Any Suggestions for Building an SEO Friendly Auto Dealership Website?
-
Does anyone have suggestions for re-designing an auto dealership website? Is it possible to build a WordPress website that accepts an inventory feed from VinSolutions? I've been building websites and provided SEO services for years. This is my first time working in the auto industry.
The issue I am facing is that our dealership currently have two websites. Both are built on 3rd party platforms and I am seriously considered rebuilding our website from scratch.
Our first website was been provided to us by our Hyundai and the website is managed through Cobalt. While I like that the website is directly affiliated with Hyundai, it's very difficult to manage and I have yet to be able to get the techs to grant me access to the FTP server or provide help with installing Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
The owner of our dealership never liked the Cobalt website so they decided to launch a second website that is created and managed by a company called Dealer Specialties. The site is also very difficult to administer and I only see problems later down the road.
Is anyone familiar with working with auto dealership websites? I would love to hear your comments on the best way to proceed with our new web presence.
-
We had exactly the same problem as this. We then quoted the client to rebuild from scratch - but the cost was inhibitive for them.
The thing about these 3rd party platforms is that they get the client hooked onto them and they get comfortable just paying a nominal fee each month.
This particular client would spend the money to re do the website from scratch.
The problem with their systems is that you cannot do too much customization of the pages in terms of the SEO attributes or change the page names etc,
I am certainly not endorsing or recommending this company - but we have had more success with www.ebizautos.com in terms of the issues I have just mentioned.
With their system you can change the page names etc and have the ability to create numerous pages with their own custom URLs that then can be as optimized as you want. URLs are ertainly better than the Dealer Specialties ones.
Not as good as building your own system - but the results we have had from optimizing some of these ebiz ones have been better than using some of the other systems out there. IT also helps if you have a client with serious budget constraints.
Downside:
Still cannot get FTP access or them to even upload an XML file for GWMT.Might be worth a go. Hope this helps.
Carlos
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
-
Partial Website Translation - Strategy Debate
Hi We have a travel site with over 3000 pages in English. Of these around 200 relate to products and the rest are content articles, most of which with very low traffic. Certain products and pages appeal directly to users in different languages (around 20-30 out of 200 for each language). We are debating how to go about translating these pages... If we did "oursite.com/es/product", "oursite.com/de/product", etc then users entering the site on these translated pages from Google would be limited to seeing a very cut down site, bearing in mind most speak English and would also be able to interact with our English language content we are probably losing out. Also, if we detected user language on entry, we would show effectively hide most of our product and content from users. Any suggestions or ideas about how to go about this without losing engagement/conversions/creating a mess?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | ben100010 -
What is the Impact of Content Personalization on SEO?
I am using Optimizely to serve personalized experiences to our website users. Is there an impact on SEO ranking? The personalized content is dynamically changed on our website and the URL does not change. Thank you
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Dilgul0 -
User Testing a Website
Hello We're soon going to be embarking on a fairly major site overhaul and while this isn't a particularly SEO related question, I’m keen to integrate user feedback quite heavily in this process and would appreciate your opinion as how best to collect this feedback. These are the kind of questions that I would like to pose: Is it clear when you visit the site, what it is that they do? What is your first thought about the site when you visit it? On the homepage, where is your eye drawn to immediately? When wishing to purchase a product, would this product page draw you into the sale? Do you get a general feeling of trustworthiness on the site? Using the series of drop downs on the homepage, please choose any product and follow the process through to the checkout. Did you feel that this was engaging throughout? Rather than yes/no answers I’d like the user to spend a good 5-10 minutes giving their detailed opinions so that we can gain some genuine inspiration on how best to improve the site. What would be the best method of collecting this data? I was thinking perhaps Amazon Mechanical Turk but the thrust of the work offered there seems to be so diverse that I’m not sure we’d get people in tune with offering the kind of detailed answers that I’d be hoping for. Thanks for your help.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Help with ecommerce duplicate pages and SEO advice(magento base site)
Hi, We have a magento build site (www.mokee.eu) and are selling our own branded goods. So far it is a very limited range of products. It's 1 baby crib in 5 variations. We recently started getting more sales from the site, so I started to look a bit more into optimising our site. I rewrote item name, created better descriptions, added meta titles and description etc. and subscribed to the MOZ analytics platform to understand a bit better ways to improve things up. From what I saw we have a big issue of duplicated content because our product pages are the same and only the product colour changes, which is something google apparently doesn't like However it is important for us that each colour get referenced by google so people who search for grey cot can find a picture of our grey cot etc... Also I was thinking to create only on multi variation page with all colour but when you have only 1 product to sell it might look a bit empty on the site. 1- Do you guys have some advise on how to go round this issue? 2- Do you have any other advise for my site in particular to optimise things and actually do you think i should be worried at all with such a small catalogue? Thanks Sam
Conversion Rate Optimization | | mokeestore0 -
Video Keno gambling SEO client !? Do I want em?
I have a guy who wants SEO help. Actually he owns several companies and is willing to put my ad before all the movies in a local theater plus an ad AND a Q&A section about SEO and Internet marketing in a small newspaper he mails to 7k businesses every month in exchange for my help. While I am excited about the exposure and I'm sure it would result in some business I'm not excited about touching anything related to gambling at ALL. Am I right in thinking this or should I treat it like just another client? He has a site where he teaches people how to win at video keno and sells this info packet. Porn and gambling. Everything I have read and heard is geared towards sites like this NOT coming up in search engines. Thoughts? Thanks and have an AWESOME week! Matthew
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Mrupp440 -
Canonical to another website?
I've recently noticed in my adwords campaigns that using exact match domains improves my quality scores so I've been snatching up all kinds of domains which include different keywords. On these new sites (which I only use to bring down my CPC) I've been tossing up a landing page, scraping some content form my main site and direct a canonical tag to my organic site so google doesnt penalize me for duplcant content. It is ok to use a canonicle to an outside website and Is there any precautions when doing this? I just want to be sure I'm not hurting my main site where we rank well organicly on and I was also wondering if any of these sub sites which also have links to my main site carry any vaue. Appreciate any feedback! -Cliff
Conversion Rate Optimization | | CliffAuerswald0 -
Conversion optimization with Optimizely, impact on SEO
I am looking into signing up with www.optimizely.com for conversion testing. They put scripting on my site which will then redirect half of my site visitors to an alternate home page. The site I want to test on is ranking quite well with Google and I do not want to hurt my rankings. And with this set up,what Google will think is my home page is not and so I am essentially sending visitors to a different page than Google reads as my home page in source code. So, my concern is whether this will have a negative impact on my SEO rankings to redirect 50% of site visitors to a different page using this testing tool? I would use Google Web Site Optimizer, but many of my sites are in Wordpress and it seems that Wordpress and web site optimizer are not so compatible. Advice would be appreciated. Thank you, Robert
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Robertnweil11