Brainstorm for a Car Classifieds website. Would you guys mind help me brainstorm?
-
Hey Mozers...
Would you guys mind help me brainstorm?
My client contact me and he wants to build a car classified kind of website for Utah. He wants to make the website from scratch, he has a pretty good budget and plan on using online marketing together with traditional marketing.
If you were building your own car classifieds sites and budget was not a problem what would you include in your site? (ex: responsive, native ios app, blog, free tool for tell the user the value their car, etc)
How would you do the online marketing?
Which car Classified site do you like? why?
Thanks
- Felipe
-
Thank you for your inputs Jeff, I really like your ideas specially the professional photos idea. The client is big car dealership inventory should not be a problem
-
Felipe -
Cars used to be sold via classified ads in newspapers, until Craigslist came around. Craigslist removed a huge source of revenue - classified ads - away from newspapers. That, and the fact that nobody receives newspapers anymore.
I would say that any classified car site, even one focused on Utah, has to compete with Craigslist. How to do that? Craigslist has the audience of people looking to buy cars, and a ton of people who want to post cars for sale.
Craigslist, due to it's minimal, almost text-only design, loads really fast. It allows people to upload images, and list a price. It makes it really easy to find cars.
Whatever this site that you're building for a client needs to do everything that Craigslist can do, but more.
One thing I don't love about Craigslist is that you can't search specifically by car model, year, type to hone in on the results.
A better search option would be really helpful.
That said, if you're just starting out, you'll likely face an inventory volume problem - so you don't want to have too many empty categories.
Another thing that doesn't work as well for Craigslist is that the quality of car images tends to not be great. Probably this is my bias, because I'm a professional photographer. But an iPhone shot of a car just doesn't work well to sell a several thousand dollar car.
Perhaps one idea is that to launch the site, anyone who wants to list can drive the car to a location in Salt Lake City, or somewhere else, and have someone on the classified team take professional photos of the car, against a nice backdrop, and also give nice detailed macro close up images of the cars and trucks for sale. Including one of the open engine compartment, the odometer, etc.
One other idea for functionality: allow users who come to the site to get an email alert when a car matching the description of what they're looking for (i.e. I want to buy a Toyota 4Runner w/ a manual transmission).
You'll obviously want to do tie-ins to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, to allow people to pin something they want, and share when they list something.
That said, posting on Craigslist is free. And it's touch to compete with free. (Craigslist makes their money for job postings, and everything else is free.)
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Advice on estate agent website SEO next steps
Hi everyone, I have been working on the SEO for this website for a while now and have had a good amount of success increasing the traffic and rankings. However our main hurdle is improving conversions on the actual website - we want to encourage more people to book a valuation. Does anybody have any suggestions on how we can improve this? The website is www.richardkendall.co.uk Thank you
Web Design | | sophiecrosby970 -
Seperating Different Parts Of The Website
Hi There, I have a client with two parts to his business both for different types of customer with different language and copy needed. At the moment they have one website and I am trying to figure out the most search engine friendly way to present these different types. So for example if a client came in looking for service A, he would see the home page for service A and if he came in looking for service B he would come across the home page for service B. I know I could have seperate service pages for each service he provides, but I think it would be off putting to come to a home page of a site and see completely unrelated services on one page. I hope I am explaining myself here. As far as I can see the options are:- subdomains for servicea.examplesite.com, serviceb.examplesite.com and a split page (see attachement) where you click which you are interested in (don't like this idea) seperate websites a home page which shows all the services (too confusing) Any advice would be most grateful. Regards Neil MpYSKqN
Web Design | | nezona0 -
Link juice passing from a .org.uk link to a .org/uk websites
Hi all, A client I am working on had a CMS built in recently which has resulted in all their canonicals tags being taken off the website, and as such the same page with both a .org/uk and .org.uk/uk domain have appeared in the search results and I am wondering what your guys take is on the best cause of action. For further background: Historically they have always used .org.uk/uk (not sure why) for their UK website and used .org/xxx for other countries (they also have a .org splashpage FYI). Having seen the .org/uk pages, and knowing they have to choose one to avoid duplication, they would like to move their uk website to the .org/uk domain to fit in with the rest of the divisions. However due to the historical use of .org.uk/uk their backlink profile contains links to both the .org.uk and .org domains. My question then: would a canonical tag on all the .org.uk/uk pages pointing to the .org/uk pages be strong enough to pass on link juice to the .org/uk pages (from all links pointing to .org.uk) or would a 301 redirect be required in this instance, or indeed would it be best to stay with the .org.uk/uk domain? Thanks, Diana
Web Design | | Diana.varbanescu0 -
I need help with international SEO for two sites?
I'll try to keep this clear... I am working with an company based in Germany, they own company.com/de and company.com/en, and that's how they are currently structuring their domains. They also own companyusa.com that they really want to show up in USA only. They want to keep company.com/en for England/english speaking Europe and company.com/de for their German audience in Germany. They are wanting us to optimize/SEO for companyusa.com, and they want that URL to show up as the top google search in the USA for their "company" keyword. What is showing up now is www.company.com/en 1st in Google because it's been around longer and it has more domain authority. What is the best practice for us optimize companyusa.com so that it is the top dog in the USA while not messing up the other domains? Should we merge? Subfolders all around? Thanks for all the input.
Web Design | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Best way to handle Spanish/English WEBSITE
Hey guys, How are you doing? I have a website (www.aceromart.com ) in which the primary language is Spanish. The company is oriented toward the Mexican Audience. However, recently we are dealing with many U.S companies. Also, we want to be included in the Yahoo Directory and several other directories which demand a U.S version of the website. So i want to have a U.S version of the website. My ecommerce is based in the NETWORK Solutions platform and has around 1,000 products and pages. What is the best way to include an English version of the website. Ive seen some pages using the Google traslate tool, which only traslates the text. Hope to hear some of your ideas, Regards,
Web Design | | JesusD0 -
How to judge a good website designer?
I am looking into hiring a company to redesign my website. What tips can someone give me about how to judge whether a company is good or not? I am most interested in the website being designed to work well with SEO and crawls. Do I compare the rankings of the websites they have in their portfolio? I'm so petrified that I'm going to make the wrong choice.
Web Design | | CapitolShine1 -
Best Website Builder - Help Me Choose
I need to built a multi language site (to built a Pilates, Yoga site) and I will use a site builder. After posting questions on wix.com I came to the fact I should continue my research because there are not SEO friendly. Do you have a suggestions? Limited to html knowledge, using a website builder is my only option. Here are some of the features I need: Multilanguage Web Site Mobile version SEO Friendly Nice Template Selections( this is important) HTML customization Twitter, Facebook, Blog... I'm not looking at free website builder, when you want good features, there is a price to paid. Thank you for your help and suggestions, BigBlaze
Web Design | | BigBlaze2050 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0