The Dynamic Duo: Combining SEO and Paid Social for a Meaningful ROI

In this episode of Word on the Street, Dealer OMG teams up with Reunion Marketing to explore how combining SEO and paid social creates powerful synergy in automotive marketing. Learn how organic search strategies align with paid social campaigns to attract and convert customers while driving a meaningful ROI. Whether you're looking to refine your dealership's digital presence or maximize your marketing spend, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you stand out in today’s competitive automotive landscape. Tune in now to transform your marketing strategy!

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Transcript

So the two ways that customers find the dealership where they end up purchasing their vehicle is by searching for it or discovering it. So the customers search for the dealership or search for that type of vehicle, and that's where the dealership pops up quickly, or they discover it. This is where the dealership is able to get in front of a customer when they're not necessarily expecting it. And what dealers are finding now is the most cost-effective long-term solution to be really searchable is through search engine optimization. getting on maps, getting Google business profile, playing the game of search. And then the most cost-effective discovery path is through paid social media, getting in front of customers that are in market with a message that resonates with them. So I'm talking in this conversation with the owners of Reunion Marketing, Dave Spanicki and Chad Graves, about what they've done writing the book on SEO for dealers. I know you're going to enjoy this conversation. I'm Andrew Street. This is Word on the Street. Stay tuned.

Well, Dave, Chad, Ashley, I'm Andrew. It's good to have our heads back together. Let's start out by talking about the road trip that you and I did, Dave. We went on an educational tour up the East Coast spanning between Philadelphia and Boston. And from my observation, I was doing the paid search conversation and how to tailor that with the discovery of SEO, like how customers are going to discover you through SEO versus how they're going to discover you through social. and in my observation you guys have a really great ability to quickly audit and get a health for how a dealer's seo is doing already like how searchable they are online uh and show them show them where their strengths are show them where their holes are show them some strategies that might help plug those holes uh can you talk a little bit about how you're able to pull that uh audit up and what it looks like typically Sure. Yeah. I mean, well, one, I love that, uh, that tour in general, right. We had a lot of fun, you know, we, we, we really did a great job of going out there and sharing, you know, things with dealers that they just don't know what they don't know. Right. And so it's very similar to how you guys take that, you know, I always call it like a volume and variety approach. You know, they have multiple different business objectives. They have new cars and used cars and then, you know, acquisition and there's just all sorts of different needs, fixed stops, uh, um, you know, uh, finance i mean just all sorts of different things that people are looking for and so people don't don't know how well they're doing in terms of their visibility on google unless they know so you know what we end up doing is we we've uh you know seriously analyzed about i mean a few billion different uh queries you know across all of our search console uh query reports and google ads query reports to see how are consumers looking for dealerships they're looking at they're they're typing in all sorts of different things into google And we've taken that information and looked at both by volume. There's a lot of volume searches that people do on the regular when they're a little bit more broad in what they want. Then there's a few more high intent, ready to buy searches. People that are typing in make model for sale or make model lease or make model price and those kind of things. And with that information, we have a nice little report that shows here's exactly how you rank on Google for these different searches. And when they see that, you know, one in their in their primary geo in their background, there's typically a lot of things that they're not ranking for that well. And so being able to see that there's opportunity to build, you know, an experience in the website that's going to get them to be seen for those searches in their background is great. what we see even more often than that is that that next city over that's in their aor that they're not ranking for at all that they may have you know one out of out of you know a hundred different uh keywords that that's in the top top position or you know very very low visibility because their website doesn't have an experience on it that matches with the needs of that that customer and that shopper and once people see it and i know andrew your favorite part was that it was color coded. So they're like, oh, green's good, red's bad, right? And it's really easy to understand, okay, well, here's why, why we're not getting as much traffic as we can. And once you see that, it makes it a whole lot easier to understand what the reasoning is behind building a plan to get you to start ranking for it and create some transparency and accountability that That oftentimes people just don't know what they're getting. You know, I know Chad's got a big rant on that that he can he can speak into that. You know, people just don't get they don't get SEO often because they don't see it spelled out in those kind of black and white terms. And that's something that people really like. Right. Yeah, that was my experience is like going into a handful of different dealer groups with you. And we were able to say, here's our companies, here's exactly what we specialize in. And it looks like you guys are, are doing X, Y, and Z. And what we're finding is with similar dealerships, with just a little bit of attention towards these areas, we've been able to improve their visibility, their searchability, um, And like once you get going, once you guys launch the strategy, is it kind of baked into those search terms that are typically in the red? So go ahead, Jad. Well, I was going to say it can kind of be a little bit of both. I think one of the things that SEO companies have historically not done well is actually aligned with the dealership at the very beginning on what are their actual goals from an SEO standpoint, right? So the analysis is obviously going to help us when we see a bunch of red in a certain area. I mean, Dave mentioned new car, used car, fixed ops. Usually dealers are doing pretty well in one market when it comes to new. But even when you look at used in Raleigh or in Austin, if the dealerships are physically located there, they start to fall off a little bit. And same thing with fixed operations. And then when you look at compounding that across maybe another city that's in their AOR or PMA, but they don't have content that ranks for that. And why is that? It's because it was never built for them, actually. So right at the very beginning, you really, I think one of the things that's different about us and that I think is really helpful for our dealers is we spend a lot of time in that alignment phase and understanding, you know, what is Ashley's priority versus Andrew versus Dave across new, used, and fixed. And sometimes we might need to build a little foundation right at the beginning in the first month or two to make sure the site architecture is there and sound for us to build off of. But from there, we should really start attacking what are the dealership's goals? Is it to grow new car market share in GOs two, three, and four? Well, that should take a precedence in the strategy, right? Or is it growing used and reducing dependency on third-party sites in GO one? That content plan would look a little bit different. And that's what's going to really shape the keywords. And I think that gives a good picture of where dealerships are today a little bit too with some of their SEO strategy with their current partners. Yeah. totally and if i feel like once you're having that level of conversation with the dealer opposed to just kind of like looking back and saying here's what happened last month here's like maybe or get traffic picked up a little bit we're doing a great job it's continually doing more of a strategic call where you can couple that with the other advertising that they're doing whether it's you know even like on-site events or TV or OTT or paid search or display advertising to help keep that goal in everybody's mind of like, hey, here's our strategy right now. Sure, we want to get new customers, but here's where we want to get new customers right now. And here's where we're going to focus our budget. If our budget's unlimited, cool. We can go after everybody and start doing the content. But to start ranking in those specific geos is it putting content on the dealer's website typically with call outs to that area yeah exactly you know it's um google tells us what to do right they've got their algorithm of dave help me out here eeat experience expertise authoritativeness and trustworthy is that right i've had two cups of coffee this morning i'm ready to go um but you know they tell us what they want right it's just a matter of Dealers still being opposed, I think, a little bit to the technology that's available to create content at scale, right? People are scared of it. And then I think also there's an idea that two to five pages is acceptable, but with AI, with the technology that's available today, We have most of our dealers doing ten to fifteen plus pages of content every single month. And that's what allows us to work through G.O. one, G.O. two, G.O. three. In fact, some of our folks are even up to seven markets that we're targeting today. And again, to your point, it's a page just throwing it up there. That's not going to work, right? It's got to have not just the right content, but the proper technical elements, the proper backlinking. And all those things together are what create a really sound content page that's going to rank well in Google. And it's not as it's not a here's like what I come across a lot is like dealers aren't looking for success tomorrow. They're looking for success today. And by the end of the month and you know, it's, they're down to the ticker. How do you guys get started where it seems like it's more of a long-term play. It's not a, Hey, let's do this quick fire push for a week before the end of the month. What's a way to kind of settle down the strategy and get them on board? You know, I mean, dealers want everything right away, but I think for the most part, they know that SEO is going to take a little bit of time. But the nice thing is when you build that solid foundation and you do content at the volume that we like to do it, they typically see some results a little bit faster than what they will, you know, if you're doing just two or three pages a day and getting a link from ABC cars or whatever.com. There's a lot of things out there that people are doing that don't create results as well. I mean, we want to make sure that our pages are indexing. We're submitting the site maps where we're building content at a scale that, you know, that we just see Google go in and want to re-index it more often and understand what the sites do. And so typically, I mean, by the end of month two, we start seeing some some movement. And then by the time four months is in, we're starting to see some real celebration. And I think with consistency, when you're building content at that kind of scale, that you're going to see some movement within the first six months easily, but usually before then. I think one of the things that makes it easier for us to kind of demonstrate you know how this works and why this works so well as you look at some of the third-party websites you know if you do ford f-one fifty for sale in austin you know down by you guys i think i used that as an example during our educational tour um i think maybe austin or dallas i can't remember because i think i went when i last visited us dallas first in austin but we're using that one as an example You see AutoTrader and Cars.com and CarGurus and Edmunds and Carfax and all these different third-party websites that show up in the results. And then when you click on one of those, it's basically an SRP. There's not a ton of actual content. It's a lot of inventory. But if you scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll see that they have a page for, uh, for the twenty twenty five, the twenty twenty four, the twenty twenty three, the twenty two, the twenty one, all the way back to like twenty thirteen. And then they have that, you know, that same content that's relevant with a map or whatever for, uh, Dallas and Fort Worth and Arlington and, and, uh, Irving and all these different areas so that they build content that really matches what the people are looking for. And because in today's environment, people, they just all search for things in different ways. They're all in different markets. They're all asking different questions. That's probably going to continue to get more variety really as more people lean into AI. I think what we expected from voice search is starting to happen now with AI where people are searching for things that much more, that many different ways in which they're searching. When you demonstrate that this is how other sites are built and why they get the traffic, it makes it all click and make sense. And then when you start building content because you can, as Chad said, because the technology today allows you to build content that is helpful and relevant and has the EAT principles, you do it at a volume, you're going to see results a little bit faster. And that's what we end up seeing and then setting in terms of our expectations. Cool. And it sounds like you mentioned like it pretty quickly in the first month or so you can start to see some tangibility. And then after a few months you start to see the celebrations. I like what it sounds. What is like, what does a celebration start to look like? Like when it's really humming, is it Google analytics is popping? Yeah, I think analytics is part of it. But one of the things that we really try to do is actually tie into our own platform of exactly what moved. So it's not just an arbitrary like, like that's great we're gonna look at that in analytics we're gonna share that and we're gonna be pumped about it but we're also gonna show exact specific keywords that and what the movement is from those because some of them uh like especially if it's a even if they're doing well like oftentimes to dave's point third parties are out ranking dealers in their own market so if you're a Ford dealer, you might be ranking, you're the first dealer listed, but you're still in spot three, right? Or spot four, which get ten percent of the clicks and position one in organic gets forty percent. So even moving from spot four to one is something we want to call out. But I like really, I mean, and it's kind of crazy when you look at it, but there's some folks, especially on used and fixed and Geo's two or whatever. that you can go from spot twenty where you're off page one up to position one or even spot ninety nine, which means you literally were not found on Google and now you're in the top on one of the top three positions. And so those word movements can be really exciting to say, hey, look like you told us that, you know, use was a big priority for us. So we've created this content and we've moved you from off of page two or three. into page one and now we're gunning for those top two positions. And those are some of my favorite wins when you can tie it all back together to what the dealer actually cares about when they're desking deals. I think Chad, just to piggyback on that, another thing that dealers love looking at is a map. And so, you know, one of the things that I know you guys do really well with maps also, right? I think that's one of the reasons it was so fun doing that tour that, you know, I'll keep bringing up because it really was fun to visualize with dealers. Here's your market. Here's where you're doing well. Here's where you're not doing well. And then when you start seeing within your AOR, that we're not that this is an area that we're responsible for selling cars, but we aren't on the first ten pages of Google for all these different make model terms or all these different, you know, regional terms. And you start showing that and then, you know, fast forward a few months and then you start seeing that you are showing up in those areas and you can start visualizing a map and seeing that you're starting to win market share, you know, in that battleground area where before, you know, you had competitors in there that were outranking you, you had the third party sites outranking you. And then when you can see it, you know, right in your backyard or within an area that you're responsible to sell cars in. I know you guys experience that a lot, too. And when you build out plans on the social media side, right, that's that's where a lot of success happens and a lot of excitement happens because it feels it feels more strategic because it is more strategic. And when you have conversations that aren't just about, you know, here's Here's here's where we were and here's where we are, which is our fun. But when you can really start thinking about it in a more strategic way like that. And there's just a different there's a different chemistry that comes into those kind of conversations that makes it fun, you know, as well as being fruitful. Totally. And instead of like us blanketing the whole entire market and trying to just have a generic strategy. Or even worse, like using tactics that'll start pulling in traffic for that two thousand twenty F one fifty from somebody that's in, you know, two thousand miles away. OK, it's cool. But now that person's just getting info off of our website, that's not going to turn into a meaningful customer at all. Probably. Um, and then, yeah, when you pull up a map, you can say like, Hey, here's with the allotted budget we have, here's the, here's what I want to go after. Like from our end, it's going to be like, here's the people who own these vehicles, this credit score, this age of vehicle, does that sound like a smart audience? Okay. We're going to go with it a pretty aggressive frequency to get in front of them a lot. And coupling that with like the zip codes. Now it's like, okay, let's start to couple. the search engine optimization to where we're arriving quickly and not just, so do you think like as, as you're doing better and better with search engine rankings, like the organic side, can you pull back on the spend on, on Google spend? Yeah, I think it's certainly an opportunity to, I think it, again, depends on the dealer's goals and how far you want to press and whether it's a, uh, let's say maybe it's not necessarily a pulling back on the budget, though I do think and Dave can probably speak at length about, you know, how Google is probably being a little shadier than we would like on where the spend is going. So there's probably is opportunities for most dealers just calling it what it is to reduce their spend or more be more strategic. but when you are matching it with SEO you know if you know you're owning the top organic spot that gets a ton of clicks and your Google business profile is firing there's a good chance you're going to get that customer right so maybe you can dial back the spend or at least bid a little bit less make your competitors go a little bit harder and then maybe it's moving to that geo two where you know we're not building content yet or maybe geo two is too close but three or four where it's in your PMA, you're losing deals there today. You know, somebody sold ten F one fifties into that market. Well, cool. Let's go be more aggressive there. So I do think when you're it's maybe not just a reduction of budget, but at least fine tuning it to you're at a point where you're getting the maximum amount of coverage as possible. And I think that's one of the things that we're super excited about this year is like the opportunity to show dealers like, hey, You've been overspending and just throwing money at Google for so long. And now with the right approach on SEO and paid search and paid social, you can blend these things together with experts that know how to take care of your money, that can get you the most ROI for the buck by being experts at what they do. And I think that's something that as dealers tighten up a little bit and as they start looking out the dealership windows and there's more inventory out there than ever, you I think people are going to be looking for experts. And I think that's an exciting thing for our industry, actually. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. Like having like a little assassins at their craft versus just like a big one stop shop that does everything poorly. Yeah. Or even OK. Right. Like what was what was the you said, like Google's not great at showing where money is going. What are we talking about there? Like just where the ads are being distributed? I'll let Dave. Where do I start? I mean, Google's made a lot of changes in these past several years and they do it for the folks that just want things to be easy. You know, it's there's a lot of automation now. Trust the algorithm. You know, you look at performance max ads. That's basically what you know, if you're into the if you're if you're into Google ads and in that world, it's just broad match. You know, you just say, Google, go spend my money where you think it's appropriate. Give me some conversions. Right. Trust where that's going to go. They'll put it across all their digital assets. They'll put it in the maps and then search and display and YouTube and all over their assets. But you don't really know where your money is going. You don't know where you're getting the biggest return. We know that we like to be in there to some extent, not nearly as high as what other people do because there's a lot of wasted spend there because of the maps. But Google also, I mean, even in the search world, you know they they would prefer they just go and do max conversions as a bid type where it's like we'll bid whatever we need to bid to get you a conversion and and then they're gonna come up with close variants for if i'm looking for a honda dealership i might be you know say we're in dallas again in that market because that's a familiar one they might say honda dealership fort worth honda dealership arlington on the dealership dallas on the dealership irving all the different areas around it and then because your ad doesn't necessarily match what those areas are or your landing page doesn't match, you're not as relevant, you end up with, I mean, the easiest way to say this is a lower quality score and the lower your quality score, the more you got to bid. And so one of the things that really helps is When you can start getting more granular and kind of air traffic controlling is how we describe it, where we put a bunch of negative keywords in place so that every one of our ads really matches where we're going right to that landing page. The amount of savings I mean, we see about thirty five percent savings just off the top from doing that because because it's not necessarily about uh trusting the algorithm you know we want to put some bid ceilings in we don't want we we've seen and i'm not kidding uh upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars for one single click on in google ads and that's and that's happening it's because this person is a very very likely conversion But well, why are they likely? Is it because they've already converted, you know, four or five other times? You know, I mean, there's a lot of different things that go into that making that person a likely conversion. And if you look at some of the attribution reports, you see, you know, seven or eight or nine times someone's going through a Google ads, you know, CPC click. how much that person costs is like eight hundred dollars or something for that one person. And you start really thinking about it from an ROI perspective. And we're not just going after the numbers, but we're going after the actual consumer path and how they're how we're getting more and more people. And when you can start saving money in those ways, I mean, it's amazing how many more people you can get, how many more sales you can actually ultimately get because you get more real cracks in the bat. And and the savings allows you to, as Chad mentioned, let's go start let's start expanding into these other markets and moving to these areas where we're not selling cars but the competition is and when the pump in pump out reports are showing that we're getting our butts kicked let's go let's go take the savings and either take it and and keep those savings and lower our overall marketing cost per car sold or let's start expanding into these other areas and start you know increasing our market share and getting again getting to be those assassins you talked about andrew right where we're getting that much more strategic and and getting that much more for the spend Yeah. And so one hundred fifty bucks a click, you had mentioned a second ago, was that with a dealer? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's so I mean, very, very often you see in these close it's the close variants that are happening. And we love looking at those reports and showing people how that's happening, because what Google does is they say this person is used to just say, OK, Honda dealership, Dallas. And, you know, your phrase matching, you're only getting Honda dealership, Dallas type searches. but now you'll you'll get a close variant where it's going to be something different and and so because of that you're going to have lower quality score you're going to have be less relevant and so google's going to guess especially under a max conversion bid strategy where there's no bid ceiling where where we we just i mean that we just won't do that you know we like it's an auction why on earth would we not want to say this is the most i'm going to spend you know it's you know if you go to any other auction it's like okay i will only spend this much but into the current environment they'll spend whatever it takes to get those conversions right and so that that one of the things that google is really good at doing right now is is winning the game of averages you know and if you're a math guy you know and i love digging into math and The standard deviation on some of these, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, is extensive because the averages are going to look pretty good. But if you can eliminate those high-end outliers, and there's a lot of them that are, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty times what that average CPC is to get that conversion. and you say you know what i'm gonna go and get eighty percent of these kind of folks but i but there's a point of diminishing return when we start going after these extra conversions that i think a lot of them are repeat conversions we don't have the transparency to know for sure but you know you can make some assumptions as you start digging into the data and and seeing what you're doing you can dramatically decrease your overall spend and save money but google is uh there's a lot of guesswork that goes into how they go about bidding for things and it's really neat and it's not being talked about at all right now and it's something that we you know we like being loud about because um you know we're not one of those companies that just says hey we trust the algorithm because while google is a great place to spend money and then we certainly recommend spending a good amount of money there because but they've been stimulated their interest you know they've They're they're in the market, they're ready to buy and you want to get them. You know, there is a point of diminishing return if you start spending that much. And yeah, twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred, one hundred fifty dollar clicks. It's crazy. And it's happening. I've got a I've got a buddy who runs a marketing firm that works with attorneys and he works with some lawyers like in Houston that do tort cases or like class action lawsuits. And it's like eight hundred thousand dollars for a click for like asbestos claims, Houston, things like that. That is like so valuable for the lawyer to get them. They'll spend a thousand bucks to get somebody to come by. I think, and I could be wrong, but at least at one point, like personal injury lawyer, insert city was like the most expensive click on Google for a little while. I also have some friends that do some marketing for legal teams and like their budgets and like what they have to spend on is crazy. So, you know, it's not just dealers, but you can kind of pick that same conversation up and take it anywhere, which is interesting, I think. And it just kind of shows how we're all working in the same Google framework. And it takes people to actually like slow down enough to be like, this does not look right. I'm not a math person, but even I can look at some of these averages and be like, yeah, something's up here. Like this doesn't make sense for one customer, one opportunity. Like, come on, there's gotta be a more effective way to do this. Yeah, and okay, so you guys know, you guys wrote the book on SEO for car dealers is what I've, in my observation. Appreciate that. Do you guys click on Google ads yourself, like on search ads, when you're going to go visit one of your customers' lots or dealerships? Not our customers, we don't. Editors, you know, typically when I'm in certain markets and I want to run up their tabs a little bit, no. Try not to. Try to give the organic. I want to see where it goes sometimes. I'd try it out and like, okay, let's make sure that this stuff's working before I just go to the organic results. I mean, still, seventy percent are doing organic. So, I mean, you know, most of the conversations seem to always still go around the paid side and we forget that seventy percent of all the clicks are still organic. But thirty percent is a lot. I remember it was two to four. But people are clicking on it. Worth the conversation. So only thirty percent of people do in Google searches are clicking on the search results on the ad. Well, of the clicks, I guess. Yeah. So I mean, most of the time that's a whole different topic because the number of clicks has gone down significantly, but the number of searches has gone up. And so like the clicks that are not getting clicked on are people that are just asking questions like how tall is Michael Jordan? You know, what team did he play on? Those kind of things. but people are clicking when they're saying i want to buy a car right now you know show me things to go look at and shop you know it's you know people it drives me nuts all these folks that are saying that seo is dead when it's just not even close i mean year over year google actually has a higher volume of searches that are that are happening because people are using it even more they're just using it a little differently and then you know those that are using chat gpt and some of those ai things you know i saw recently that of the chat gpt users of them still use google so there's a lot of commentary out there about how you know seo is dead it's over and it's no i mean people when people want to shop they want to find the easiest way to shop so where's the experience that gives them the easiest way to shop that's why we care about our dealership websites and making it easy and highly converting and making the shopping experience good google that's why they introduced vlas that's why they're doing more things on platform Because whoever has the best shopping experience and delivers the best shopping results is going to win. And people are not going to just sit there and not click when they're trying to shop. They're going to look around and kick the tires virtually, as they always have. So it's one of those things that kind of drives me nuts. Obviously, I'm on a pedestal. Let me get off it real quick here. Or a soapbox, not a pedestal. Either one. I was on something there first. No, you're doing good. I've always thought if you can translate between digital marketing into English and then into automotive, you're, you're trilingual and it's, you know, you can make that, that conversation flow. So we were talking, you've talked, we've talked about websites and I do want to talk about AI for a second about how you guys are unlocking that thing, but are you doing much off of dealers websites for SEO? Google Business Profile, all these other things, backlinks, is that still the thing? Yeah, yeah, great question. I'll start with Google Business Profile and local SEO in general. I think it's ultra important. We call it pillar two, if you will, of SEO and a sound strategy. If you're just doing content and ignoring GBP, you're gonna miss out on a ton of local searches. And if you're just doing local and you're not doing content, kind of the same thing. So we do feel that they go hand in hand. I mean, today, I think we're tracking ninety five attributes, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in that above ninety attributes that make a dealerships Google business profile strategy sound. And that's, you know, several things across not just one profile, but the fact that they can have three or four. So if you've got. primary, which is usually your sales listing, plus a service, plus parts. And then we have several stores that have a body shop or rental car, collision. Those can each have their own unique business profile as well. So we do a lot on those. And then it's also about keeping track of some of the other ancillary sites that don't drive a ton of traffic, like your ways being Yelp, But making sure your information is accurate and consistent is helpful for Google. It's helpful for the consumers. So we're doing all that on a monthly basis as part of local. And Dave, maybe you can actually speak a little bit about why linking and automotive is a different game there. Yeah, well, people spend a lot of time doing it. And, you know, and one of the things I think that's helpful for us, I mean, over at Reunion, I mean, Chad and I, we were doing SEO, you know, before it was really, I mean, content, especially before it was really that big of a thing. It's actually, you know, we started Reunion, you know, because of the successes we created at the dealership, at our thirty-three store group that we were working at, Leith Auto, way back in the day. I spent ten years there as the marketing director and you know, towards the end, hired Chad. And that was a great move. And then we hired Matt and Andrew. And I mean, it was it was an exciting time where we really were focusing on doing all of these things to increase the overall traffic and leads to the dealership and ultimately what we found is that that the content approach uh was far far more uh rewarding in terms of roi than some of the link building activities that we were doing and the more content we built the more we were increasing traffic and and leads and showing up number one again that's why we like looking at those key lift reports because if you're able to accomplish it without having to add all this extra work, then why would you go do all this extra work when you can be redirecting that time, repurposing that time to build more content? And the reason why that's the case in automotive is there's just simply not that much competition. We've got some great authoritative links from the manufacturer. We've got some built-in links from the community already. Your competition is really just there's a few dealerships in the market and then the third-party websites. And there's not anyone else really going after a lot of these these in-market searches that dealers are going for. So, you know, a lot of times, you know, you read and I love reading search engine land. I love reading all the different SEO blogs out there and from all the authorities. They're talking about industries that have, you know, five hundred people in one market that are trying to win for that market. There's not the same level of competition. So if you're thinking about it from just a mathematical standpoint, what's going to get you there the fastest? We've seen it over and over and over again. And that's why our strategy is, I think, a little bit different than others, because we had the experience of having been in dealership, having increased the lead volume to that group by four hundred percent, watched them go, you know, increase their overall revenue by seventy five percent the last three years that we were there. I mean, it's a direct result of just being more mathematical and sound and understanding of, you know, who the competition is and what you have. Get you on that one? No, no, no. I thought I was frozen, but then I was like, wait, hold on. I'm still blinking. This is interesting. And I'm impressed also with your understanding of the Dallas Metroplex cities. I'm a big Rangers fan too. I mean, you don't know how to say it, but I took my dad and my son to the World Series last year because I've been a Rangers fan since I was two years old. So I know that area pretty well. Um, okay. AI. So are you guys using it as a content generator for, for your dealers right now? Yeah, I think if you're if you're not using it at some degree, it'd be silly at this point. You're just not using the tools that are largely available. I mean, Google came out last year and said, hey, we're OK with AI content as long as it represents that acronym we spoke about earlier. And it's good content. Right. With that said, it's still for us. No piece of content is going to go live on a dealership site without being reviewed, edited and looked at by human because we need it to be unique. We need to make sure that it works. But we should be using it for prompt engineering. You should be understanding it and using it for its capabilities to create unique content at scale. It's obviously much faster and moving much faster than I think than anybody would have imagined even possible. You think even a year ago, I don't even think a year ago today, I don't think ChatGBT was out or somewhere close to that wheelhouse. So you think about how often it's used today, and that's just one example of what's out there. So absolutely, right? Use it for idea generation, use it for blog types, use it for content generation, but then making sure that a person is touching it, feeling it, making sure that it's actually what the dealership wants. I think that's what builds the recipe for content success in today's world. but I think you'd be silly not to be using it. And then obviously we're using it to analyze data and look at things holistically that takes somebody like a Dave to be able to do it. And now somebody like a me can do it with a little bit of tech EBT. So why not, right? Use those tools that are available for you. And I think the dealers that are embracing it, we've got some clients that can school me on the uses of AI, man. And I think that's fricking awesome. And if I was one of their competitors, I'd be super nervous. because they're going to keep throwing bodies at it in an environment that people are losing money. I think how dealerships embrace AI and how they utilize it in their systems processes from marketing and BDC and so everything, I think that's going to be a big separating factor in the next couple of years. And I think that'll be interesting to see, to be honest. Yeah. I do dig I like that trend instead of like dealers looking to vendors to be the AI vendor. It's like you got access to those tools already. Just get somebody in the inside to be the champion to find uses for it, like responding to reviews or something really simple. What are you seeing right now that dealers are doing themselves with AI? That's that's pretty that's low hanging. Yeah, I see a lot of people doing some analysis. I've seen a lot of people integrate it into their BDC processes for email templates and things like that. A lot of those people still using humans for the final touch points or as a catch safe. But I think implementing it into information analysis, BDC work, marketing pieces, if you're at least trying those three things and open to it, I think you're light years ahead. You know, I know a lot of the CRMs and people that, you know, a lot of us know are starting to incorporate into their templates and things like that too. So I think that, I think it's, I think it's here. It's very much now, how often do you adopt it and how much do you embrace and, you know, how does that work within your dealerships framework? You know, if I were managing a store today, I would certainly be asking that question of like, How can I be helping me run my store better? Right. I think that there's people who are embracing that for sure. It's going to be interesting to see. Obviously, that's what's going to be talked about next week as we all descend on New Orleans. There's a lot of vendors doing it well. I think there's a lot of vendors and dealers who are kind of faking it. Right. Like we got AI. Just don't ask us too much about it. But I don't think that's going to last forever. I think it'll be a lot that people are going to say, okay, show me because I've been doing my research to your point. And I know what this can be done for. So I'm excited about that transition with auto, to be honest. I think it's a great thing for people. Yeah. Is it creating content or is it analyzing data to help us? find the hundred most profitable customers in our CRM and then what do they have in common and find more of those people somewhere lost in my plumbing. Have you guys found anything with SEO that helps sell EVs? Do you guys have strategies that wrap around EV? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's actually the area where dealers have the least visibility because they, I mean, it actually just comes down to the fact that they have no content around it. You know, it's not, it's not just baked into the website that they buy, you know, and, and to, to rank for anything, you need to have relevant content around it and that helpful, you know, EEAT content and, If you build it, they will come. That's what Nicole Hayes and our team says all the time. If you build it, they will come. And so dealers, ultimately, they just need to start building more content around the different search terms that people are searching for as it relates to EVs and hybrids. If you don't have it, then you're not going to rank. I mean, that's SEO in a nutshell, really. I'm finding people don't understand the tax credit. yeah it's i mean they still have it it's like so many educational opportunities yeah so many educational opportunities a couple years ago it's been a little bit but our friends over at the carter myers group in virginia here really challenged us to come up with a ev specific strategy that we could roll out across the group and so we spent some time and built like i would call it an entire campaign with incorporated, you know, what cars are best for these people and how to charge and, you know, what tax credits, like kind of a, I'll call it an EV one-on-one, you know, and escalating. And, uh, some of those results were honestly great, right. That we had, like, they were ranking for EV related search terms across the entire state of Virginia. And, um, That's very sweet. And they continue to champion that today. And so I think that, again, that's where dealership alignment matched with marketing can be really cool. And I think that's another exciting thing that should be coming from vendors in this year. That's cool, man. Like if we can move more mockies and things with some clients, it's like, okay, let's have our ads not necessarily hone in on the vehicle. Let's talk about the tax credit. Okay, that's getting results. Now they're coming in a little bit more informed. Okay, so sort of winding this down a little bit, like as you guys have been really drilled in on this SEO with dealers, whether you're inside the store or just on the same side of the desk with dealers helping them figure out their strategies, Has there been a specific moment you can think of where it was like, aha, we've got this. Eureka. This thing is working right here. Has there been a big moment that's been a breakthrough for you guys? There's probably several. I think the most recent, man, I mean, we'll take it all the way back to the beginning with our color coding. But I do think, you know, the first NADA we presented our color coding system, it was in Excel spreadsheets. It was not pretty, y'all. It was not. But... For the first time, I saw dealers be like, oh, I understand where I'm at today. And then when we started marrying that to a content plan, it was like, oh, now I know what you're doing and why you're doing it. I can't tell you those two things about my current SEO agency. And obviously, that's resulted in some great growth for us, which has been really exciting for us as a company. But I do think that initial, and again, it was us being like, I think this is going to work, right? I think we can show this. come from a spreadsheet to now in a full platform uh with visualizations and mapping technology and soon-to-be sales and inventory data like there's a lot that we've been able to build within it but i think that first time dave and i showed a big dealer group and we were on the phone together and they were like no i get this now i i know what i know why you're doing this and i was like holy we've cracked the code like we we've done something here and it was it was a cool moment for all of us and i think we just continue to build upon that today that's Dave, that's the one that comes to my mind first. That's exactly what I was going to say. I just wanted to hear you say it. You always tell the story. Yeah, no, it seems eye-opening. If you've heard endless pitches from partners and vendors to have somebody come across your desk that shows you something eye-opening that you don't already know about yourself and how to wrap a strategy around it. It's amazing. And it doesn't require you to continually put input from the dealer's side. It's like, okay, they already see the holes and they already have a plan to patch it. Yep. I think it's fun to be able to have tangible conversations with dealers around. you know, what's going to actually help them move the needle for things they care about. Right. And when you can match that color coded keyword report to, Hey, you know, you told me that your core use is the most important thing for you. And dude, you're not on page one, like no wonder your paid search budget's crazy. And you're spending eight grand a month on auto trader and like, let us help you with this. And I think um you know when you can see the success and you know that they're peeling other pieces back like that's that's ultimately the fun funnest part for me and being able to do that it's cool it's a fun industry man and it's always changing platforms are changing the customers are changing dave chad it's been a sure it's been a gift to have you guys hanging out what uh what's the best way for people to follow you or get connected Yeah, I think Dave and I are always out and about. I mean, please feel free. Our website is an easy place, but our emails are just as simple as can be. Chad and Dave, two four-letter names at reunionmarketing.com. And we're always on, man. And we love talking about this stuff. So we're happy to have some of these educational conversations, run some analysis, and always open to any conversation we can have with folks across the industry. I love it. And I think stay tuned. Maybe Dave and I or Chad and I or somebody will hit the road again doing just an educational tour, hoping to open dealers' eyes. Everyone was jealous of the last one. We can do it again. I love it. Very awesome, guys. Thanks so much for having us, Andrew and Ashley. It was great. Thank you. Adios.