Dealer review sites waste your time
Reviews are popular for helping consumers choose products. One of my favorite car review websites is CarSurvey.org, a website where anyone can post comments and participate in a discussion about any vehicle on the road. Beyond automobiles, several industries rely heavily on testimonials to make sales. Movies, books and restaurants can be impacted greatly by professional and independent reviews, but there are also some businesses where reviews mean far less to consumers. These businesses are ones that do not offer unique or rare, one of a kind products. Most car dealerships fall directly into this category.
If you work for a car dealership and you are encouraging customers to submit testimonials to third party dealership review sites, you are wasting time, wasting money and helping your competitors.
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Dealerships sell the same products
Unless a dealership is making the vehicles that are being offered for sale, the products sold are not unique. Any car dealership or motor sports dealership can offer the same product for sale. Car dealerships are not boutiques, and do not need a referral to be shopped. Out of Eden Soaps is a boutique with unique products that benefits greatly from word of mouth/referral/testimonial leads. If anyone needs such a testimonial, my mother, sister, or girlfriend will be happy to recommend them.
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Website content is real estate
Motivating a customer base to write original pieces of content about a dealership is a great feat. Instructing customers to publish reviews on someone else’s website is a terrible waste of marketing the brand has earned. Every website on the web competes against every other website on the web. As a auto dealership review site grows, it will rank for the content the website contains: the names of businesses and the products they sell.
Helping a third party compete against your business home page in a search engine is not a good idea.
A company called Capterra competes in search engines with automotive software vendors. The directory ranks for all kinds of phrases like “dealer software.” About a month ago, a friendly email arrived from Capterra that is along the same vein; encourage customers to help the Capterra website compete against you in search results. Since then, I have received a follow-up proclaiming the new program is a total success.
We are now allowing vendors like you, who have listed their software products with Capterra, to collect user reviews to display with your listings. Please email this link to your most satisfied customers and encourage them to submit a review!
http://www.capterra.com/review_new?vendor_id=##########
Capterra’s goal is to create the premier online database for objective business software reviews, submitted by real, verified users and in doing so to generate more and better leads for you, our customers. This first phase simply includes the ability for you to solicit reviews from your customers.
For the time being, only you will be able to view what your customers submit. Eventually, we plan to add the:
1) Ability for buyers to see reviews.
2) Ability for buyers to sort by number of reviews.
3) Ability for vendors to display reviews on their own websites as testimonials.
4) Ability for vendors to respond to reviews.…and more!
While it is widely accepted that reviews are helpful to buyers when evaluating software, we know that they can carry risk for vendors. We plan to protect your interests by not allowing anonymous reviews, removing bogus reviews and encouraging vendors to respond to all reviews.
To see reviews as they are submitted, just log in to your Capterra vendor portal: http://capterra.com/software_vendors
Contact us at reviews@capterra.com with questions or suggestions.
Best Regards,
The Capterra TeamNew features from Capterra! Spend your time making the Capterra website more valuable to shoppers than your own! Capterra charges a few dollars per click to be one of the featured vendors at the top of most their pages. Step one, collect reviews to help this directory rank higher than your own website. Step two, pay the same directory more money for premium placement because step one made them more powerful in search engines. Aaron Wall also recently discussed Marchex, another player in this travesty of a game that is paying your search traffic competitors to get back traffic you gave them.
Dealerships develop intimate customer relationships and provide a wide spectrum of business environments. Customers may be motivated by a referral to consider a particular establishment. Simply, cars are cars. If any seller, licensed or private, tries to list a vehicle on Autotrader or Cars.com that is already in another user’s account, that seller will be told sorry, first come first serve.
Reasons to use review sites
- Help expand a website that promotes your competitors
- Encourage them to charge you for premium placement
- Reinforce their search engine rankings for your business and product names
In all due respect, you couldn’t be any more wrong. Your comments about having customers rate a dealership is a waste of marketing time doesn’t make sense. Some of the best marketing for restaurants, hotels, etc come from sites like this. You are right about a car being a commodity so it is even more important for a dealership and its personnel to differentiate itself from the competition. These 3rd party reputation sites help with this (and no I don’t own stock in any of them) as long as the dealership prides itself on its customer experience.
I do agree that content hosted on these sites does compete on the SEO side but that is a decent trade-off. Customers typically don’t trust dealerships so if those reviews sat on the dealership website the customer would probably not believe it. Plus, many of these sites link to the dealers website, much like they do with other rating sites. Customers appreciate that and it provides the consumer with a good experience.
If a customer Googles one of my dealerships and the first page search results showed my organic SEO links, my Google map, along with 3-4 rating site links, I would take that all day long.
David Metter
Chief Marketing Officer
MileOne Automotive
[...] others point out things that I cannot, even if I do not agree with them [...]
David, thanks for expressing your thoughts. I am sure you will not be the only one who disagrees with my point of view.
Part of my job as a web developer is to compete in search engines for the names and products of my business and its customers. Simply, it does not make sense to offer my time or coordinate consumers to help other sites rank for these terms.
I think we agree that a third party referral can help business. I prefer to have more control over those top ten results, and prevent sites that promote the competition on the same page from ranking as good or better than the sites under my control.
If those 3-4 rating sites have favorable ratings and they aren’t auctioning above-the-fold ad space to your highest bidding competitors.
Hi - Michael Thomas from Capterra here.
With regard to the value of off-site reviews, I think Dave Metter of MileOne said it as well as I could have.
Regarding the motive for Capterra’s review program…. vendors who work with us are constantly looking for new ways to describe and differentiate their products. Likewise, buyers who use Capterra are always looking for faster, easier ways to identify a vendor who can help. User reviews are the next step for Capterra in expanding that already very successful relationship.
I think we could also generally agree with David that testimonials collected by a vendor and listed on their own website do not have the same credibility that user reviews presented by a neutral third party, like Capterra, would possess. The distinction is one overlooked by Corey, who seems to see reviews and testimonials as one and the same.
I would suggest that this somewhat mitigates the idea that spending time to generate content meant to appear off-site is a waste. In this case, the content is uniquely MORE valuable when it appears off-site and is a further investment in generating high-quality leads from Capterra, which many vendors have a great interest in accomplishing.
Corey seems to view the neutrality of our forum and the inclusion of potential “competition” as a threat. This stems, I think, in part from the attitude that potential buyers are a uniform commodity – all the same, all of equal value. Any software vendor seeking to generate leads online knows all too well that not every prospect is a good fit.
Capterra offers a unique benefit to potential buyers in that they can compare their software options and zero in on a targeted vendor that is a good fit. This translates into better-targeted prospects for our vendor customers than might be generated from a natural search result.
A prospect who has used Capterra to identify a well-targeted vendor is going to be more confident in their choice, more willing to enter the sales process and more qualified as a lead for having used Capterra than would be a prospect who simply clicked over to a vendor’s website because that vendor was the first natural listing.
While natural search positioning is a valid concern for any business active online and is always going to be competitive it is only one battle and not the war. SEO at its best is only a means to an end - that end being leads and sales. This is what Capterra brings to the table in spades.
We work WITH software vendors by attracting a largely different group of buyers because of the unique resource that we offer. We aid in qualifying these buyers and we are tireless is our attempts to help vendors make the adjustments necessary to convert their referrals in ever higher numbers.
Needless to say our customers hardly view Capterra’s contributions to their business as a “travesty.”
As a final note, I don’t recall ever receiving an email or call from Corey regarding our new reviews program or our other long-standing lead generation offerings. Nor am I aware of his ever having been an active participant in our programs, although we would love to have him.
All the best,
Michael Thomas
Business Development Director
703-994-4205 - Phone
703-842-6046 - Fax
Capterra, Inc. — The Smart Way To Find Software
Michael, thank you for your thoughts, but I can’t help but resent your disrespect. My thoughts here require no insider knowledge of your review program to understand how it will help Capterra compete against vendor websites in search results. I have not called you because none of what I have written here requires a conversation. This must have occurred to you or you would not have felt that a response at all was necessary because my opinions would be incomprehensible and baseless. Alas, you tried to discredit me anyways.
Along with David, you have failed to address the only concern I raised here–that contributing content to a third party website is anti-productive when you have the capacity to operate your own. If you’d like to comment again, please try to address that point instead of blowing the Capterra horn and insulting me because I didn’t call you and ask permission before I wrote about your program.
You have said it yourself–the content is more valuable as an investment in Capterra. From your point of view as a Capterra employee, this is absolutely true. You definitely want people to create content for you so you can keep your first page Google ranking for “dealer software” which motivates vendors to fork over $3 and $4 per click for the featured spots at the top of your pages.
An investment in a review website does not equal an investment in any single business represented on the third party site. An investment in a third party review site is an investment to promote ALL the businesses represented on the review site.
If a vendor can motivate his customers to write about their experience with a given service, giving the product of this effort to a third party instead of publishing it under direct control is a mistake.
I disagree that self-published reviews inherently have less credibility than ones that are published by a third party. I might agree if we were to consider only anonymous reviews, but I have published plenty of reviews that contain phone numbers and business names—a point of contact that actually permits a one to one conversation to verify the testimonial.
If you believe that web content becomes “uniquely more valuable” when published off site, there is a problem with the content–not the publisher.
Any software vendor seeking to generate leads online would rather, I think, rely on and promote their own sales funnel instead of one that charges them for leads and promotes their competitors on the same web page.
I feel bad that you feel you have been victimized, here. I singled you out and used your program as an example, and that is probably why you felt you had to attack me. I regret that you did, but it is what it is.
A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. I am not sure if I will be able to help you see this situation objectively because of your interests.
Hi Corey,
I am very surprised at your negative reaction to my comments. I think it is safe to say that my intent was not in any way to attack you. Building on the comment left by Mr. Metter, my goal was simply to articulate the value proposition for third party online reviews. I take no issue whatsoever with you posting our invitation email and I thank you for spreading the word about our programs. We’ve already had an inquiry or two based on your comments.
All the best,
– Michael Thomas
Business Development Director
703-994-4205 - Phone
703-842-6046 - Fax
Capterra, Inc. — The Smart Way To Find Software
[...] criticism drawn by my previous post, Dealer review sites waste your time, focused on the reality that third party websites are already ranking for business names. [...]
Of course you are! The PR hat produced quite a narrative for anyone else that may be reading, but hell, you weren’t able to address me directly until your latest comment. I am no stranger to the product defense disclaimer that always finds its way into my comments, and I love feedback in the third person.
I have published part two. I doubt it popped up on your blog alerts yesterday: http://www.tacticaltechnique.com/opinion/reasons-to-give-away-unique-web-content/
Glad I could help encourage more decision makers to inquire about your program. You know what they say, no press is bad press, and there’s a sucker born every minute.
[...] as explained at another automotive marketing blog. Car dealers are not selling a unique product and to pay to have reviews of their dealership [...]