Harley-Davidson Best Practices

What is DAT?

DAT stands for Dealer Assigned Territories. It is a list of cities or zip codes that are assigned to a Harley-Davidson dealer that they are allowed to actively target for marketing purposes. Any city or zip code that is listed as included in a dealer’s DAT has the go ahead to be targeted both on-site and in meta-information such as descriptions and titles.

As a rep, it is your responsibility to ask your dealer to send over their DAT and to complete your location targeting appropriately in regards to the dealer’s DAT limitations.

Harley’s Official Guidelines (From Harley)

PLAYING FAIR
You wouldn’t stand in another dealer’s driveway waving a sign directing customers to your store, would you? Of course not! You should play fair with other dealers online as well!

Avoid the use of another Harley-Davidson dealer’s official dealership name in metatags for SEO purposes.
Avoid implying, in metatags, metatext, or other source code, that your dealership is located anywhere other than your actual, approved location.
Avoid using “Harley-Davidson” or “Harley” in conjunction with geographical place names in a way that implies your dealership name is anything other than your approved dealership name.
Besides being disrespectful to other dealerships, adding such “non-relevant” tags can get your site banned from search engines.

Dealer Spike’s SEO DAT Guidelines

Only DAT approved locations may be targeted or mentioned in meta-information such as titles, descriptions, or image tags.
You may target locations outside of their DAT in the on-page content and in the H1s.
If your dealer insists on targeting a city outside of their DAT in the meta-information let them know that it is against their agreement to do so.
1. If they continue to insist let them know you will have to reach out to your supervisor to get that cleared on our end. Then reach out to your Pod Lead.
2. We will then need to get something in writing that mentions that they understand that they are breaking guidelines set out by Harley.

Harley-Davidson

Only use the federal registration symbol ® when you are certain that a brand name or trademark has been registered with the federal government. If you are uncertain, you can use the common law designation ™ next to it. You do not have to place the ® or ™ on a trademark every time it appears in the same marketing piece. Place it on the first mention of each mark, and in all titles, subtitles, captions and the first time it’s used within a section.
Always include the generic name of a product that the brand or trademark identifies.
- E.g I am wearing a MotorClothes™ jacket
Always use brand and trademarks in a manner that distinguishes them from the text in which they are situated by using all capital letters, initial capital letters, boldface, italics, or quotation marks. Best option will be to us initial capital letters.
- E.g He rides a FAT BOY motorcycle.
  - He rides a fat boy motorcycle
  - He rides a fat boy motorcycle
  - He rides a “fat boy” motorcycle
  - He rides a Fat Boy motorcycle
When using Harley-Davidson brands/trademarks as nouns, you risk making them generic, which means anyone can use them to describe their products. You should be able to remove the brands from the sentence and still have it make sense. If you remove it and the sentence become meaningless, you are misusing the brand.
Do not use Harley-Davidson as a possessive, as in it can not use a possessive apostrophe. Instead, rewrite your sentence to avoid this.
- WRONG: Harley-Davidson’s new bike
- CORRECT: The new bike by Harley-Davidson

Do not use ® when referring to the company, and only use it when referring to the brand.
- E.g Harley-Davidson Motor Company makes the Harley-Davidson® Road Glide®
“Harley-Davidson” is the proper full name of the brand, and “Harley-Davidson Motor Company” is the full proper name of the corporate company. Both may be shortened to “Harley” or “H-D” only after it’s been properly used at the first mention in the copy.