Big Car Dealership Wants SEO. How much do I charge / What Should I do for Them?

I deal with lots daily I would offer depending if they do not have it a custom website,mobile site and rankings for different keywords
up sales would be
1 App
2 sms
3 Window stickers with Qr codes for night traffic when there closed you would be surprised how many people walk lots when there closed
4 offer them listing in different places craigs,cars,auto shopper,trader etc
5 custom ad designs
lots of things you can up sale to dealers would be nice if one of the designers/programmers here could make a custom dealer/real estate website with members area for certain things id paid for!!

btw i would charge per city for Seo

600 cars, $600 a month. I did that with a dealership before and the owner laughed, but liked my idea so he agreed.

1 buck a car is a good price depending on what your doing for them and the size of his lot
if its a multi lot owner that pushes 1k or more amonth that would be worth it.

$600, can you only get them 3 sales a month? I would say any decent size dealer you should be able to charge $2-5k. Depending on the size of the city.

3/5k is way high from some of the dealers I talk to there is already a few big competitors doing it for less then that
also depends on what your doing for them and how many keywords there wanting.
dealer.com is one of them the other i forget ill have to look them up
Most I talk to want a all in one supplier they do not want to pay 2/3 people and if there using someone like dealer or the others you will have to be able to provide it all

An average new car today costs $30,000 in the US. With that said if they have 600 cars then they have 600 X 30,000 = $18,000,000 on the lot. Now, the bank probably helped them secure the money to finance those cars but we're talking about a multimillion dollar business. $600/mo for SEO is too low. We worked with a a guy who was doing a $1 million in sales (it was business voip business) and we charged him $500/mo. Honestly, I think he could of spent more. It's reasonable to assume you could charge him $500/mo for ever $1 mil in sales. The biggest thing with dealerships is you don't want to make it high enough that they can afford to hire you full time but make it enough that its worth your time. I'd throw $2,500 a month at him and see what he says. Remember you can always go down but going up is much more of a challenge. Besides, customers probably talk that much down from the original sticker price on a new car so a few thousand isn't going to scare him. (btw a luxury car dealer in my town was trying to hire my buddy to do SEO and PPC for them full time and they proposed $4,000 a month)

As for additional services, you could provide him with PPC, Facebook Marketing/Advertising, and/or a mobile site (buyers might be running around town with their iPads/cell phones).

It sounds to me that this guy already knows he needs SEO so you're already have the advantage. I'd talk about it like it's important but don't dumb it down so much you insult him. And when he asks what its going to cost you have to say your number confidently. I'd practice in front of a mirror first thing in the morning.

Good luck! Let us know what happens!

I'd love to give some advice but need to know more about the dealership.

Used only?
Franchise?
Volume?
Price strategy? Luxury? Normal? Economy? Cheap? Buy here, Pay here?
Dealer software integrated with their website?
Website handled by a service or custom?

Prices will depend on what you can and should do for them. And a lot of that will depend on what they are selling and to whom. This will help us figure out what the customers they are want to target are searching for. And trust me it is not "cityname + cars". That is not how people search when car shopping.

I always love when some SEO guy tells me I should rank for "city RV dealer". First we do rank for it thanks to google places. Second unless a customer is just trying to make a list of dealers to visit they are not searching this way.

That said a lot of car dealers have web marketing guys who are kinda dumb. I just searched for "city rv dealer" and I have 9 out of 10 PPC ads for car dealers. Only one of the PPC ads is for an RV dealer. And it is a major competitor about 3 hours from here clearly hoping to grab a few of our customers. You think those 9 car dealers could use a new PPC campaign manager? You bet.

You could end up charging this dealer thousands per month. But to do that you have to bring value. Understand how they make money and help them make more of it. If they sell cars for a nickle over and make all their real money on the backend you won't be doing them any favors if all you bring them are guys who want a cheap car and will pay cash and never buy a warranty. But if you bring them guys with good credit who always buy extended warranties you could help them make a few thousand off each customer. BTW nickle means $500, dime mean $1,000.

The biggest thing I can tell the group is don't assume just because a dealership is big that they make a lot of money. Some of them may actually be losing money. margins on cars are low. In fact it is one of the lowest margin forms of retail. The key is that because they cost a lot low margins and high volume can lead to good profits when a dealership has a plan in place to capture all the available dollars.

If anyone wants I can go into more detail on how dealerships(cars, rvs, boats, etc) make money so you can better know how to pitch to them.

Ok, first things first. You need to get a much more detailed understanding about what people are actually looking for. Not as many people look for "Atlanta cars" as they do for " Atlanta car dealers or dealerships". Best way to do this is to use the free Google Keyword Tool. If you dont know how to do this, make sure you set your search parameters to "Exact match" and not "Broad". Do a search for "car dealers in CITY" and go to the suggested keywords tab and set your results in decending order.

You will now have a much better idea of the keywords that you actually need to go after. This will also be very important in your pricing. This is what I have done in the past, I figure out how much more in sales a month I SHOULD generate using VERY VERY concerviative numbers. I only use 50% of the total number of searches then take estimate a very low 1 or 2% conversion rate. Also, find out from him what 1 new sale averages in profit.

For example, lets say that "car dealers in Atlanta" has 2000 exact match searches a month. The SEO traffic I will estimate will be 50%, so 1000. Then I tell them the standard conversion rate is around 2-3% for a website. Figure out how many customers he should get with a low 1% conversion, 10 total, and ask him how much 10 sales mean for his business. I know that the profit is around the 200-600 dollar range in profit for a new car if you have a smart buyer, so it could mean 2000-6000 dollars more a month for his business if his sales staff is any good.

Now that you know what you can earn him, what is an appropriate fee? Remember I just showed you 1 keyword and there are many, many keywords for a car lot in any large town.

$500-1500/month is the industry norm. If you can get more than that, by all means take it. But do understand that dealers get hit up A LOT by the big firms and trust me they know how to sell their crappy services. Dealer.com and Cobalt are the big boys. Their sales people on the ground don't mess around - they know how to sell their auto marketing products like crazy.