Domain Names (aka: URL’s or “uniform resource locators”)
Your domain names are your addresses in the online universe. Just as we’ve always made it a point to identify our dealership’s physical location in our traditional advertising, you need to make sure that customers are able to find your dealership when they look in the Internet world.
You should register every conceivable name that a customer (who may be unfamiliar with your dealership) might use to find you online. These include the full name of your dealership (johndoepontiacbuickford.com); your name by each of the individual makes you carry (johndoepontiac.com), and common misspellings of your name (johndohpontiacbuickford.com, johndohpontiac.com). If you have a slogan that you can turn into a domain name, it will give you a web address you can use in your advertising that’s easy for customers to remember (yourfriendlyforddealer.com). It can also be used as an interesting, unique email extension (jdoe@yourfriendlyforddealer.com).
Popular wisdom has it that it is usually best to go with “shortest” whenever possible, but unique, memorable domain names can be highly effective. One of our personal favorites is the Cadillac dealership that had the good sense to grab the domain name drivecadillac.com as their URL.
The perfect Internet dealership owns all the domains that may be applicable to them and if they don’t have a slogan that is available as domain name, they change the slogan to something that is.
