Is There Actually a Market for Franchise-Level Websites at $399/mo for Independents?

[SavvyNick]

The best example is CarGurus on the VDP question they bury them the same as Carmax and Carvana and those guys are dominating the space.

 

[DjSec]

Our approach is the opposite of the typical “try to make every VDP rank” strategy

No one does it so not doing it would be typical

because that’s a trap.

This is false because:

VDPs already do rank just not for dealers.

Cars.com
CarGurus
AutoTrader
Edmunds
TrueCar

These sites rank millions of VDP pages for long-tail keywords every day.
If ranking VDPs were “a trap,” these companies wouldn’t exist and they wouldn’t be worth billions.

The problem is NOT that VDPs can’t rank.
The problem is that:

• Dealer VDPs load too slow
• Dealer VDPs have duplicate content
• Dealer VDPs lack structured data
• Dealer VDPs have no internal links
• Dealer VDPs have no supporting topical authority
• Dealer VDPs disappear when the vehicle sells
• Dealer VDPs use generic templates
• Dealer VDPs ignore long-tail keywords

VDPs aren’t designed to be long-term SEO assets, and trying to force them to rank for competitive keywords creates volatility, cannibalization, and constant re-indexation problems.

If your VDPs don’t rank, your entire SEO strategy collapses.

Why?

Because:

• 70%+ of organic dealer traffic should be used car inventory traffic.
• Shopper queries are overwhelmingly long-tail.
• High-intent searches map to VDPs naturally.

Examples:

• “2019 f150 xlt for sale near me”
• “used tahoe under 25k”
• “2018 camry se in stock”
• “awd suv near me under 30k”

If you eliminate VDP SEO, you are throwing away 70–80% of all organic opportunity.

What your calling a “trap” is actually:

The #1 most valuable type of organic traffic a dealership can get.
You don’t try to force every VDP to rank.
You build a supporting ecosystem that pushes authority into the right VDPs.

I totally agree on the thousands spent on third parties. Coming from a long term Auto retail background tis hard as a dealer to not buy in to that cycle of wanting "more exposure". I wish i would have had a better understanding of this when i was in store.

the reason that money is spent on 3rd part platforms is because they rank their VDP's for those keywords.

I appreciate your feedback and would love to get on a call with you and our team to discuss further.

Any time 770-897-6107 just ask for Gregg and if your not ranking VDP's what is your approach and do you have a sample site?

 

[DjSec]

The best example is CarGurus on the VDP question they bury them the same as Carmax and Carvana and those guys are dominating the space.

They bury them in their nav structure so humans don’t browse thousands of inventory pages manually,

BUT they massively expose them to Google through:

1. giant XML sitemaps
2. deep internal linking
3. powerful category pages
4. VIN-based structured data
5. high authority domain signals
6. canonical architecture optimized for search engines

They absolutely push their VDP pages to Google just in a way that is invisible to average users.

 

[SavvyNick]

I'm afraid the data doesn't lie. Here is a VDP page for Cargurus I took this screenshot a few minutes ago. If you look at the canonical link for the VDP page, Cargurus is linking Used SUVs / Crossovers for Sale near Land O Lakes, FL - CarGurus which is not the VDP page I'm on. If you're not familiar with canonical linking, this is a way to tell Google if you're page is just a copy of another page, or if you want it ranked.
You would never canonical link to a search results page if you were trying to get a page ranked. This is actually common practice among all the websites you listed to negate all SEO value of VDP's. Cargurus and others understand how google's index works and thus bury VDP's and focus on Search Result Pages instead which has helped them outrank every dealership in the country.
When trying to find best practice it helps to study those who are winning which is what we did when designing our platform.

Used SUVs / Crossovers for Sale near Land O Lakes, FL - CarGurus
Browse the best November 2025 deals on SUV / Crossover vehicles for sale in Land O Lakes, FL. Save right now on a SUV / Crossover on CarGurus.


Also here is a link for one of our sites. https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-jarrettauto-com/4njgvrq0oz?form_factor=mobile

 

[DjSec]

Also here is a link for one of our sites. https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-jarrettauto-com/4njgvrq0oz?form_factor=mobile

Thanks for sharing the site!

Since you’re positioning this as your high-performance example, I want to give you real feedback based on actual standards (Google, WCAG, and W3C.

Here’s what I’m seeing:

1. ADA Compliance
The site fails multiple WCAG checkpoints.
That puts the dealership at real risk of ADA lawsuits and fines.
Any dealer platform today has to meet WCAG 2.1 AA out of the box, that should be the bare minimum.

2. Core Web Vitals
LCP is 4.1s and FCP is 2.5s.
That means:

• A large percentage of users are bouncing
• SEO is suppressed
• Google won’t crawl the site as deep as it should
• Paid traffic performance gets crushed

If this is the “high performance” example, most dealers would struggle with conversions.

3. W3C Errors
The page reports ~90 coding errors.
That’s not a deal-breaker by itself, but it’s usually a sign the framework wasn’t tuned for speed or accessibility.

4. Bootstrap Template
It looks and behaves like a standard Bootstrap dealership template.
If the goal is “franchise-grade,” the UI/UX and structure need to differentiate from Carsforsale, DealerCenter, and every other template-driven provider.

Here’s the real question I’m trying to understand:
If your platform is built on Bootstrap, has ADA failures, slow Core Web Vitals, and a very standard layout…

What is the strategy behind this product?
What makes it different from Carsforsale, WebsiteOnDemand, DealerCenter, or any other template provider?
What problem are you solving that they aren’t?

I’m not being negative, I’m genuinely trying to understand the positioning.
Right now, it looks like the same structure and constraints as every other dealer platform, so I’m curious where you see the value or differentiation.