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AUTOMOTIVE: How AI Is Changing the Rules of Search

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If your dealership website is seeing fewer visitors than it was a year ago, you’re not imagining it. Some of that declining traffic is a direct result of how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the way people search online and the rules are changing faster than most dealers realise.

Over the last 18 months as a research project I’ve been studying the effect of AI technology on Internet search. New agency disciplines like Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) Conversational Search (CAI) and Answer Optimisation (AO) all drive AI Search Summary results including the citation links.

The fact is – Customers are increasingly getting the answers they need in the AI Summary at the top of the search results (SERPS) without ever clicking through to your website. That’s not a temporary blip, it’s a structural shift in how search works. There’s every chance you are burning your Pay Per Click (PPC) budget.

Here’s another steer – don’t chase every new AI tool that lands in your inbox, an endless wave of shiny new products promising to revolutionise your digital presence. Instead go back to basics.

Review what you already have, identify the gaps, and fix your foundations first.

UK dealers are being targeted by an ever-growing number of AI marketing vendors, many of whom are selling solutions to problems dealers haven’t fully understood yet – I wrote an article called The Comprehension Gap. Understanding the landscape clearly is the essential first step. Some solutions don’t even need AI to resolve them.

The Language You Need to Know

To make sense of what’s happening, it helps to get comfortable with a handful of key terms that are increasingly shaping how dealers think about their digital presence.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice most dealers are already familiar with – building website content that ranks well in Google keyword searches and earns free, organic traffic. It remains important, but it’s no longer the whole picture. In fact Semrush, a leading analytics provider, recently  quoted a 1/3 drop off in search appearances for popular search terms because of ‘position zero’ AI summaries. Those enquiries are going to the forward thinking supplier who, ahead of the game in the world of GEO, is already being cited in AI search and AI App results – and will benefit from early adopter status forever.

Position Zero refers to the featured AI generated snippet that appears at the very top of Google results, providing a direct answer to a search query without the user needing to click any link. Appearing here means visibility without traffic, which is precisely the problem.

LLMs (Large Language Models) – as explained by Prof. Hannah Fry on the BBC this week – are the AI tools driven by state of the art electronic chips that are increasingly influencing how people search and make decisions. These include Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, platforms that millions of UK consumers now turn to for recommendations, comparisons, and buying guidance.

Schema Markup (sometimes called Website Schema) is structured data added to a website’s backend that consistently labels content, vehicles, reviews, services – so that search engines can properly understand it. It helps generate richer search results and improves click-through rates. Many dealer websites in the UK lack this entirely.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is perhaps the most important new concept for dealers to grasp. Where SEO is about ranking in traditional search, GEO is about structuring and creating content so it can be easily understood, cited, and summarised by AI tools. Think of it as SEO for the AI era. Unlike traditional SEO, which tends to return the same results for the same keyword, GEO is highly personalised, the same query from two different buyers can produce completely different AI-generated answers, pulling from reviews, forums, and third-party sources alongside your own website.

Prompt Visibility refers to how frequently and prominently your dealership, brand, or specific information appears in AI-generated responses. If an AI tool is recommending dealerships near a customer, does your name come up – and in what context?

Agentic AI is the next frontier. Unlike AI tools that simply provide information, Agentic AI can independently plan, make decisions, and execute multi-step tasks. In a retail automotive context, this means AI that could guide a buyer through the entire purchase journey, from initial research to booking a test drive, with minimal human involvement. This is not science fiction; early versions of this capability already exist. LLMs were initially created to drive Chatbot conversations.

Hallucinations are incorrect results appearing in AI search summaries that could affect a contact or even a loss of reputation. AI is in the ‘Model T Ford’ era, it is not always correct and you need to be testing search terms for accuracy as part of your reputation management.

What This Means for U.K. Dealers

The practical implications are significant. Every positive customer review matters more than ever, because AI tools draw on that content when forming recommendations. An authentic dealer with consistently strong, genuine reviews is far more likely to appear in AI-generated responses than one whose online reputation is thin or inconsistent.

Critically, responses to reviews also need to feel human and genuine – AI can detect overly automated or templated replies, and this affects how credibly your dealership is represented. You cannot rely on AI in most cases ChatGPT writing your content – it’s great for writer’s block, but rewrite ideas in your personal tone.

Your website content needs to answer real questions clearly and directly. Generic manufacturer copy doesn’t help AI understand what makes your dealership distinct. Pages that explain finance options, compare models, or provide genuinely useful local information are the kind of content that both search engines and AI tools favour.

From a technical perspective, your website needs to be accessible to AI crawlers in the first place. A significant number of dealer sites inadvertently block tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI systems through robots.txt settings or security configurations – meaning those tools simply cannot recommend them, regardless of how good their stock or pricing is. Does your supplier understand llms.txt and is this included in your website back end? These are now questions you need answers to.

The fundamentals; fast loading websites, clean data, honest content, and a credible presence across all digital platforms haven’t changed. What’s changed is how much they matter, and what gets built on top of them.

Steve Coulter is a four decades Sales and Marketing expert with a career in the Automotive Industry and involved in state of the art Digital Marketing since 1999.

AUTOMOTIVE: The Autotrader Deal Builder Double Whammy

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A sharp, forecourt-level look at how Autotrader’s Deal Builder and the rise of Zero Click behaviour are squeezing used car dealers from both sides, eroding autonomy, visibility and buyer engagement in a fast-shifting digital marketplace.

Autotrader Deal Builder


Autotrader’s Deal Builder isn’t just another product tweak. It’s a disruptive structural shift in how used cars are bought and sold online and dealers can feel the ground moving under their feet. For years Autotrader played a fairly neutral host, the marketplace where dealers paid increasingly handsomely for leads but kept ownership of the tango between buyer and seller. Deal Builder flips that. It pulls negotiations, finance steps, part-exchange valuations and the vital early dealer-customer chat into Autotrader’s own funnel adding a new commission to variable costs.

Dealers are no longer shaping the first conversation. They’re reacting to it.

At a glance that might simplify the process for the buyer – even more appealing to some? But for dealers it means the nuances that make a sale happen; gauging buyer intent, framing the value of the car, uncovering their real needs, building rapport, have already been flattened by a scripted online journey. Price becomes the headline act. Specification, condition and service history become afterthoughts. The sales wizard on the phone or forecourt who can turn a researching caller or hesitant browser into a committed buyer no longer gets to weave their magic until it’s far too late. Many dealers see that not as convenience but as a strangulation of their craft. No wonder this has become the straw that broke the camel’s back for already disgruntled dealers and Autotrader contracts have been cancelled.

But even with Deal Builder, removing yourself from Autotrader in 2025 is like stepping off the M25 at 8am weekdays and hoping the A-roads will deliver the same traffic. You cut yourself out of the busiest shop window in the country. That risk is amplified by the rise of so-called ‘Zero Click’ behaviour. To an increasing extent searchers are no longer hopping from platform to platform, comparing listings, digging into dealer sites or ringing up on a whim. They’re skim reading synthesised summaries generated by AI that sit above the results. If a car search query gets answered directly in a neat little paragraph; price ranges, typical condition, popular models, even directing them to the dealer with the greatest AI savvy, the user might never reach the listings at all.

This is the new hazard. It’s not simply that buyers won’t click through. It’s that discovery is now mediated by machines distilling the market down to a few tidy facts. Dealers who once relied on strong photography, punchy descriptions and a competitive price for that particular car now find their efforts abstracted into an AI-authored digest that doesn’t mention them, their car or their service. Even when shoppers do hit a listing page, in our ADHD world they’re being conditioned to make faster decisions with less context. Cars outside those first handful of ‘best fit’ results are ghosted before they’ve even had a chance.

Put Deal Builder and Zero Clicks together and the picture gets darker. Dealers leaving Autotrader lose control over a funnel they disliked, but they also lose access to the only marketplace still large enough to push past the AI summaries and land real eyes on stock. Meanwhile the secondary platforms they retreat to don’t have the critical mass to surface above the Zero Click fog. A dealer might regain their autonomy only to find there’s no-one left to talk to.

It isn’t terminal for the trade. Those who invest in their own digital presence; take social media seriously, craft richer websites and vehicle pages, create informative video walk-arounds, encourage reviews, restructure their websites to answer conversational searches, build first-party email lists and get serious about local search can carve out their own lane.

Community reputation, repeat custom and transparent after-sales support still matter in ways algorithms cannot capture.

But make no mistake. The combination of Autotrader centralising the sales journey and search engines becoming subordinate to AI search is a huge double whammy. Dealers will be squeezed from the marketplace side and the discovery side.

Navigating this reality will take sharper thinking than the industry has been asked for in years.

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Steve Coulter is a four decade Automotive Industry professional now running a creative agency specialising in AI Search, Digital Transformation and Brand Engagement.

CAR DESIGN: Positive and Negative Euro Supermini EV

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There was once a time when a supermini was a matter of necessity, not indulgence. The 1970s gave us the first Renault 5 a pert little pâtisserie of pressed steel and whimsy in vivid colours, every bit as much at home dodging gendarmes in a subtitled film fantasy as it was rusting gracefully on the fringes of Calais. Fiat, of course, had its own proletarian darling, the original 500, its rear-engined, frugally upholstered buzzbox or colloquially in the Coulter household ‘fart box’ – but nonetheless a model long synonymous with post-war Italian redemption.

Fast forward five decades and we arrive at a curious juncture. Both marques, veterans of automotive egalitarianism, have chosen to reinstate their icons as electric cars (EV) the Fiat 500e appearing first, in 2021, to much fanfare and fawning from urbanites and influencers flown out to test it and now, Renault’s thoroughly modern reinterpretation of the 5 arrives, seemingly sculpted from the same nostalgia-drenched clay. But only one has truly understood the brief.

Let’s examine why, first of all heritage vs homage. Fiat’s 500e is undeniably adorable. Styled with exquisite reverence to Dante Giacosa’s original shape, it trades mightily on its cuteness and perceived Italian flair. But beneath the surface, the car is more pastiche than progression. It is a fashion statement, not a philosophical one.

Yet perhaps this misses the point entirely. Fiat’s approach wasn’t born from ignorance of mass-market electrification, but from a calculated decision to position the 500e as a premium lifestyle product. In urban environments where the 500e primarily operates, its design excellence becomes a genuine strength. The car’s visual impact is undeniable, its ability to turn heads and spark conversations in city centres is precisely what many buyers actually want. When parking space is at a premium and daily commutes rarely exceed 30 miles, the 500e’s boutique-like character transforms from apparent weakness into selling point.

The interior, whilst admittedly compact, demonstrates genuine attention to detail and material quality that feels authentically Italian. The premium feel isn’t accidental, it’s strategic. Fiat understood that electrification offered an opportunity to move upmarket, to transform the 500 from economy car to desirable urban accessory. In Chelsea or Notting Hill, this strategy makes perfect sense.

Renault, by contrast, has dug deeper. The new 5 EV does not merely mimic its predecessor, it reinterprets it. The original 5 was a clever, modular platform that underpinned everything from the humdrum TL to the tempestuous Turbo. It was pragmatic yet cheeky. The new car carries this spirit not in shape alone (though that face is exquisitely reimagined), but in function: it is a clever, resolutely French attempt at democratic electrification, not just a rolling Instagram post.

Secondly, beneath the skin let’s compare engineering. Fiat’s 500e is built upon a bespoke EV platform, dubbed “Mini BEV.” It offers a 42kWh battery, up to 199 miles of range (WLTP), realistically 148 (I owned one for two years) and a single front-mounted motor delivering 117bhp. It is whisper-quiet, beautifully finished especially as my car in top ‘La Prima’ trim, and drives with a certain Mediterranean élan but when the government subsidy dried out became expensive for what it is.

Renault’s 5 EV rides atop the all-new CMF-B EV platform, shared with the forthcoming Nissan Micra EV. It too features a 52kWh battery option (with a 40kWh entry-level variant with range almost mid to top 500e level), promising a range up to 250 miles. Even adjusting for ‘real world’ alone marks a step beyond Fiat’s offering. Moreover, the Renault tips the scales at just 1,450kg some 100kg less than the 500e, due to clever packaging and a refusal to bloat the body with frivolous weight. A gold star from this Chapman ‘add lightness’ acolyte who really struggles with EVs on the scales.

Renault have also opted for a synchronous motor with a wound rotor technically more complex but free of rare earth magnets, which makes it both greener and a subtle exercise in Gallic engineering pride.

Thirdly let’s look at matters inside. The Fiat’s cabin is charming in the same way a Dolcé & Gabbana kitchen appliance is charming. But it is tight, rear accommodation is lacking, and the boot is more gesture than utility. Materials, though pleasant to the touch, drift into lifestyle accessory territory. The 500e is less a car, more a boutique on wheels but in fairness at launch in top trim one of the closest models to evoke the spirit of (ironically) Renault’s Monaco-Baccara-Initiale car as fashion brand ideal.

The Renault 5, however, feels engineered with a more adult sense of purpose. Its cabin is roomier, more rational, yet still playfully detailed. The pixel-matrix dashboard graphics and central avatar (dubbed “Reno”, a digital Gallic shrug in anthropomorphic form) are delightfully French in their eccentricity, but not at the expense of ergonomics or comfort. Predisposed with Google Maps, Google Assistant and Google Play it’s a great leap forward in convenience and easily recognisable tech. The car’s multimedia system ‘openR link’ provides a seamless and customizable interface for all Google connected services

On to dynamics and driving. Neither car is built for Nürburgring glory, but here again Renault shows more depth. The 5 EV’s steering is light but precise, its ride supple yet controlled. It feels composed at speed in a way the 500e doesn’t quite manage. Fiat’s car, while sprightly in a scurry, lacks the damping sophistication to settle itself on rougher A and B-roads. Ride is killed by the semi-run flat seventeens with stiffer low profile sidewalls beloved of designers wanting to make a statement in a new car showroom.

That said, the 500e’s urban capability shouldn’t be underestimated. Its compact dimensions and tight turning circle make it genuinely excellent for navigating congested city streets. The instant torque delivery, whilst less sophisticated than Renault’s implementation, provides perfectly adequate performance for town work. In London traffic, the 500e’s party trick of near-silent operation combined with its striking appearance creates a surprisingly satisfying driving experience.

Renault, by contrast, understands that electric torque delivered abruptly must be tamed, not merely unleashed.

And let us not forget regenerative braking. The 5 EV offers multiple levels, with a true one-pedal drive mode, while the 500e’s regen is more brutal and unsophisticated. For the discerning driver, that matters not merely for efficiency, but for fluidity and passenger comfort.

Fiat’s 500e was, at launch, widely praised. It won a slew of accolades from EV magazines to Marie Claire and a nod in the World Urban Car of the Year awards. It is undeniably chic and competent, particularly in cities. It also played a short burst of very European classical music after the day’s first fifty metres

But Renault’s new 5 has already garnered a 2025 Car Of The Year, the Design Award at the 2024 Geneva Motor Show, and is being positioned not just as a halo car, but the spearhead of Renault’s mass-market EV strategy. Where Fiat’s car is a boutique item, Renault’s is an attempt at mobility for the many, a return to form reminiscent of the R5’s original purpose.

And, most crucially, Renault has priced the 5 EV more aggressively, £22995 for the Evolution base model, with Techno top trims just beneath the £30000 mark. Fiat’s 500e, particularly in its lauded La Prima trim, can stretch well past that. In an era where electric adoption is still handbraked by cost (and potential eye-watering depreciation), this is no small distinction.

In summary, the Fiat 500e is a fine car, as mentioned I ran one for a couple of years and really enjoyed the performance and features of what was my first foray into EV ownership. Its design excellence remains genuinely impressive, and for urban dwellers seeking a premium electric experience, it delivers precisely what was promised. But unfortunately it is not the future – it is an echo.

Renault’s new 5 EV, by contrast, is a forward-thinking machine draped in historical allusion. It is clever, dynamic, well-priced, well equipped and fundamentally imbued with the same spirit that made the original such a quietly revolutionary car.

Fiat built a retro trinket. Renault has built a car and in the process, they’ve done something far more valuable than resurrect an icon, they’ve reminded us that, done properly, the humble hatchback still matters.

Fin.

DIGITAL MARKETING: 2025 Developments You Cannot Ignore. Pt.1

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The first of a five part post on the key developments in digital marketing that businesses should be aware of in 2025.

Part 1. AI Integration in Marketing.

In 2025, AI integration stands as a transformative force in digital marketing, shifting from a luxury to a fundamental necessity for competitive advantage. By leveraging advanced AI technologies, businesses can now orchestrate hyper-personalised customer experiences across all touch-points while simultaneously reducing operational overhead. The technology excels at processing vast amounts of customer data to predict behaviours, automate content creation and optimisation, and deliver real-time personalisation at scale. For example, AI powered tools can analyse customer interactions across multiple channels, automatically adjust campaign parameters for optimal performance, and generate tailored content that resonates with specific audience segments. This intelligent automation allows marketing teams to focus on strategic initiatives while AI handles the heavy lifting of data analysis, routine content creation, and campaign optimisation. The key to success lies in striking the right balance between AI automation and human creativity using AI to enhance rather than replace human insight, ultimately driving more efficient, data-driven marketing decisions that deliver measurable business outcomes.

Advanced AI-powered content creation and optimisation.
– AI can now analyse vast amounts of historical content performance data to identify patterns in what resonates with specific audiences.
– Tools can generate initial drafts of marketing copy, blog posts, and social media content while maintaining brand voice.
– Automated A/B testing helps optimise headlines, email subject lines, and ad copy in real-time.
– Dynamic content optimisation adjusts website and landing page content based on visitor behaviour and preferences.
– AI can analyse competitor content and identify gaps in your content strategy.

More sophisticated predictive analytics for customer behaviour.
– Machine learning models can identify customers most likely to churn and recommend retention strategies.
– AI analyses purchase patterns to predict future buying behaviour and optimal times for engagement.
– Behavioural scoring models help prioritise leads based on likelihood to convert.
– Advanced segmentation identifies micro-segments for more targeted marketing.
– Predictive lifetime value calculations help optimise customer acquisition costs.

Automated personalisation at scale.
– Dynamic pricing adjusts based on individual customer behaviour and market conditions.
– Product recommendations evolve in real-time based on browsing and purchase history.
– Email content and send times are optimised for each recipient.
– Website experiences adapt to individual user preferences and behaviour patterns.
– Personalised retargeting campaigns based on specific user interactions.

AI driven chatbots and customer service solutions.
– Natural language processing enables more human-like conversations.
– Chatbots can handle complex queries and seamlessly escalate to human agents when needed.
– 24/7 automated customer support with multilingual capabilities.
– Proactive engagement based on user behaviour triggers.
– Integration with CRM systems for personalised responses based on customer history.

One key aspect worth noting is that while AI tools are becoming more sophisticated, they work best when combined with human oversight and strategic direction. The goal is to augment human capabilities rather than replace them entirely.

If you are interested in any particular application or to discuss how these AI solutions might specifically benefit your business please contact me.

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MARKETING: The Weak Ad Threat

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I spend time researching advertising and too often struck by weak, unfocused and what can only be described as complacent ads.

Advertisements without a strong call to action (CTA) are burning money. Here’s why:

The CTA Imperative. Without a clear directive, potential customers are left confused and unmotivated. CTAs serve as critical signposts guiding users toward the next step in their customer journey.

👀 Key Pitfalls of Weak Copy
– No clear user direction
– Missed conversion opportunities
– Reduced audience engagement
– Lack of psychological motivation

✅ Pro Tips for Improvement
– Use strong, action-oriented verbs
– Create a sense of urgency
– Make CTAs visually prominent
– Clearly communicate the value proposition

Remember: Your copy should not just inform, but ‘inspire action’. Every advertisement is an opportunity to convert interest into tangible results. If the advert is aimed at a specific sector or group have follow up adverts ready to run as a reminder and to be consistent.

Run the rule over each ad.

✅ Great headline

✅ Engaging & informative copy

✅ Call To Action

It’s not 💥💥💥🚀

 

First published on Linked-in.

Contact me if my ‘Do The Simple Things Well’ philosophy resonates.

As ever Like, Share & Follow my social media posts the links are above. 

ADVERTISING: Old School Ogilvy For Today

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David Ogilvy, often called ‘The Father of Advertising’ revolutionised the industry with his iconic campaigns. A great observer of detail, his constantly finessed drafts and final adverts combined meticulous research, storytelling and creativity to captivate and resonate with audiences.Here are some of his greatest works and iconic campaigns and how his style can still inspire contemporary advertising. As an enthusiast of old school copy ads from the Fifties and Sixties they are published here complete:
Rolls Royce (“At 60 Miles an Hour”) Known for its now legendary powerful headline, “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock” it highlighted product specifics and luxury.
Dove (“One Quarter Moisturising Cream”) Ogilvy repositioned Dove which was struggling for recognition and market share as a “beauty bar,” not just soap, elevating its status and creating a long lasting brand identity.
Guinness (“The Guinness Guide to Oysters”) This series of educational ads paired Guinness with food, blending information with elegance to enhance its sophistication.
Schweppes (“Commander Whitehead”) Featuring the company’s president, this ad exuded authenticity and sophistication, tying the brand to exclusivity.Hathaway Shirt (“The Man in the Hathaway Shirt”). Featuring a man with an eye patch, this ad used “story appeal” to intrigue viewers. The mysterious element drew attention, making the brand memorable.

So here’s the meat in the sandwich as a friend says.

Contemporary Applications of Ogilvy’s Style :

Storytelling with Visual Hooks: Modern brands can emulate Ogilvy’s “story appeal” by using intriguing visuals or unexpected elements in social media campaigns.

Data Driven Headlines & Content: Like Ogilvy’s Rolls Royce ad, brands should craft specific, benefit driven headlines for digital ads to boost engagement.

Authenticity in Branding: Using real people (e.g., founders) in campaigns resonates today, especially on platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram.

Personal Brand: The ‘Commander Whitehead’ as pictured in the Schweppes adverts is an obvious spin-off personal branding opportunity today.

Educational Content Marketing: Ogilvy’s Guinness and Dove campaigns show the power of educating consumers about product benefits aka solving a problem too. A strategy effective in blogs and video content.

In summary, David Ogilvy’s timeless principles truthful storytelling, captivating visuals, and product focused messaging remain essential for modern marketers.

Who are your advertising and copywriting heroes?

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Specialising in effective website and digital marketing content, Steve Coulter is a U.K. based copywriter and content professional with a lifetime interest in advertising and marketing.

CASE STUDY: Change Of Trading Style.

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Objective

With a limited budget organically increase the used car enquiries and online visibility of a former Stellantis New Car Franchise nowadays Used Car Sales, Service & Parts.

Included:

Current Marketing Strategy Analysis

Carried out a comprehensive business SWOT Analysis

Agree Goals of increase sales, local awareness, increase website traffic

While maintaining the high customer satisfaction net positive score.

Strategy:

Using Canva created a new modern brand appearance across all advertising. Consistency

Comprehensively improved Google Business Page (GBP) content and encouraged customer reviews to increase net score. Trust

Joined local forums, posting regularly and interacting with local people. Educating & Authoritative

Standardised and vastly improved content descriptions and photography with a dedicated You Tube channel with each car video uploaded and links back to website. You Tube is a great search engine too

SEO website and specific content pages pertinent to the makes and models of cars now being sold.

 

Results:

Uplift in visitors to website. +26% over 4 months.

Increased the quality of content in line with the latest Google algorithm.

Featured at Number 1 and in Top 3 in Google Local Search across many search terms relating to the new business style. Great organic reach improvement

Great feedback from new Facebook interactions.

Increased review score to 4.7/5.0 from 200+ reviews

Corresponding uplift in sales and stock turn.

 

This was a business development and digital marketing project.

 

 

 

 

DIGITAL MARKETING: Money Matters.

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We are all motivated or many people would remain in bed all day. The essentials of life have to be accounted for with whatever we can earn. But to achieve more than basic needs we need a driver. A great example is a mortgage. We all want to pay off our mortgage, but actually, having that ball and chain is a driver to earn more to pay what can be an amount that wildly fluctuates as a percentage of our income in our lifetimes. Somewhere you find the money for the home you thought you could not afford. After conducting an autopsy of my own working life and expenditure I believe having a permanent mortgage would have been beneficial. Obviously age and health are pertinent. Where am I going with this?

If you don’t have a budget to start a business you don’t have a business. Don’t start a business if you don’t have six months income set aside too. Investing £x 000 in the start up essentials of a modern enterprise like a sophisticated website not only gives your business an anchor, but somewhere to market to and from and capture prospect data. Repaying initial costs is part of your driver to establish a thriving business and go the extra mile to secure sales. You can also offset against taxable income so it’s less than its actual invoice price. It’s only the modern world where clicks have replaced bricks that not having any premises to trade from could even be contemplated. Before Y2K you couldn’t open a shop without acquiring one, rent or buy. You wouldn’t open a shop right next to another one either unless demand suggested it were viable. Social media has exacerbated the problem. Yes, Instagram, Tik Tok or Twitter is virtually free to use but it’s not as effective as paying for a targeted professional campaign aimed at a specific product or service. Or the data you can extrapolate for next time and who it turns out is your customer.

How much of your start up funds would you invest in a website and marketing to drive traffic?

SOCIAL MEDIA: Video Killed The Literary Star

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The Rise Of Instagram Reels Video & TikTok over static images. The new 2021 Instagram Algortihm.

Earlier today on Clubhouse Social Audio during the 4:13 Leadership forum I was asked to compare marketing online now versus twenty years ago. Categorically I would say it’s far more sophisticated, much lower cost, far more effective and offers high quality metrics to measure your efforts and spend. As they say, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. But as far as some platforms are concerned the writing associated with posts is becoming redundant in favour of video for a generation with very short attention spans.

Where platform leaders go, others follow. So with this in mind we are all going to have to consider how we can promote our businesses within the realms of 30 second short video and longer forms of 5 to 15 minutes of content. Influenced by the success of TikTok amongst it’s key demographic, Instagram are moving towards being more of a video than photography platform and ranking Reels use far greater in the algorithm. Post Likes are being dropped in favour of Saves and Shares so it’s vital you encourage followers to support your efforts by doing this with your posts.

I don’t believe the original developers of Instagram ever envisaged that it would be so heavily used by business marketers and like everything in business we should all have a Plan B ready should Plan A be lost to us. Thus we need to develop our use of video in a market sympathetic way, and find alternatives to support the graphics and photography we use as a lead magnet presently. With this in mind, Pinterest looks like a safe harbour and I’ll be looking into this platform next.
 
Instagram is still a heavily used platform so I would continue to post as you are until your analysis shows a diminished return on your time.

DIGITAL MARKETING: Brief Take On Domain Authority

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With Internet development, a website’s Authority is a compound metric used for measuring a domain or individual web page’s overall quality and SEO performance particularly against other websites within a similar realm. The score is based upon many metrics representing authority within the field and trustworthiness. Machine Learning (ML) ensures the result is fresh so do not expect to get 100 – it’s a moving target for you to continuously improve and attempt to remain in the top quartile.

The old days of recent, relevant and frequent posts that determined your website’s position in the major search engines list of results has been replaced by a more sophisticated approach. None of the engines officially publish how they rank your site but it is generally accepted the following is instrumental.

Initially an algorithm uses organic search data, web traffic, and back link information to understand the ranking of the most trusted domains on the web. Then a second algorithm uses backlink data compares how your site wins or loses authority by gaining links. The number and own authority of referring domains. The volume of outbound links from referring domains. The total number of IPs and backlinks pointing to the site. Plus further esoteric information.

The measurement is within a range of 1 to 100 with very few domains scoring late nineties.

In my previous post ‘Discoverability’ I described tuning your website and good housekeeping before approaching other businesses within your realm to link to your site – and therefore positively affect your Domain Authority (DA) score. In this respect there is no ‘Good Score’. Obviously you don’t want to be zero and under fifty would highlight obvious improvements that need to be made, but whatever your score, even improving the content, SEO and backlinks for your site may not improve the score if ML comparison websites have also improved or further authoritative sites have been added to the subset and less authoritative dropped.

I’ve mentioned before in Social Selling posts that ‘niching down on a niche’ is the way forward for marketing SME sized companies online in highly competitive fields to become a trusted leader within that particular industry and this is relevant with DA. Ordinarily, you may think that linking to a blog or site with a lower score would be disadvantageous, but in fact, within a niche it could help your own DA. The important thing is to compare your DA with competitors to ensure that your SEO and recently published content is working and giving you a higher rank in search engine’s result lists.

In summary. If a domain score is upwards then a concerted effort with SEO may be yielding results. It may though be that a competitor has fallen back. You see, it’s not a simple yes or no. Heading downwards could indicate a very competitive niche, lack of effort with SEO.

Link building to sites that do not already link with you, listing on trusted directories, mentions in respected articles online (linked) and eradicating broken links or links to toxic sites will all improve your DA.

Astute use of keywords within your content, titles and tags are also a great way of positively influencing this.
 
An analogy may also be, you wouldn’t expect to run a takeaway food business of the scale of MacDonald’s, Burger King or KFC, but you could aim to be the ‘best of the rest’ more achievable and far less frustrating!