- Apr 7, 2009
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CarGurus - significant drop in traffic?
- Thread starter kevinfrye
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- autotrader carfax cargurus cars.com
From the source:
@joe.pistell hit it on the head with the big paid push by CG. Looks perfectly timed during the most recent organic slap on the wrist
@joe.pistell hit it on the head with the big paid push by CG. Looks perfectly timed during the most recent organic slap on the wrist
- Feb 11, 2015
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I get where you're coming from, but that's if SEMRush's data is holistic. SEMRush won’t scrape every website because many sites use proxies to block scrapers and while many sites may block scrapers from using their keywords or searching their blog metadata, for example, Google Ads are less likely to be blocked. I'd lay your trust in paid and not organic with them.
- May 1, 2005
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Any ideas on what CG is/was doing specifically that Google didn't like that caused such a swing in their organic traffic traffic?
Jeff - to answer your question, and I believe a prevoius poster touched on this on this or another thread, it's about Google making its search results better and Cargurus are lower funnel, so when customer want more reviews, more rich data, more content, they need upper funnel so they adjusted their algorithim to have the top searches be more informative and for those who are just about getting the lead/sale, they can pay for it since they aren't adding value to the customer. Relatedly, anyone been hearing about the recent price increases from Cargurus? We haven't gotten our price gouge yet from Cargurus, but it sounds like they are coming back with huge increases. And if we put that together with the interesting data above, it's because they have to pour more money into paying for search now that organic has dropped, and need to make that back. Ironically, for those of us with our own websites, they just drive the price of keywords up that we coudl buy ourselves or the other websites are getting organically, but that's another discussion. But if they are forced to pay even more than they already do for traffic, these huge price increases dealers are getting are going to continue, and it's just for buying keywords which we can do ourselves. Query their value add.
You must have missed the meme in the other thread regarding Cars.com SEO
Sure, I was just showing the data from the horse's mouth rather than second hand from Carfax rep. Speaking of paid though, check this out for Carfax.
What's your money on @Alexander Lau ? An agency running Carfax's spend and either purposely buying carMax keywords / wasting money on carMax keywords, or semrush being completely inaccurate?
- Feb 11, 2015
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Great assessment, but your boy David Greene from Cars.com is saying that CG will be unable to fix those issues, which I find to be pure and utter poppycock. Google's algorithm doesn't work that way. When CG fixes those issues they will be back in the driver's seat organically. That's how they dominated the rankings in the first place. Much of this is well know, but I don't think Langley Steinert (also founded TripAdvisor) is quite that stupid, along with Steve Kaufer, co-founder and current CEO of TripAdvisor, and Simon Rothman, formerly Global Vice President and General Manager of eBay Motors. That fix will happen, plus I don't buy SEMRush's reports as a holistic measurement and which keywords were used in the assessment!?
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- Feb 11, 2015
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Good research.You must have missed the meme in the other thread regarding Cars.com SEO
Sure, I was just showing the data from the horse's mouth rather than second hand from Carfax rep. Speaking of paid though, check this out for Carfax.
View attachment 4113
What's your money on @Alexander Lau ? An agency running Carfax's spend and either purposely buying carMax keywords / wasting money on carMax keywords, or semrush being completely inaccurate?
- I don't buy SEMRush as the be-all; know-all, when it comes to organic ranking reporting (I stated this a few years ago in these waters). As you had copied my post: "SEMRush won’t scrape every website because many sites use proxies to block scrapers and while many sites may block scrapers from using their keywords or searching their blog metadata, for example, Google Ads are less likely to be blocked. I'd lay your trust in paid and not organic with them."
- Which specific keywords were used in the reporting? As @jon.berna said (in so many words), the data can be cooked to make them look good.
- In this instance, I don't know why they'd be buying carMax keywords, except to populate for those using their that name in the query string, which is lazy and a bad effort, IMO. I'd give SEMRush more credit for paid search, I don't think it's as difficult and it looks like Google has always allowed for scraping against it.
Thanks Alex. Re; CG fixing it, I don't take a view, but from what I've read it is the upper vs. lower funnel issue, and that's not really fixable for Cargurus. However, you or another poster mentioned Google changes their algorithm every few months, so who knows what the next one does, could reverse right back. And you are 100% correct that Langley and co. deserve the benefit of the doubt with what they've done. The key distinction though is they bought the traffic which is SEM, not SEO. They spent >70% of their revenue on Sales and Marketing, much of which is just buying their way to the top. In any case, I'm curious in David's response on reconciling Carfax's presentation and Cars.com and Cargurus. Also, Alex you brought up an interesting related point when you mentioned the former EBAY GM - where is EBAY here? They have a huge lead gen business in Europe and a small one here. There were rumors they were exiting the market but those turned out to be false and now are expanding. At NADA folks thought it was because FB was launching marketplace and partnering with lead-gen and others, so EBAY had to step back in and compete. But just curious where they sit as we haven't heard form them other than their hiring of employees.
I had EXACTLY the same question and I think the posters here did a good job. The graph posted by Cars.com only used 4k keywords; Carfax used 20k keywords, and Cargurus pays for millions. So definitely "spin" as another poster noted. It would have been helpful if David or someone else from one of these companies just came out and said this and how we should interpret it versus having us figure it out, but that's what crowdsourcing is for
. In seriousness though: I think the point another poster made that directionally Cargurus is consistently down is important, and in my view 4,000 words is probably a large enough sample size for SEO in terms of what people are typing; but I suppose reasonable people may think its higher. The most important question is are dealers seeing results? David: Can you prove out more lead conversions from this traffic? Or can Carfax? that will help us parse through the spin.