need to be writing content about the cars you sell, because you're inherently going to rank number one for that. So really, I think the biggest problem is people not understanding how Google really works or how SEO really works, and number two people just following some checklist that they found online. And that goes for a lot of SEO vendors too. A lot of SEO vendors just have this checklist and they run the same checklist on every dealership. But every brand is different, every dealership has different style of running the dealership, every competitive landscape is different, every location is different. So you really have to customize what you're doing based on your specific business goals. So the checklist approach doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love this idea. You've said the word difference now a few times in this, in this sentiment. It kind of you know what. What comes to my mind is what is the differentiator're right? You know, dallas is the most densely populated ford market, but when you look at your ford competition and everything that they're all doing the same and wondering why they're not outranking one another, they're all using the same seo vendor.
Speaker 1:Uh, who's locked them into, like you said, kind of this cookie cutter oh, you get. You know, four blogs a month, you get. Whatever the standard rig them role is, the idea is to stand out. I love what you started with, which is anticipating the questions that your customers are asking you and answering those questions. It's even like, I think, openings on on just the finance side.
Speaker 1:I think one of the most frustrating parts of buying a car is being ushered into the finance office and sitting there watching them clack at their keyboard for 43 minutes and not saying a word to you. And you're going like, what are they doing? What's the holdup? What's the like actually answering people's questions around financing a car and what happens and what the process is and what you can expect. And hey, if I don't talk to you for five minutes, it's because I'm actually on a phone call with the bank negotiating a better rate. And you know, just like all of the different things, that there's just so many opportunities.
Speaker 1:And this kind of leads me to this sentiment around AI Cause now there's people saying, well, yeah, but like I can go ask that question to chat gpt or claude or whatever they are, what's your, what's your response to that? For people that say, oh, like, search is going away, google doesn't know what they're doing anymore. They're, you know, they're scrambling. They added gemini in. It's not that great, but but ai can just give me the response that I need as quickly as possible. What's what's deficient in that thought process?
Speaker 2:The deficiency there is. The vast majority of the public still doesn't really understand that AI isn't actually AI. Everybody uses the term AI, but it's not AI. It's not artificially intelligent, it is not thinking for itself. Artificially intelligent, it is not thinking for itself.
Speaker 2:All of these systems are large language models and they are word prediction programs. They say if I'm writing about this topic and the first word is the, according to the millions and millions of other pieces of content that I've written about this topic, the next most likely word is car and, according to the millions of things that I've read, the next most likely word is dealership. And it's just gonna spit out a bunch of word vomit that, sure, linguistically kind of looks okay, but if you really look at it, grammatical structure isn't always correct. There's a lot of hallucination in the things that it says. You know, know you'll be like, hey, give me a, give me a 500 word blog post on the 2024 Honda Odyssey, and it'll be like it's got a 250 mile range on a single gallon of gas, which makes zero sense. You can't go 250 miles on a gallon, but it just randomly makes up facts, right. So people don't really understand that chat. Gpt, claude, jasper, whatever you're talking about isn't actually intelligently writing about a topic that it knows about. It's referencing millions of other pieces of previously written content and emulating that content, so it doesn't really know the answer and give you an answer, and that's where most people really screw up.
Speaker 2:Does that mean you can't use AI to write content? No, you can, but you can't. Go, hey, ai tool, write a piece of content and go throw it on your website. You still have to put it through human editing, and I don't mean human editing like you read through it and go, yeah, it looks okay, like you actually have an editor, like a professional editor, fact check and check for grammar and check for spelling and get rid of a lot of the terminology that the AI bots tend to use, and then you can use it. But as far as using chat, gbt or something else as an alternative to Google, it's just not there yet. Like, I don't know if you've tried it, but the answers suck.
Speaker 2:So you know, a year and a half ago, when everybody was like, oh, now we can start writing AI, all this stuff, google's going to go away. No, it's not going away. And then Google released AI overviews, people were like, oh, it's the death of SEO. No, it's not, because then they pulled the AI overviews back.
Speaker 2:The only reason Google put the AI overviews out is because Bing put AI overviews into Bing first and Google didn't want to make it look like Bing was better than them, so they had to rush and do something, and a lot of people don't realize that, like two years ago, google was like we'll never have AI in search results because it's just not there yet. It's not reliable. But then Microsoft came out and released it on Bing, and then Google had to scramble to make up ground so that they could keep their market share. So then they did it too, and they all know that it sucks, and Microsoft knows that it sucks, but they're just putting it out there to look better than Google. So there's a whole lot of infighting in the industry around that stuff, and I think the explosion of all of these AI tools has kind of hurt more people than it's helped, because people don't really understand what they're using.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love this. You know, it's like, when you talk about this infighting and just the ecosystem, the political landscape at play, Microsoft does it first, so now they're like wait a minute. This is where people need to pause and be like so why? Why do it? And the answer is because shareholders.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Google is not your friend. Google is not a free utility. Google is a company that's in business to make money and people forget that.
Speaker 2:And Google has an inherent desire to make sure that the search results are awesome. Because if the search results on Google suck, what are you going to do? You're going to bounce and use DuckDuckGo or Bing or Ecosia or Yahoo or one of these other crappy search engines, and not Google. But as long as Google search results are fairly decent I mean sure they kind of suck, but they've always kind of sucked as long as Google search results are pretty good, you're going to keep using Google, and that means 20% of people are still going to click on paid search ads for every query that they do, and Google is going to continue to make billions of dollars.
Speaker 2:If Google's organic results suck, people won't be on Google clicking on those ads and Google doesn't make any money. And that's part of the reason they're not ruling out a ruling out or they are not rolling out a full AI powered search experience, because where do the ads go in that case? You're asking a conversational question. You get a single answer there's no place for them to put ads, and that's what they have to consider, and that's why you still have ads at the top and ads on the side and ads mixed in the search results, because they still have to make their ad revenue and if they switched to a full, ai powered search results page, there is no search results page anymore and they lose their ad revenue. So you got to kind of consider them how dare you be so commonsensical about this.
Speaker 2:The whole thing is it's not really that hard to do SEO. It's just people hear from all of these agencies or freelancers oh it's really hard and there's a lot of moving pieces and it's going to take forever to get results. And then you start reading articles and one article will tell you to do something and another article will tell you never to do that one thing because that's really bad. And you'll read something that somebody wrote and then you'll read something that the same person wrote. That's a polar opposite of that, because people are really looking at the dates that things are written. There's stuff that I wrote for Search Engine Land 10 years ago that doesn't work anymore, but Search Engine Land still has it up and people can still find it. And there's so much incorrect information. There's so much outdated information. There's a lot of complex moving pieces and a lot of people are just like I don't really know. I just have to pick who to trust. And then, specifically in automotive, you talk to us. We're going to give you an answer of how SEO works. You talk to a different vendor. They're going to give you a different answer. You talk to another vendor they're going to give you a different answer. You talk to a vendor that's in the OEM approved program through Shift Digital or Ford Direct or whatever, they're going to give you another answer, but you can be sure that answer is going to be wrong. So how do you know what to do? And sure everybody's going to say, well, I'm right. But that's why I try and you've seen me do this over the years at NADA and Digital Dealer and whatnot I always try to break things down to really simple concepts because anybody can get up there on stage and go this is how it works, do this, this, this and this.
Speaker 2:But I try to get at the why, not just the how.
Speaker 2:Because if you're just doing the how, then people just leave with another checklist that might work for a couple of months or up to a year, but at some point that checklist starts to break down and it's not going to apply anymore to how the algorithm currently works. So I try to give those simple concepts. Like I said a few minutes ago that Google is really just pattern detection, you got to think about these really simple concepts to understand how Google works. That will never change and that kind of gives dealers a little bit of a leg up when they're trying to figure out, okay, what really matters for seo. Oh well, yeah, I remember greg saying it's pattern detection, so I need a better pattern than the competition, okay, well then you can look at all the competition in town and see everybody's doing the same thing and know you need to do something different. That at least helps you a little bit, and so that's kind of been my goal over the last few years is to squeeze in those kind of general, simple concepts.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Easy to remember, that kind of stick in your mind to help dealers have a better understanding. Moving forward, so that I get it. Not everybody's going to work with us, not everybody's going to work with any single vendor, but it lets you start figuring out. All right, there's a handful of vendors that really are just in this to take my money and there's not going to be any positive benefit coming out of me spending this marketing dollar. Maybe I should spend it somewhere else that I get a little bit better vibe that they're really wanting to help and not just take my money.
Speaker 1:A, a little bit better vibe, that they're really wanting to help and not just take my money, see, and that that leads to, I think, a really good question. You know you talk about. Things have kind of been forced down the industry's throat for so long, in a certain way, that it's become cookie cutter and it's become, you know it's, it's become expected from from the dealer's perspective. So then they're going to vet somebody to help them with SEO. There's two things here. The first is I love, I love the visual you're giving me, which is hey, anybody can do SEO, but here's the reality of it.
Speaker 1:It's a discipline, it is something that you have to pay attention to. If you don't have the bandwidth to learn it and execute it and test upon it and experiment, all that, we're not saying you can't figure it out. We're just saying we're already in the mind space of of doing it. Essentially it's it's it's its own discipline, just like being a ceo is or being a. It's just a different discipline, and whether or not you have the bandwidth to fully execute is one thing. The second thing is to ask better questions. I'm feeling like, instead of imposing what we have adopted as an expectation like how many pieces of content are you going to create for me a month? We need to be asking better questions like, okay, hey, here's what we've been doing for a while. What would you propose that is different? That will help us stand out and, to your point, asking that why and why is that important? Or why should we do that? Or, I think, the dealer asking better questions of whoever they're looking to, right.
Speaker 2:You should be able to ask your provider why you got a certain piece of content, because most of the providers are just going to give you content and you don't know what's coming until it just shows up. And when it shows up, does it pass the smell test? Is it really something that's going to help you get more visibility with customers or answer customer questions? And if it's, here's the King Ranch F-150 features in Dallas, texas then you ask what's the purpose of this? And they go oh, you need to show up for an F-150 King Ranch. And you go why is 250 words?
Speaker 1:of crappy stuff.
Speaker 2:That isn't answering any customer questions going to help with that. So you have to understand that. The other weird thing is, you mentioned earlier, I speak all over the world. The benefit of that is I'm exposed to a lot of different business verticals in a lot of different countries, and really automotive in the United States is the only vertical where you have the manufacturing part of the business get to dictate what the endpoints use for their website and for digital marketing. And not only do they get a dictate, they get a limited to a very limited number of people and there's not really any vetting for who gets in on that. It's more of who wants to give them a kickback, because literally that's what it comes down to, that in between, like Shift Digital or Internet Brands or Ford Direct, they get a kickback off of somebody being in the program, even though they're not providing the service. They're literally not doing anything other than handling billing but they get a kickback of sometimes up to 20% of what you're paying for your digital marketing. And then they have the co-op system. But you can only use co-op on the people that are in the program, which means it's effectively free money, but they're making you use that free money on providers that suck and you go well, at least I'm getting SEO and I don't have to pay for it. Well, it's literally the most important thing you can do for marketing. You'll get more leads from SEO than every other thing combined. Who cares if you got to spend a couple of grand of your own money?
Speaker 2:And there's these weird disconnects too. You'll talk to dealers that like, oh yeah, I spend 50 grand a month on paid search. Ok, well, that's awesome. Yeah, like, my market's huge, you know. And then there's a reason there's they're not wasting 50 grand. They're spending 50 grand and they're making sales, so it's worth it.
Speaker 2:But then you go OK, what are you doing for you? Well, yeah, but like, there's people out there charging three or four grand a month for SEO. That's so expensive, buddy, you're spending 50 grand on paid search that if you stop, it goes away tomorrow. Why not go do the other thing? That's just a couple of grand, even if it's out of your own pocket. When you're going to get more leads from from the three or four grand that you spend on SEO probably gets you more leads than you're getting from the 50 grand of paid search, but that's too expensive. It's this big disconnect of again. I just don't think most people really understand what's going on with it and it's this big scary thing and they go. I just need to check the box that I'm doing it, but they don't really vet the quality of the person that they're partnering with for the SEO.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cause they don't know how, which leads to the last thing I want to talk to you about. I mean, I love the transparency. You don't just say the word transparency, you demonstrate it. You open the book, you lift the hood, whatever the insert pun here for pulling back the curtain and showing the reality of what people should be looking at, asking so that they can properly vet. You're putting on Ignition Conference and it's unlike any other automotive conferences kind of the way it's positioned. Talk to me a little bit about that. When is it? How can people learn more about it and the positioning of it? Why is it different than the other conferences in your opinion?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you know there's a pretty limited number of conferences in automotive. You've obviously got NADA, you've got NIADA for the independents. You've got you know regional IADA conferences. You've got Sean Bradley's deal. You've got Brian know regional iada conferences. You've got sean bradley's deal, you've got brian pash's deal and that's kind of about it.
Speaker 2:But then if you really talk to the dealers about what they want at a conference, what they want out of a conference experience, dealers very rarely go. Yeah, I want to go fight through a bunch of vendors that are trying to shove their business card down my throat and get a phone call. No, you know, you know, sure, there are dealers that will go to NADA every year because they are looking for new solutions. They do want to go through the expo hall and talk to those people, but they go there with a mission. You go to the digital dealers, you go to the Brian Pasch events, you go to the to Sean Bradley events and like we're at those events, like we're there because like you got to be there, you got to be out seeing people, but the dealers don't enjoy the vendor aspect. So OK, cool, we're not going to have vendors at the event. No vendors at all. No tables, no booths, no, nothing. It's more like a 20 group where it's focused on education.
Speaker 2:And another big problem with a lot of the conferences and automotive outside of NAD and digital dealer, it's pay to play. You don't get to speak unless you buy sponsorship, which then results in most of the talks being thinly veiled or not even veiled at all sales pitches, which that's not really what you want. You want to come and learn stuff that's going to help you be better. So let's focus on the education element. Take the vendor element out. Some of those conferences too. You kind of have to drink the Kool-Aid of the person running the event, and the event's really more about pumping up that company and talking about how awesome that company is. We don't do that either. We don't even really talk about Search Lab at the whole event. It's literally a kind of a separate thing. All the speakers are handpicked and invited, so none of the speakers had to pitch, none of the speakers had to pay, and I can tell you multiple times I have spent more than 20 grand to get a 30 minute speaking slot in an event, and sometimes there might be 10 to 15 people in the room for that 20 grand or 25 grand that we spent. Do you really get the same value out of the speakers that are spending 20 grand to speak Versus the ones that were invited because they're at the top of the game and they're sharing consistently helpful information? I don't know. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. We're also the first conference ever in automotive that has an equal 50, 50 split between men and women speakers, because it's very heavily white old guys on stage, which obviously I am too, with the Santa Claus beard now. But you know there's a lot of women out there that have amazingly awesome ideas and really incredibly helpful information. But it's really hard to break into the good old boy network at a lot of these conferences, so we wanted to give equal representation there Also. You know a lot of these conferences Digital Dealer great example happens every fall in Vegas, but it starts on a Tuesday, so you have to fly in on a Monday, which means you're probably missing work on a Monday, and then you're there Tuesday and Wednesday and it's a half a day on Thursday.
Speaker 2:You're probably bailing early and going home, but you're effectively missing four days of work to go to this conference. People complain about that too. It's a lot of time away from the dealership. So we're doing it on a Monday, because most dealerships are closed on a Sunday. So they can come in on a Sunday, not miss any work, attend the event on Monday and then it's over at 4.30 on Monday, so then you can go home that night. You'll only miss one day of work.
Speaker 2:And because it's in Dallas, it's the headquarters of American Airlines and the headquarters of Southwest, so it's really cheap to get flights in if you want to fly in. But there's a lot of people in the kind of surrounding area of like really, arkansas, louisiana, oklahoma, that you can drive for anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours and be here. So it's pretty easy to get to for a whole bunch of dealers. So we kind of tried to address all of these various pain points and just create something different. And we did the first one last year and it went over really well. This is the second year. Next year we're already looking at venues and dates. We're going to move it out of Dallas next year and go somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Our goal is eventually to do it three or four times a year in different places, because the other big problem you know we were talking to some dealers in Dallas a couple of weeks ago and they were like yeah, we don't really have the ability to send a couple of people to NADA or digital dealer because it's multiple people gone and a lot of travel expense or whatever. So when it's right there in local, if the dealership doesn't want to send you, okay, cool, take a Monday off. Is it going to be that big a deal to miss a Monday in the middle of the month? No, and you can get a cheap ticket to the event. In fact, I set up a special discount code for people listening. Tell us If anybody is listening to this podcast and you want to come to the event. It's on Monday, august 19th in Dallas, texas, and tickets are $350. But if you use the code PLAYBOOK all one word when you register for a ticket, it takes $200 off the ticket. You get a ticket for 150 dollars holy crap, I love it, man.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be fun.
Speaker 2:The top minds it's. It's uh, george, nitty, bobby, heron, subi, gauche you, sean rains me like a ton of awesome speakers. So it's top level. It's intimate and small, like we specifically keep it to a smaller group, so it's more like kind of like a 20 group great food, cool venue, like it's just a really kind of refreshing take on automotive conferences.
Speaker 1:It's going to be a blast, man. Monday, august 19th, use the discount code playbook, uh, to come and join us. It's going to be, uh, just a complete blast. I'm excited to be there with you guys. Greg man, thanks so much for joining me on the dealer playbook.
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks for having me on again. I thought it was my first time, but I'd forgotten because it'd been so long. Hopefully it won't be another five years before the next time.
Speaker 1:No, but if it is, then I need your beard to like just really be down here.
Speaker 2:Dude, this is terminal length for me. Something that a lot of people don't realize is every dude has a thing called terminal length on your beard, and that is if you don't trim it at all. That's the length that you get, and it won't go any further. This is terminal length for me. I would go down like ZZ Top style if I could, but this is it. It doesn't go anymore.
Speaker 1:But it's pretty epic still. All right, man Been a blast. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks man.
Speaker 1:Hey, thanks for listening to the Dealer Playbook podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please subscribe, share and hit that like button. You can also join us and the DPB community on social media. Check back next week for a new Dealer Playbook episode. Thanks so much for joining.
