Cobalt Sites

[sweece]

I've looked around the forums and read the thread entitled "Dealer Mandated Sites" but I still have some questions that come to mind. A little background for everyone - we are using Cobalt to run our website right now. Like many others, we are a little tired of the cookie-cutter feel that they provide. We want to really differentiate ourselves in terms of the appearance & feel of our website and we don't think that Cobalt's platform will be the best way to go about this.

Has anyone had a negative experience with keeping the Cobalt site solely for the factory leads and pushing a different site designed to create a unique customer experience?

If we create our new site under our current domain (which has a quality page rank on Google) and create a new domain for the Cobalt site, will this have any effect on our rankings?

We have looked into DealerTrend as a potential vendor due to their Wordpress integration and customization capabilities, any thoughts?

 

[ajholland]

I went through your exact scenario about 9 months ago. We still have the "free" cobalt sites, but we drive the traffic to a different site. I have seen zero negative effects from it. Our google rankings have been fine, the Cobalt site got a new obscure domain and never comes up in the searches. Hope this helps!

 

[DevBasu]

Hi Sweece - While I can't comment on whether DealerTrend would be a better vendor, I can comment with authority on the transition between website platforms, while retaining your rankings.

1) If you choose to change platforms, aim to keep the existing url structure as similar as possible. For example, if your current inventory page is something like www.domain.com/inventory/ford/f150.php then that's exactly what it should look like on your new site. Make sure your vendor can support that.

2) In many cases, the above scenario is not possible. It is then important to get a complete URL extract of all the indexed pages in Google right now. You can do this by running a site:yourwebsite.com command in Google. If you install the SEO for Firefox plugin (just google this) you can extract all the results into an Excel file.

3) What you now need to do is make sure that all of these old pages are permanently redirected to your new website's urls i.e : www.domain.com/inventory/ford/f150.php must be 301ed (permanently redirected) to www.domain.com/inventory/ford-f150.asp (if that's what it turns out to be).

If you follow the steps outlined above, you won't experience any loss in rankings. Cheers!

 

[ghen]

My experience is similar but not the same. We have two websites. Chevrolet Dealer Newark | Used Car Wilmington | Porter Chevrolet DE and Porter Chevrolet, Newark Chevrolet, Elkton Chevrolet, Delaware Chevrolet, Wilmington Chevrolet

The second site (the .net site) is our cobalt site and does a decent job for bringing in GM leads. I don't mess with it much other than letting the advocate know what to push for the month.

When I obtained and promoted the .net address for chevy leads it did not harm my normal customer base. The two websites seem to act mildly independently from each other and don't leech customers from one to the other.

I've been researching website companies recently and can highly recommend dealer.com even though they don't build my site currently. Their tools are top notch for website creation and they can give you that custom look you want during production. Might be a bit expensive though. Haven't shopped it perfectly yet

 

[sweece]

Thanks for the responses everyone.

@DevBasu - Unfortunately, the current URL structure that our vendor provides is not very SEO friendly. Vehicle detail pages appear like so: ourdomain.com/VehicleDetails/123456789. I think if we made a switch, we would make one to a vendor that can provide an effective long-tail URL structure. What is the reasoning behind having our current pages 301ed to the new pages? & can this be easily accomplished?

@ghen & ajholland - Upon creating your new domain, did you experience any sort of retalliation/resistance from Cobalt?

Thanks again!

 

[CAORYAN]

Sweece,

There is a lot of benefits to having multiple websites. Use your new website to hit certain keywords and use your cobalt website to hit others. Don't have them compete for keywords. Wordpress is an amazing platform and I highly recommend it. I use them to build websites.

As for if you choose to replace your cobalt website you can do 301 redirects to push all previous rank to the new pages. However.....be smart about your 301's. You need to 301 the 2001 chevy cobalt with the non seo friendly url to the new 2001 chevy cobalt url. match the pages if that makes sense.

Matt Cutts from Google addressed losing SEO by moving your platform and he said he recommends doing a little at a time.

I would recommend buying a domain and going after different keywords. Do your keyword research and choose carefully.

With WP you can easily change the url to whatever you want.

 

[Matthew Cole]

We have many clients who market and drive traffic to their own custom website, while keeping the factory website to maintain factory leads. Spend your dollars building your Dealership brand and get customers into your own 24-7 digital brick and mortar. The factory website will still get you your zip code specific leads, regardless of traffic.

We usually replace the domain name that the existing factory website is on, because that's what you have been marketing for years now, besides where search engines have seen you and are recognized for. Buy a new vanity domain name and move the factory website to the new domain. Yes this is an opportunity to optimize and pick up on a few new focused keywords. Use the factory website as a micro site.

Wordpress is also a great micro site platform and an easy way to generate fresh relevant content and backlinks. You should also use the blog as an extended social networking tool, as in share similar information and don't make it all sales driven.

see some examples below, and feel free to reach out with any questions!

http://www.coxchevy.com
http://www.broadwayautomotive.com
http://www.hennessyfordstores.com

 

[Eley Duke]

I am in the same boat, we use only the Cobalt GM site and we have the Digital Ad Package, but I am interested to know if I am wasting our money cause it seems it isnt moving the needle. In July we had 416,000 online impressions, 3,116 website visitors and 350 leads, of which were 105 Hours and Directions, 209 Phone calls, only 35 email leads, and the Digital Advertising Leads and Prospects were 67. We're paying $3,000 a month just for the Digital Ad Package with Cobalt and I am wondering if this is worth it becasue GM is craming it down our throats and I think this is the only option, or if I need to move on from their strong hold?

I have been talking with dealer.com, and I am going to talk with Dealer Socket, both have impressive features. Has any GM dealer made this switch and gone with another vendor, dealer.com perhaps, for your main web site using your marketed url, and then done the Cobalt site to a lesser degree to get the GM leads? I would like to know your results.

Thanks,

 

[Justin Duff]

We've done the double site thing with many of our clients. It definitely will not have a negative impact on you.

We do have the best URL structure that you are looking for:USED 2006 Ford Mustang GT #NDZ1759A | Joe Rizza Ford Orland Park

We also, like Dealer Trend, have integrated Wordpress into our actual sites. This will boost your on site SEO, instead of hosting a blog on a separate unique domain. You really want to be optimizing your main site with all that good SEO content. http://fordop.rizzacars.com/blog/

Chicago Ford | New Used Preowned Cars SUVs

 

[TwoBoxDesigns]

"Like many others, we are a little tired of the cookie-cutter feel that they provide. We want to really differentiate ourselves in terms of the appearance & feel of our website and we don't think that Cobalt's platform will be the best way to go about this."

There are companies that specialize in customization of CMS systems like Cobalt, Reynolds & Reynolds and Dealer.com. It is much cheaper to have your site "re-skinned" with custom graphics than to have a fully custom site built from scratch. Aside from the cookie-cutter look these CMS systems usually have good back end architecture and inventory managment tools which are expensive to recreate. These site are usually free, or heavily subsidized by the manufacturer and it's a lot more cost effective to refresh them. As an added bonus they have a huge head start on organic google ranking over new sites.

Hope that helps.