I'm just trying to share my knowledge and I don't have agenda to push for high end services.
I am not trying to protect the tricks of my trade either,
Light House does get you to the 80% mark. However, the next 20% is probably where Greg is saying that it doesn't cut muster. Which I do agree 100%. So, of course light house is not the best for a professional SEO tool. There's hrefs, screaming frog, and many other tools.
But it still comes down to staying on top of the latest google trends, schema.org, json-ld, html tags, becoming a content authority and such.
Does clean code and speed matter?
The video the other day which featured AutoGenius (i think that is who they are) mentioned lazydays. Those guys sure think so and I agree with them. They made it their mantra and they were making fun of dealers whose pages load in 26 seconds. They useimagekit for their image cdn. I wonder if google thinks that is better than any other cdn? I also think that top tier brand services will help your rankings. The length of how long you paid for your domain probably does too. I come from an industry that Accessibility scores really matter a lot. Those amubulance chasing lawyers go after companies who fail at this.
When it comes down to it. We just don't know what Google is going to do in the next 5 minutes to your search rankings.
"Yeah, they'll rank for Chevy terms... but for anything else, like used cars, or service, or non-brand-loyal customers, they won't rank unless they do SEO."
I am going to disagree with that comment slightly.
What is the SEO for this? The following experience will cover why I question this.
What is your target? New car sales, used car sales, 700+ fico, BHPH, or what not?
Where are you located? large city or small hick town like my example?
Here's an anedotal experience:
I grew up in small town in WNY. We now have a Chevy dealer about 10 miles away. West Herr is the major player from what I'm hearing. Or am I looking for something like Hamburg Camp Auto Sales. The opposite extreme is that I live in Houston. I took my Jeep to the dealer just last week. (I bought the easy care warranty for it -- not plugging them but I should) and was looking for where to go. I am new to Houston and my exposure to the various dealers in town is just driving down roads. No opinion for anyone. I am car body style loyal and don't pick dealers by brand. But my friend does and he's a die hard Toyota guy. I bought my current Jeep after using gurus extensively and just happened to talk with a dealer salesman that I sort of chat with over the years I've known him and saw my current vehicle by chance and I was just tired of looking more.
So all of this is saying that I really think that dealers need to look at their own specific location and customer base and adjust to those
critieria for their web marketing campaings.
