Help Me Decide on my Limited Choices in Web-Vendors

[amirxl]

Yoast is just the backbone of WP SEO. Most vendors (that dont use wp sites) have their own method of adding SEO data.

I use Yoast to generate sitemaps, restructure some URL parameters, and more backend-related things.

 

[Chris Cachor]

I currently spend around a $1,000 per month times two stores to have a company do our SEO and if we could do it in-house with an easy to use tool and save some money I would be very interested.

What exactly is included in the $1k/mo? That's a nice chunk of change for SEO even if it was combined. Position 5 for "Jonker Honda" on Google returns a bad Yelp review in all caps :/

 

[craigh]

What exactly is included in the $1k/mo? That's a nice chunk of change for SEO even if it was combined. Position 5 for "Jonker Honda" on Google returns a bad Yelp review in all caps :/

Up in my neck of woods $1000 a month is average for SEO. That includes vendors and non-Automotive SEO companies.
The ones I got quotes from in Toronto were anywhere from $900 to $2200 a month.

That said, those companies actually got great results.

 

[ErikJonker]

What exactly is included in the $1k/mo? That's a nice chunk of change for SEO even if it was combined. Position 5 for "Jonker Honda" on Google returns a bad Yelp review in all caps :/

I really don't have a clue what to do with Yelp...I have 9 not recommended yelps that are hidden on the site with five of them being perfect 5 out 5 star reviews. I know that we have never put in fake reviews to Yelp or paid for any blackhat service to fudge the numbers. Yelp only wants to show five bad 1 star reviews for some reason. Funny thing is that for a while the good reviews were being shown for more than a year and now they have blacklisted the good reviews and I am back to looking like a dog and funnily enough I have a voicemail from a Yelp employee soliciting me from 2 weeks ago.....

Coincidence????????????

 

[Chris Cachor]

Funny thing is that for a while the good reviews were being shown for more than a year and now they have blacklisted the good reviews and I am back to looking like a dog and funnily enough I have a voicemail from a Yelp employee soliciting me from 2 weeks ago.....

Coincidence????????????

If Yelp's business model is based on shakedowns like this, I hope somebody sues their pants off...

 

[Jeff Glackin]

I would lean Dealer-E. With my research they have customer service that is top notch and they are a very progressive company. The actual performance is very high as well. They do have from my knowledge responsive site capabilities but the one you had used as an example is not. But if I were to switch any of my dealers it would be to dealer-e.
Just my .02 cents.

Progressive would have them in the responsive category. Last I heard it wasnt even on their roadmap. Good people, I think they are behind the times in sites and SEO. My opinion of course.

 

[yagoparamo]

@Jeff Glackin

Glad you mention that.
Here are two DealerEProcess responsive sites with server side components:

http://www.rocklandtoyota.com/
http://www.bmwofschererville.com/

I'm particularly proud how the SRP and the VDP came out:

http://www.rocklandtoyota.com/auto/used-2009-ford-fusion-se-blauvelt-10913-ny/2403693/
http://www.bmwofschererville.com/search/new/tp/

There are more things I could show you that are "progressive", but that will make Jeff mad.
We will be at NADA, where you can meet the chief architect, Dave Page.

 

[craigh]

I'm particularly proud how the SRP and the VDP came out:

http://www.rocklandtoyota.com/auto/used-2009-ford-fusion-se-blauvelt-10913-ny/2403693/
http://www.bmwofschererville.com/search/new/tp/

VDP came out nicely, but the way the VLP collapses ends up making each vehicle look like a mini VDP - it was a bit confusing at first.
I tried running through the BMW site on my iPhone and ran into a number of issues on the VLP.

• I couldn't view the full gallery of photos (it just opened a black box and hung forever) and when the lead modal has an error it explodes and text suddenly flies everywhere and I can't close it anymore.
• When I first visited the site that chat over ruled everything as well and scrolled the web page down about halfway and it took about 3 seconds for it to close. In Safari the chat also shows up on every single page, even if I hide it - this is a huge deterrent when it's taking up 100% of the screen real estate.
• Trying to use the vehicle comparison tool became very obvious that it was built for desktop and forced onto mobile.
• The homepage also has some sort of embedded content from BMW that's unusable.
• There's also a link on the homepage to the grad rebate page, but this page doesn't work on mobile.

I like the idea of responsive, but not having a dedicated mobile website leads to problems like this almost every time I've seen it tried. Modals, photos, chat, navigation, etc always have issues. The buttons on some of these pages (ie: pagination) are too small for my thumbs.
This site needs responsive IF statements to hide content that simply doesn't work on mobile.

I don't mean to be overly critical, but as a customer I wouldn't last 30 seconds on this site using my phone. Submitting those lead forms would take multiple minutes and everytime the keyboard comes up everything moves too much and it becomes borderline impossible to complete the form.
I like that the industry is trying to move in the responsive direction here, but this is more of a halfway point to responsive.

 

[Chris Cachor]

I like the idea of responsive, but not having a dedicated mobile website leads to problems like this almost every time I've seen it tried. Modals, photos, chat, navigation, etc always have issues. The buttons on some of these pages (ie: pagination) are too small for my thumbs.

I see this all the time as well. It's usually a mobile site stretched to desktop sizes or vice versa. I have not seen any responsive dealer sites hit a home run yet.

I don't mean to be overly critical, but as a customer I wouldn't last 30 seconds on this site using my phone. Submitting those lead forms would take multiple minutes and everytime the keyboard comes up everything moves too much and it becomes borderline impossible to complete the form.

I don't think field testing is very high on the list of vendor priorities and this is a great example of it. Sure there's internal testing, but how great is that?

 

[craigh]

I don't think field testing is very high on the list of vendor priorities and this is a great example of it. Sure there's internal testing, but how great is that?

I know from running my own software development team for the past years that internal testing always has issues.
The team built it and they can't wait to go live. They can't wait to love it. Separate QA teams are the only way we've found to combat that.

I'm still a firm believer in a mixture of responsive and adaptive.
I have a desktop website that may resize slightly based on Retina iMac vs. $200 laptop.
I have a mobile website that resizes based on any mobile devices and tablets.

Trying to combine both of those into one website is where the disaster begins.