Regardless of what Schem
a is supposed to do it has done nothing significant for indexing, search results, or the ability of a website to perform better.
You can find schema based results on a few SERP like this one:
AutoTrader Schema Results
Schema was recommended by Google, a for profit business, as a "best practice" because in some cases they benefited from it. That benefit hasn't rippled down into the dealerships yet.
All my dealers at DealerEProcess.com have had schema implemented from the time Google recommended it, however I would never recommend a dealer using one of my competitor's website systems to leave their platform because they don't have schema in the system. They better find a better reason to leave their current vendor and come do business with us. Otherwise I will be ill advising them.
I agree with your first two paragraphs (assessments), but not the last paragraph.
I disagree, Google makes the rules whether we like it or not and they literally are asking you to install rich / structured data / schema in order to improve the likelihood of their bots' understanding of your website. Unfortunately, digital marketing pretty much lives and dies according to their good graces. The application of schema and structured data makes it much easier for robots to process your website data. Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. However, you can provide explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. Now, whether schema and structured data equate to higher rankings or
visibility, it can be argued.
It can only help, not hinder. If an automotive platform fails to apply schema, I'd look elsewhere if I were a dealer (because it shows you the platform provider isn't paying attention to the basics, so wonder what else they are missing???). I hold no allegiance to any automotive web platform vendor, completely indifferent here, but let's be honest about it. We all can decipher those platforms that perform poorly, well and super. Pasch, Wikimotive and the like grade those.
Apply your client websites to this tool and see how they look...
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/
You can enhance your AMP content for Google Search by creating a basic AMP page, adding structured data, monitoring your pages, and practicing with codelabs.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/enhance-amp
Will AMP Give Businesses a Mobile Edge?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amp-give-businesses-mobile-edge-brian-pasch
In mobile marketing,
fast page load times (speed) is critical to increase conversion outcomes. In 2015, a consortium of companies, which included Google and Twitter, created an open specification for creating Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). You can learn more about the project by visiting:
https://www.ampproject.org/. Google AMP pages load in
under one second on most devices.
In the automotive industry
Lotlinx and
TECOBI have demonstrated the power of using AMP landing pages instead of existing dealership website pages, in mobile advertising campaigns.
More importantly, if you're running a Wordpress-based site, there are plenty of free AMP plugins to be had. Dealer Inspire, etc. probably install those by default. Maximize your blog reach, going back to the original theme of this thead and
evergreen content.