S2E5: Google As You Know It Is Gone Forever. AI Impact to SEO | Dealer Insights Podcast By Strolid

Dealer Insights Podcast is brought to you in part by Strolid, the premiere automotive BDC solution.

Guest
Matt Copley, HRIZN https://hrizn.io/
HRIZN is offering a free account to listeners with their Free Around and Find Out campaign.

Summary
In this episode of the Dealer Insights Podcast, Michael Donovan and Matt Copley discuss the evolution of SEO and AI in the automotive industry. They explore the importance of quality content, the impact of Google's algorithm changes, and the need for collaboration with AI to enhance content marketing strategies. The conversation emphasizes the significance of building a customer-centric experience and leveraging data for marketing success. They also highlight the role of agencies in SEO and the necessity of adapting to the changing landscape of digital marketing.

The changes to Google in 2025 for tier 3 dealerships is having an impact. The SEO practices and techniques are no longer generating the results in ranking and organic traffic. In some cases the SERP will return an AI overview and Search Generative Experiences (SGEs) suppress position 1 2-4 full scrolls below the fold.  Google is syndicating and summarizing content without consistent attribution or clicks, which makes them the supplier and competitor. The only way to be above AI Overview is with Google Ads.  

How do dealers navigate these changes?
Leverage the data available in GA4, Google Ads, and Search Console to capture the 2025 trend. 
Explore external tools like SEM rush to gain a deeper understanding of performance.

SEO Data-driven Questions for dealerships
1. Keyword Count: How many keywords is your dealership ranking for?
2. Index Analysis: How many pages are currently indexed on Google?
3. Exposure/Activity Trend: What is the YTD trend for Impressions and Clicks (organic)?
4. Mutual Keywords: What top keywords are being targeted in Google Ads and SEO?
5. Analyze mutual keywords (paid and organic) average position, and change in position.

Pro Tip: Consider expanding the date range to a 13 month period. This will provide YoY and complete trend line. Visualize in simple charts and graphs to share across stakeholders in your organization.

Action Plan
With a current analysis complete the next step is to form an action plan. The details might vary from dealer to dealer, market to market, and OEM to OEM.  Define the areas that are the biggest opportunities, and align with your goals. If it begins with exposure, then more keywords and indexed pages is how you get there.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dealer Insights Podcast
02:24 The Evolution of Content Creation in Automotive
05:19 SEO: Past, Present, and Future
07:43 The Role of AI in SEO and Content
10:15 Collaborating with AI for Better Content
12:50 The Shift in Google's Algorithm and Its Impact
15:40 Strategies for Effective Content Creation
18:13 The Importance of Consistency in SEO
20:47 The Future of SEO: Search Everywhere Optimization
23:26 Leveraging Agencies for SEO Success
25:47 Conclusion and Key Takeaways
34:06 AI as a Force Multiplier in Automotive
36:45 The Unique Challenges of Automotive Content Creation
38:18 The Future of Work: Humans and AI Collaboration
42:26 Creating Customer-Centric Experiences
48:27 The Importance of Intent-Driven Content
52:26 Leveraging Data for Enhanced Customer Engagement
56:56 Navigating the AI Revolution in Automotive

Strolid provides industry leading BDC services to #automotive #dealership for #sales and #service 
Innovators of #conversationalai #ai and #technology that empowers our BDC advisors to deliver results.

Think we could help?
👇
www.strolid.com

Explore automotive AI platform built on conversational data from phone calls, emails, text messages and chat.  Uncover business intelligence that will allow your store to grow and improve how your customers are treated.

Follow Us: 👇
www.Linkedin.com/company/strolid
www.Instagram.com/getstrolid
www.facebook.com/strolidresults/

Automotive BDC for Fixed and Variable Operations
www.Strolid.com

Creators and Guests

Host

Michael Donovan

Michael Donovan is the Vice President of Marketing at Business Development Center (BDC) Strolid, Inc., where he leverages two decades of automotive industry expertise to drive growth through innovative digital marketing strategies and AI technology integration.

What is Dealer Insights Podcast?

Interviews with Strolid CEO and Founder Vin Micciche, BDC industry icon and veteran

something like this the road ahead has never been more clear success belongs to
those who take the lead welcome to Dealer Insights podcast that puts you in
the driver's seat of growth hosted by me Michael Donovan oh it says Vim Machi
hosted by let's just say this is where experience meets innovation from cutting
edge technology to gamechanging strategies we go beyond the surface to
bring you insights that matter real conversations to help you navigate the
everanging automotive landscape buckle up your next competitive advantage
starts now so that's that part i'll just put a little you know it's amazing what some editing can do dude it's amazing
that you weren't a radio host at one point in your life i hear that i have imposttor syndrome with I have imposttor
syndrome with that yes I don't hear myself like that but I hear that often
so check this out if your dealership still treats SEO like a checklist simply
put you're losing the game has changed and AI isn't just part of the change is
the change in 2011 I was invited to speak on a
panel at Digital Dealer on the best of the best demystifying SEO
the things that have changed since then are vast and the landscape is being
redesigned from the ground up in order to bring high value and information
dealers like you really want I knew I had to find a high-powered individual
that can do more than talk the talk welcome everybody back to another
episode we're changing things up a little bit with Dealer Insights podcast
my name's Michael Donovan with Straid VP of marketing and we're talking about the
evolution of SEO in automotive and again that
highpowered individual i'm here with Matt matt thanks for
showing up man yeah Mike good to be here man why don't you
give us the elevator pitch on uh what you're up to yeah so um
you know I think what we saw early on this is about two two and a half years
ago as the LLMs hit the market is that AI represented windfall change for the
industry especially around areas that represent tremendous headwind and redundancy for dealers in their
day-to-day workflow we set out to slay a number of different dragons in the space
right like the opportunities were obvious to us what sort of got Horizon
focused on our first product offering and and delivering this was really feedback from our dealer adviserss our
agency adviserss sort of dragging us toward this thing boy if if if you could
this would be amazing and so today uh you know I guess last week we went open
beta with a firstofits-kind content marketing platform for automotive we
empower automotive marketers in general to 10x content quality 10x speed to
market and 10x productivity all of that while driving significant cost reductions across a number of content
and communication operations so the canvas is fairly wide right i don't love to be pigeonholed into SEO because it's
one piece of what we do but we're looking to really deliver meaningful tools to automotive marketers to better
deploy content at scale that is helpful and delivering meaningful user
experiences and then ties nicely into all of the other things that they do from a paid marketing and strategic
perspective you know we've had some conversations and I've I've been we've kicked this can down the road long
enough you know I was really again appreciative of you joining me here today on this topic it's my pleasure seo
is you know I it just has a real special special place in my heart when it's done
well and you know I've always always been that white hat let's do it right
let's roll our sleeves up and figure it out you know it's it's it started out for me it was very exploratory let's try
this here let's try this here and I'm thinking back to when I worked for the
Leo Auto Group director of search marketing and and you know the first order of business was SEO and when I had
that speaking engagement out with uh old Phil Surah man you know shout out to Phil with Wayne Userie and Andy Graph
and you know I was I was the young buck for sure but I was the only one sitting
up there and this isn't a I'm not taking a shot at anybody i was the only one that was on that stage that was actually
doing the work right the other guys were talking about their vendors and what's
interesting with Horizon is you know it's a it's very neutral it fits for
anybody and it also you know if you're a single point franchise dealer and you're
thinking you know can I use Verizon yes you can if you're a major automotive group publicly traded on the New York
Stock Exchange it fits for you and everywhere in between and it branches
out right you have that horizontal movement into marketing agencies vendors SEO vendors
even i mean sure it fits and it's almost like I can see the dots being connected
as as Vin says right where you've built this this platform that
you've built a platform that is looking into the future a little bit in the
sense that prompt writing and and managing your
content as a whole is going to be a new position that I think we're going to
find more common place in in dealerships in agencies in the fabric of content
creation and before we start peeling those layers back I wanted to have a little session
with you talking about like the old game you know and and and the the message
here for everyone listening is is what got you here won't get you there
so what's that mean like let's do a little like a back and forth on some old
tactics white hat black hat gray hat what comes to mind when you think that's
a big plate to carve through um so I I think how do we how do we tackle this
efficiently so the last two years have represented a fairly seismic shakeup on
Google's part right make no mistake that the helpful content update over the
breadth of its pieces over the last couple of years represents one of the largest algorithm shifts probably the
largest algorithm shift in in Google's history um and and and and don't doubt
for a moment that it's not driven by the rise of AI both in their internal infrastructure and external competitors
that they see coming but what what did it used to be right well early on it
started with you know what we would today call very black and gray hat stuff
you know I'm gonna I'm gonna stuff a bunch of meta keywords behind the page that have like zero relevance to my page
and get it to rank i'm going to try and manipulate metadescriptions then I'm going to try and manipulate backlink
architecture go out and buy back links etc etc etc right like there's always been sort of this give and take and this
play between Google you know changing the way that they you know sort of
prioritize or weight their algorithm and then SEOs both white hat gray hat and
black hat all trying to sort of do the best they can within the new framework and infrastructure and don't doubt that
that won't continue google has you know they support a a broad ecosystem of
developers and SEOs and content writers and creators of all types with that
algorithm right and there is a there is a healthy sort of uh relationship between Google's continued evolution and
the livelihood of all of the people that provide content for Google to uh deliver to other consumers
however you know a lot of sort of the hidden stuff got blown out of the water quite some time ago and over the last
maybe 10 or 15 years there there has emerged some clarity to sort of what we
would call white hat practices right create relevant content and the practice
for quite some time has been to create content that's optimized for keywords right configure my my my writing style
and the saturation of keywords to sort of rank for this thing that I'm trying to rank for when somebody types it into
Google you know have strong backlink strategies to drive valid back links
site to site sure that's mattered over the past 10 years and then you know
focus on user experience from a site speed and loading perspective and whatnot the fundamental challenge for
automotive dealers is when a when an automotive site is fully deployed with the 26 vendor tags that uh the dealer
has put on and the 13 that they forgot were already there and um you know uh
the website not supporting WEBP images or whatever right like there are inherent technical pieces that slow down
dealer websites simply the turn of inventory and the fa the failure to alt
tag inventory images right like you run an audit on any dealer website you're
going to get a mountain of technical errors many of those fundamentally unsolvable due to requirements from OEMs
and OEM programs and website providers etc so there's been an ongoing game of
like oh look your site's bad check out my audit and then we're going to do this technical stuff and it's going to get
better and to a varying degree SEO providers in automotive do good or not
so good jobs in creating the you know sort of customerf facing content
model landing pages comparison pages model reviews service pages one thing
they've always struggled with is really good blog posting right yeah
but what's happened as part of helpful content is Google has totally shifted the focus they've said "Hey content
creators stop trying to optimize for a keyword
start trying to deliver helpful experiences to the user." Right and by
extension that will deliver helpful experiences to AI bots that consume and
deliver your content to users via Google and frankly other LLMs right and so it's
put the the the the focus really back on truly quality content right like AI
even for the last three or four years for many SEO shops has been a tool right
oh I'm going to use it to trailblaze some content and do it faster and post it to the site or I'm going to use it
for ideas or or or or what have you but now like as Google continues to make
these shifts we saw it in the March core update where like you know Google came
in wholesale and said "Look scaled content we're going to penalize at the maximum possible rate." What does that
mean to automotive well that means everybody who's generating blog posts directly in chat GPT and pasting them
across to their website penalized at the highest possible rate people trying to write vehicle descriptions with Gemini
and post them to their inventory penalized at the highest possible rate people who have bought cookie cutter SEO
packages from unnamed website providers for years that just have tokenized
injections of dealer name address phone number etc yeah penalized at the highest possible
rate so what we saw in March was like just this mass decline of overall website rankings for a lot of dealers on
content that they frankly and in their defense had spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars building over the
last 10 years so I guess in a nutshell that's what's
happening um and and and is how it is evolving
from where it was over the last 10 15 and even 20 years i would say that yeah
it presents a massive threat but at the same time presents tremendous opportunity right it's almost a table
clearing of sorts that for dealers that are now strategic and proactive in how
they collaborate with AI to deliver content experiences right like it's
redefining what good content looks like when done right you just said something
that I I really want to stress collaborate with AI
it is it is not a copy and paste you can be penalized
all of this information is accessible i suppose I could put a link in the in the description to to Google's uh guidelines
you can read it yourself uh specifically on on scaled content now don't be mistaken it's not going to give us like
all of the signals that factor into the algorithm and you know it's not groundbreaking but I think is oftent
times overlooked and maybe for more of that forwardthinking dealer or uh
marketing director e-commerce director BDM that's that's involved in the
marketing at the store or the group it could be interesting and
things to think about yeah i mean the good news about helpful content is Google is very clear about what not to
do right they're not going to tell you necessarily all the things you need to do to be at the top of Google right like
they they still view that as a competitive space for creators to create and win and learn but what they will
tell you is what not to do and it's it's sort of core in the fiber of the Horizon
DNA right like we wanted Horizon to very much be not a hack but a white hat type
of environment where a creator can collaborate with AI
to drastically improve content quality productivity and results right because
one of the biggest headwinds for content results is the ability to produce and
deploy said content and so if we can meet our customer with more helpful
content experiences in more places more of the time we're going to see more
positive results not only from the content itself but also for what that authoritative
content footprint does for all of the other pages in our site right becomes a rising tide that lifts all the boats um
and also the sort of echo effect that it has on quality score on all the paid
advertising that I'm driving across to my website because there is this inherent relationship between quality
score and what you actually pay for a click on a particular ad directing to a
particular piece of content so we think of it as sort of very holistic and has its hand in in the hand of marketing it
has its hand in the hand of fixed ops it has its hand in the hand of customer experience life cycle management you
know Neil Patel and I'm paraphrasing he he he he brings up good points in this
space right one of the tests he did was extensive this was actually a couple years old now when there were a lot of
myths flying around about AI content being penalized and now after March core
update that is definitely true but what he looked at was like how well does AI only content perform versus human-only
content and at the time it was pretty even and then what about human plus AI
collaborating to create great content and that was head and shoulders above the other two and that's sort of the
needle that we've tried to thread is to deliver an environment where humans can collaborate effectively with AI to
deliver helpful content experiences to their customers so very well said a lot
to unpack there but you know in an effort to keep the conversation going
and just that real actionable takeaway for
for any of the the listeners and viewers would you say co is is more uh similar
to you know plumbing where you plum everything in and you check okay it's
all it's all working no leaks and you walk away set it in forget it or with
this new collaboration uh leveraging the power of AI
is it more like a Formula 1 pit crew and race team where we're really looking at
our results and picking up a tenth of a second on a lap here and changing tires at this time and it's it's more involved
like how or are we somewhere in between you know yeah I mean here I think it's
it's very much um I think you know I'll steal another Patelism which is he talks
about SEO evolving into search everywhere optimization right and I
almost think about it as you know le less about SEO and more about sort of
like establishing a pulse to your store what you're about you know leading with
customer first how do I how do I deliver the things the answers to the questions my customer has wherever they're at in
the journey right and then through that answer also offer up other helpful
experiences that direct them to inventory or my current specials or my service offers or any other things that
may then be helpful when they realize that I have been helpful to them right there's some sort of inherent
reciprocity that exists when you stamp an authoritative footprint in the market what I will tell you is Google will
consume as much as you can give um for any dealership
what we find is that probably only 15% of dealers have a disciplined enough
sort of process and accountability to create content with consistency
week in week out month in month out um and that's not a knock on dealers it's just sort of a byproduct of the chaos
that exists in the car dealership every month and you know for any of us that have lived it for any pe you know long
long period of our career we know we know how it is right like there's always some fire going off on your desk and
that's why agencies remain highly relevant in this space right and that's why agencies uh that's why we have an
agency partner program and that's why we we we lean on highquality agencies to
provide a service layer on top of Horizon and support them however they may need us but yeah like we're not
going to compete as your SEO vendor that's that's not what we are what I will tell you though is that you know we
do have dealers that consistently execute inhouse and create a piece of
content a day and I will tell you the volume impact of organic
traffic year-over-year is staggering right it's in the
thousands of percentiles of visibility and reach expansion it's you know uh 2x
traffic increases right like if if you're not getting two to 5x the volume of ASC conversions
on your website from organic that you are unpaid it's time to look for for
some improvement there so so the the new reality is content creation search
everywhere optimization i I I like that by the way and I agree it's not it's not
a me thing we'll credit Neil Patel with that one yeah for sure definitely a Patelism you know that's that's how
you're going to gain a competitive edge don't get caught standing still and I I
would also like to make a point and I'm I'm not I don't want this to be misinterpreted
but all SEO is not created equal how one vendor agency or provider performs SEO
it could be drastically different to what you might find elsewhere yeah a
thousand% yeah and to that point just before I lose it because I got you know I got ADD
you know there there is nothing about what we've put into the world that diminishes the value of the agency right
the best agencies I know bring a tremendous layer of human firepower to
the mix from a strategy perspective from a creative perspective etc right so like
we feel like the the accelerant fuel that Horizon represents will make
agencies exponentially more powerful at what they do right so I think it's for
every dealer in the country frankly for every agency in the country it's why we like we give Horizon away like everybody
can sign up for free get a taste of what it does we have usage based pricing so it's really easy to adopt and work into
and evolve and develop whether you're an agency in-house marketing team or or a
dealer that whose internet manager wants to go explore what's possible right like
we we we really have built it for the content creator wherever they may exist but yeah like in a lot of cases you know
the agency is the right avenue and then collaborate with that agency to
coordinate your content strategy with the paid ad copy that
you're putting into the wild and the social that you're putting into the wild right like the agency provides like this
powerful hub to start to syndicate and ensure that you know there's there's
there's sort of flow of strategy and ideas and and collaboration across the
vendor base so we're big proponents of agencies we have a lot of agency
partners um and you know but also have really you know tried to make this a
meaningful tool in the context of anybody can learn it in 10 to 15 minutes
and start leveling up their content market
so and I mean I'm a big agency fan right and basically uh you know building uh this
this pseudo internal agency at Stalled so we can manage our marketing but it's
like all of the all of the experience and you know with what you've shared about the tool I thought it would be it
was important to me to share again I have this affinity for for SEO
it's been the cornerstone of my entire professional career in automotive i've learned a lot i've tried a lot i've had
lots of failures and what I'm seeing with Horizon and you know really the
core of this podcast is to deliver insight to dealers and so they can act
on it and I don't want to get ahead of myself but the it's you you've made it
very easy for a dealer or whatever their makeup is
whatever their stack looks like whether the dealer is listening now and kicks it
to their agency or someone internally you've made it very easy yeah we really
don't discriminate right like fundamentally you know my co-founder and I we both come from backgrounds
in marketing at different times in our career we've worked on
either you know publisher agency etc or or have worked in the vendor space but
we both also bring you know individually our own decade of retail experience to
the mix and just like a lot of the little sort of nuances of the software
we've really tried to solve some of the pain that we've felt in the past right so you know setup and implementation
right like what do what do you hear from most you know vendors that come into the dealership like hey we got a
gamechanging piece of software and it's going to be $1,000 setup fee and 30-day
setup and implementation and you got to sign a 120day contract and blah blah blah blah blah um and you know Dave and
I always sort of hyperbolized like let's let's embrace the prove it model put our
money where our mouth is right let's give it away to every dealer in the country first and foremost let's enable
them to set up and implement in 10 minutes or less and let's just let them experience some of the magic that we're
trying to deliver um and and trust that if we just go deliver
great product the community will respond yeah and and the cost of not doing anything
at all with SEO at this point I think is that's a that's a pretty high price to
pay yeah i mean here it's a bit of the Ricky Bobby paradox right okay um the the
tools that are out there now like you know not to toot our own horn like there
are other content tools we're we're convinced that ours is significantly better and more built for automotive
than anything else out there but fundamentally like if you are racing this race or standing still in this race
against someone with even the most you know rudimentary AIdriven
strategy the gap is expanding in a massive way quickly if you're up against
a Horizon dealer in your market the gap could be very difficult to close in a
short period of time because it's it really truly is like just a brute force
footprint expansion on your market that you basically have to double or triple
the workflow of the guy that started six months ago to ever catch them which if
they're a power producer will be hard to do um so it's it's interesting times
right and we're not definitely trying to deliver advantage to everyone but early
adoption consistency of execution will win in this space as it always has long
before AI was a piece of it that's right and and it's it's the current force multiplier okay so that being said it's
all about how you use it the workflow the frequency the schedule understanding
and don't be afraid to fail like get Oh yeah fail fast mentality yes embrace it
um build test learn repeat now we believe we're setting up a pretty fun
environment to do that and eliminate as many uh you know as much potential for
failure as possible like it really truly does put enough guard rails on the AI
and enough training to maintain a tremendous amount of consistent strategy
across across the content collection so obviously we have doors that are cracked
open all around us right i've always been having been in the in the adtech space and done some exploratory work and
whatnot like I always have been a big believer in in um innovate
your product well but integrate everywhere sort of like the antithesis of build the vertical monopoly and make
everybody use our product more like fit in where we need to fit in integrate with everything that makes it a nimble
and helpful tool sort of a Swiss Army knife if you will so there's doors that
are sort of cracking open to us everywhere um you know we we we embrace
conversations with CMS platforms CRM companies that want to modernize their
CRM with automotive trained content advertisers that want help deploying ad
copy at scale like you name it right we're really we're really just exploring all avenues and seeing where we can
support this industry and its in its evolution so we we kind of touched on
this is a perfect uh you know pivot point to again continue to evolve this this conversation to bring some some
value and you know you mentioned earlier content creation this isn't just SEO seo
is very important and with the recent core algorithm update it has been like a
rugpull to a lot of dealers a lot of a lot of agencies vendors website
providers and that's caused it's almost like a factory reset right but let's
just step back every dealer has access to these these
tools and resources we can understand that the AI collaboration is the force
multiplier figuring out the strategy and having the surrounding yourself with the
right people that you trust that have experience what Matt just shared with us
is you know his tool was built but it was also not built from just a technical
innovative perspective but also through the lens of retail tier three retail
automotive and the experience that he and Dave have had in the industry so I think that's an
important part and I've mentioned it in previous episodes that you should be buying the experience right and aligning
with those companies that get it so with automotive it's just a really unique space right
like so many companies try and break in and and they miss a lot of the nuance for
many years to really solve for what the dealer needs and so we think we have some advantage there right like yeah we
have some tools that are really built for automotive and the way that we like process inventory and automate
descriptions you know the way that we train around language and compliance and
you know ensure that like we brute force LLMs to not invent facts and statistics
and everything else because we're cognizant of the compliance environment too so like yeah I mean um can can can
other tools help with this absolutely like if you're not using a tool you're
falling behind and frankly you know if if if you are using one today fantastic and if you if
you're feeling pain with that those are probably pain points that that that that we've solved pretty effectively or are
you know in the process of solving so yeah I mean we don't want to make this an all about us right it's it's more
just there has to be has to be a change in the thinking of how content marketing
and the content strategy intertwines with customer life cycle management
customer experience fixed ops marketing FNI warranty and and service contract
penetration etc like all of these things sort of go handinand glove um and and
and that's where we see Horizon as a powerful piece right is it sort of understands the brand voice and the
store and the market and um you know how we want to talk about these things collectively and sort of bleeds that
unique DNA of the store across across content collections so
yeah I mean Martek's all converging right i think if you ask Elon he's going to tell you that like the robots are
going to do everything well what will people do well you don't have to worry about it because nothing will cost
anything once the robots do everything but I mean if you make no money now any
money is expensive i'm a little less dystopian i think you know the future
will fall somewhere between where we are at today and his vision of the world and I think you know there are a lot of AI
founders out there beating the drum that like oh my god like we're here to empower your people not replace them you
know I would tend to agree but I think that's a disingenuous statement fundamentally AI will replace millions
of jobs and it's inherent upon the people that are doing those jobs and the
leaders that are leading them to envision how they deliver value in a
world where their redundant task work is eliminated and that's part of the evolution that we'll go through i can't
recall who the interview was with but I was watching an interview it was really
a snippet of an interview but the statement was that the generation before ours was the last generation to manage
only humans and the future generation of managers will manage humans and bots
right and I think part of it's just you know taking a pragmatic look because hey
let's face it all of us in automotive know that AI has been a buzzword for 10 years not two most of the AI buzz for
many years was nothing more than like basic conditional logic or maybe you
know some slightly more advanced marov chain machine learning models you know
the state we're at today is definitively different than that and every company is trying to inject it into their system
somewhere to make it make the object more shiny right so I think it's important to go in pragmatically and say
okay out of all the things that we've seen what are the most empowering across the
broadest footprint of our dealer where we can see the impact on the actual
workflow and productivity of our people and then test and learn right I'm
watching I don't know if you've seen it like the whole viral deal of Oliver
Wigger the Discount Tire employee in Oregon that like quit his corporate job
and bought a sailboat and Yeah is sailing across the Pacific alone with
his cat right now right yeah heading to Hawaii i mean it's the first leg of his around
the world and he mentioned he was talking to some like seasoned old sailor who had been doing it all his life or
the majority of his life and the guy sort of chuckled at him and he's like you know talk to me all you want about
sailing around the world but I hear it from lots of people and 98% of them
never leave the leave the harbor and so I think a big piece of it like there's
things to be drawn from that right like there's a lot of unknowns but you know if you've historically been a late
adopter this is not the time to be that because early adopters are getting a significant amount will be hard to catch
yeah and it's it's important that you understand this is so much more than a
line item on an invoice yeah it's it's it's pervasive
i mean literally the point where you know JP Morgan and you know Jamie Diamond have issued
pretty stern concerns about AI right i am not the guy
that's going to sit there and say you know AI is going to run everything next year because we see it like we are
hands in the soil deep in this space and left unchecked AI pretty quickly veers
into doing things that you do not want it to do and so there
there there is and will continue to believe be I believe a distinct need for
leaders and and you know creators in the business to
remain hands-on in collaboration with AI and that that that that will be the
10-year interim and maybe sure it'll start to take over more and more pieces
but I think what you'll find as with any sort of wholesale seed chain change like
this um that the AI consumption of redundant processes will open up new
opportunities for job creation we haven't thought about yet for humans to to to be exponentially uh more valuable
to the process in new ways right oh and I like how you said you know
really in inspect what you expect test keep an eye fail fast yeah so
let me let me put you on the spot a little bit if if you had to you bump into a dealer
uh in passing that you know what he he wants the road map he wants
like give give me that three-step kind of game plan road map what's that look
like yeah i think the first thing to really think about is probably your customer and how well your site is
actually aligned with um m meeting
customer at their point of intent um you know for the last 20 years we've
built things to sort of I almost think of them as like you know a bit of a fly
trap type of deal like oh hey get them to the landing page and convert them right um but you know I think and and
and and in everybody's defense like content creation was a grind really hard
to do all the things like in my former life you know selling dynamic search and
you know just dynamic headline matching inventory all that stuff like we always
used to talk about like hey SEO focus on the 10 to 20 core keywords for the
business maybe even a hundred yeah but like that you should keep the focus in
SEO small in the core and then for all the crazy
longtail queries that shoppers ask use paid to just capture people and put
them into the most relevant experience possible whether that's your homepage your service page whatever but broadly
general sort of matches to what they may be looking for okay those experiences
don't really deliver exactly what the customer wants though right like maybe they are asking about
service intervals for my car landing them at the schedule service page might
not actually be the experience they want right it doesn't answer their question i
really like this meet the customer where they are and the beauty now yeah like you can build a myriad of intentdriven
meaningful informative customer experiences on your site for
next to nothing so and then take your paid and focus it on the stuff that
really converts instead of all of the ancillary stuff so it's almost flipped that that sort of dynamic on its head
which is what I was just realizing as you're as you're answering the question
and it makes a lot of sense but you didn't say anything about a landing page you just
said an experience yeah i mean here that's a takeway we think about landing pages in the context
of hey a user might want to know more about a car a particular model and yeah we would have historically referred to
that as a model landing page but typically model landing pages are either thin in their content or they're
templated and basically your model landing page is the same as every other Chevy dealers's model landing page for
that model in the country who uses that provider of model landing pages right
whereas now you can deliver truly a unique experience with that model in
with unique content and potentially compelling calls to action around your
dealership your service promise all of the other things and and and have it be
truly yours right have a model comparison be actually yours you know
you need an event page for the you know the Memorial Day event that's going on
well what do you also need with that landing page you don't necess it's not
just the page that you need you need the customer experience you need the TV script that drops to the page you need
the radio script you need the the performance max ads the Facebook ad copy
you need the email template you need the BDC call scripts you need the best practice guides for the BDC to handle
that effectively you need the follow-up emails for the people who did buy didn't buy etc like all of that to do it right
and deliver the experience that you're trying to promise that customer that's hard right and even if you have a great
agency working on it expensive because it's a lot of work for the agency to orchestrate all of that in their defense
worth every penny yeah no devalue there i mean to have just to have a lead on
that project okay as a former agency owner I know that I'm going to have
someone consumed for two hours making sense of all of that putting it together
that's separate like yeah right so we've already spent all of the time on the
briefs and the campaign and like that's also a significant investment now we
need to translate all of that and then we have to bring in copywriters
designers co paid search account management we have to communicate we're
going to need dev like there is a lot that goes into that and the efficiency
for Horizon like and that starts to paint an effective picture of where Horizon drives like sea change
efficiency at large agencies right okay so so is number two I don't want to load
your lips here but like so out of this out of this uh three-step road map right
and we're going to meet the customer where they are right putting the customer hat on and sometimes just as a
pro tip to the dealers it isn't necessarily going to be what you like
you might not like something about it but that doesn't make it like two things can be true it could still be the best
solution it's a it's a good point i think you know there there there there is a
balance to be struck there one of the real sort of powerful pieces of what
we've built is like a massive research engine when I go to create any piece of
content so rather than just oh cool AI wrote me a piece of content like that
content is purposeful in the context that whatever you wanted to write about
Horizon goes and gut checks that against actual traffic and high volume queries
and says okay I understand you want to write about this thing but we're actually going to align it with all of
these high volume things that people ask when they're interested in that general category yeah so that we actually
capture traffic with the thing that you want to create yes and and and yeah I
mean for for dealers you know sometimes it might not align with the with with
the old way that they've thought about marketing or TV advertising or whatever else but we're not trying to be
prescriptive with it just helpful right one of the beautiful pieces of it is the output content is in a full editor so
the dealer or their agency they can come in and add their own elements and enhance it and match it to their liking
right um so I think the the key is really you know whatever your flavor is
and there's training capability in there to sort of train the platform like hey here's how we talk about the store we're
always out front with the blue gorilla on the roof and this is our you know value statement like whoever the dealer
is it will sort of understand that and align with it and try and paint the context in in in that in that in that
sort of pallet but at that point like we we we leave that space for the dealer to
sort of collaborate with the AI to bring content that not only meets the
customer where they are but meets the dealer where their vision of their brand
is but then it's not just content right it's like oh well this content needs a
bunch of social citations to point back to it and then oh my god now I've got
organic social posts that are actually meaningful and point to a meaningful experience for the user rather than just
yelling into the void on social right okay so so there's there's there's a
high level of consistency and continuity approaching this from a content creation
standpoint yeah we think of it as like multi-pronged right like if you're going
to invest in a good content marketing strategy it shouldn't just be creating pages on your website right and that's
what it should be about like what is the customer's experience with that content
how can we bring them into that content wherever they are right whatever feed
they might be doom scrolling whatever search engine they might be querying how do we bring them into that content in a
way that captures them and then delivers them something of value and then how
from that content do we then sort of just sort of naturally deliver them
other helpful experiences within the website whether it's links into relevant
inventory or scheduling service or you know getting a trade appraisal or all
the other things that dealers are used to sort of monitoring as as as a as a meaningful conversion so and and I will
tell you that like programmatic marketers like people that
really understand fullfunnel on the paid ad side see this writing on the wall because boy
when we can fill up that funnel all up and down the shopper journey both
variable and fixed ops what it does is the minute they touch our site we've now
identified that customer they're in our CDP they're in our ad platforms
and even if they were just looking at how do I fix this peeling weather
stripping on my you know Audi A 18 days later when they realize oh [ __ ] maybe I
just want to buy a new A4 and they go to Google and search new A4 lease offers
well your Google account already knows who that customer is they can execute a bid priority on that customer and win it
for exponentially less than all the competitors in the auction right so like
not to mention retargeting tags get placed on that customer right like the footprint on the ad side gets
drastically expanded when you're delivering drastically expanded footprint on the organic side it takes
your audiences to a just a whole different level you're targeting to the next level it seems to provide this this
whole set of financial benefits
efficiency benefits across the board and and frankly data benefits right like
we've just started talking to CDP companies about this but I mean think
about when your CDP doesn't just have oh they visited a service page
you know 20 days ago or they visited a a an offers page but they can say over the
last year and a half they've increased this frequency of looking at A4 service
related content on your site yeah and all of a sudden now they're moving
into your sales offers and stuff and suddenly now the CDP is empowered with a
tremendous amount of deep context on that customer and their intent as it's
changing yeah and and again like the experience that can be crafted and then
the data that follows that over time obviously the the longer the period of
time and and the more of those opportunities that you identify you know
you have this arsenal and it it's no longer data metrics and KPIs it's
business intelligence and that's that's how you get into this datadriven mindset
at what dealers are actually accustomed to right working with their OEMs and and
variable and fixed operations but now that carries into into their their
marketing and web website performance the actual digital footprint and uh you
know of course there there's always the concern of like this data maybe becoming
siloed and and you know not as accessible so that's probably a topic
for another podcast yeah i mean we we could riff on that on another episode i
will tell you like what's the only real thing is the customer PII
right everything else is and it's all so hashed now that the moment that customer
selfidentifies they could be matched back to a hashed journey of an unknown customer you know with a good CDP and
good data cleansing processes which like let's be honest is still in its infancy
but there are companies out there executing that well now um uh you know
being able to match back to customer interactions with site content over
longer periods of time can be tremendously informative in in customer life cycle management maximization of
customer lifetime value etc so we see significant opportunities to to to
engage and share data across partners like the nice thing with us is we don't
we don't transport any PII i had a I had a big data company the other day tell me
like "Oh my god you guys are like a almost like a content clean room." And
it's like "Yeah I mean conceivably you could send us any type of payload of
demographic data or audience data and we could deliver you content tailored to
that to that audience." Right right so yeah and you know that piece just
sort of staying disciplined about staying away from the customer we don't really care who the the customer is we
care what they care about and we're just focused on delivering uh that meaningful
content to dealers to agencies to tech companies in this space i like that i
think I think you're probably going to have to edit out some background noise my dog is uh I hear your dog it's
someone is here obvious obvious so Matt this has been you know first of all a
pleasure and a very insightful uh there were a few things that I picked up i know we've spent a few sessions really
you know getting deeper on on the Horizon platform and uh you know I'm
excited for the industry i know that we're on the precipice and in the midst of this revolution and AI is a big part
of it and a lot of dealers aren't sure how to navigate it so all of that's been
you know very beneficial to recap you have to not stay static be willing
to explore change and align yourself with the individuals vendors agencies
partners that understand your business and are willing to you know look at new
things and embrace these changes that's how you capitalize on being a true
innovator in the space and not being left behind you want to be the one that's creating that margin from your
peers and competitors in your market by understanding how to evolve and don't be
afraid of failure embrace it and be able to identify it matt can you tell us you
know where where can listeners find uh find you and and learn more about
Horizon yeah uh 100% uh I mean obviously I'm I'm
on LinkedIn if anyone wants to connect with me personally I got a book meeting link there i'm open book happy to
connect talk shop whatever they can definitely go to horizon.io is our website horizon.io that's h r i zn
and yeah I mean sign up for the platform free around and find out as we like to
say you know every dealer in the country can try it for free every dealer in the country can frankly use it for free for
a couple content pieces a month i recommend you just use it right and once you get familiar with it our packages
are really inexpensive easy to adopt and frankly like from a value delivery
perspective we aspire to be as indispensable as a VOTE right like we
really aspire to deliver so much ridiculous value to the dealer that we're never a consideration of of of
whether or not we stay on the list so yeah I mean dealers definitely check it
out in the fairly near future here we will also have a partner page propped up
on the site if you prefer to explore agencies that provide a service layer
over the top of Horizon we have five in place now with uh probably a handful
more coming before the end of the quarter and yeah we're just we're here to help this industry thrive help
support meaningful change in the AI space and also you know other companies
we really don't view oursel as a competitor as much as we do view ourselves as pipes to enable
acceleration for everyone and and and be a part of this renaissance as much as we
can so if there's companies that are looking to rapidly accelerate the AI
communications capabilities in their software templating in their software etc crm CDPs website CMS platforms we've
talked to quite a few of those yeah we're we're here for it we're we're we're eager for every conversation and
and definitely built for scale to be able to support
thousands of clients tomorrow if uh we were so fortunate to encounter them well
look that's awesome appreciate all of the color and you know if if this
episode of of dealer insights lit a fire inside of you share it with a GM with
your dealer marketing director kick it to your agency or your current SEO
vendor there's like subscribe share yeah all that good stuff smash those buttons
yeah and and you know give us some feedback on this episode whether you're watching along on YouTube and you got to
see all these mugs at least they're covered up with a hat today listening
on Apple or Spotify give us some feedback give a like we appreciate you
as always and we'll catch you on the next one peace out Matt thanks Mike