150 - 250+ online per month or bust

[craigh]

Your inventory pages are WAYYYY more important than blogs or landing pages. Taking a look at our top 1000 entrances (non-homepage) from Organic Search visitors over last 90-days, inventory pages account for 948 of those entrances. Those inventory pages will build dynamic, updated daily content if done correctly.

Absolutely they will. And they need to be fixed, but I wouldn't fix them and call it a day.
This is why I emphasized the fact that the blog visitors tend to be "in addition to" the inventory visitors.

If I exclude the homepage over 90 days, its about 1/2 used inventory and the rest is divided between service landing pages, vehicle landing pages and contact. I can correlate my conversions to their landing page and it's not uncommon that they landed on one of our landing pages.

 

[anthonycapital]

Maybe too much on the homepage going on, took me a while to plant my feet down and sense where north, south, east and west was. Chances are most people are (like every car dealer website) going to click on INVENTORY the most and first as soon as they get there - however - That big image area should entice me to come in, based on something unique and profound about your dealership. Those GM sponsored banners and panels just seem so dull, because everyone has them too. I recon you need to make a big splash on page one, then hand the customer the towel in the showroom. Does every new vehicle have at least one real image?

Good points. The homepage is something we will need to improve one.
We make an effort to take proper pictures for all New and Used.

 

[anthonycapital]

Your inventory pages are WAYYYY more important than blogs or landing pages. Taking a look at our top 1000 entrances (non-homepage) from Organic Search visitors over last 90-days, inventory pages account for 948 of those entrances. Those inventory pages will build dynamic, updated daily content if done correctly.

Interesting. Most of our organic traffic lands on our homepage. Generally searching brand related terms.

I am curious as to how folks find your inventory pages on Google?

 

[craigh]

Interesting. Most of our organic traffic lands on our homepage. Generally searching brand related terms.

I am curious as to how folks find your inventory pages on Google?

He did mention they are non-homepage visitors. If you remove the "/" visitors from your Landing Pages you get some interesting information about your non-homepage SEO.

Users find our inventory pages typically because they never expire, are indexed properly and we also do some specific landing pages that include live inventory in them. So if someone looks for 2012 Ford Focus {{ CITY }} we actually end up competing with the classifieds sites a few times and getting some traction in these areas.

The real trick is taking those visitors and targeting the site to them, based on what they were looking for.

 

[csabatka1]

Interesting. Most of our organic traffic lands on our homepage. Generally searching brand related terms.

I am curious as to how folks find your inventory pages on Google?

One of two ways. Organically and paid SEM.

1. Our SEM is through Haystak and they do a great job building dynamic ads based on our current inventory. We don't have a large budget, but this is really helping with used, non-franchised placement. We're seeing great results from this in 2 markets.


2. Organically by building those dynamic inventory pages with keyword heavy make/model/sales class/location. Make sure title tag and meta description is dynamically built to match inventory page. Sitemap your entire inventory pages and submit to Google/Bing. Sitemap carefully, since these pages are dynamically built there are hundreds of thousands of possible VLP combinations. Limit the number of VLP pages that are site mapped - I think I did around 3k. I did a combination of every new/make, used/make, new/make/model, used/make/model, make, make/model, etc. The higher level VLPs. Get a Google+ account and add the +1 widget from Google and +1 every VLP you have.


Example Google Searches:
Good thing I posted this, I need to go back through and +1 my inventory pages, it's been awhile.

 

[anthonycapital]

Thank you Craig and Chad!

From doing some searches for our inventory on google it appears we have our work cut-out for us!

Thank you for giving me a great place to start.

Anthony