Dealers Are Missing Huge Keyword Gaps Because There VDPs Don’t Rank!

[DjSec]

At my agency, we are diligent about trying to not represent competitors. I actually had to tell a long time customer (I've recently changed companies) that we wouldn't work with them because of our company's partnership with a competitor. If it is unavoidable to work with a competitor, we have very separate teams working for their dealer. Yes, the tactics can then become similar as we are doing it our way, but the strategies are never exactly the same or discussed.

As for your VDP question, we build to rank, with search, for AI to read and utilize and to be useful for the consumer and dealer. I don't know why you say the VDP "goes away" when sold, as it shouldn't. The third parties have an edge as they are showing large numbers of very similar vehicles, With a OEM dealer, there has to be a decision to what pages are built, what inventory is featured, and then the ranking. You can't have a strategy of put it up, take it down with a Ford dealer gets an Infiniti on trade. If you get too specific, the customer clicks and doesn't see the inventory because they don't have it, the consumer will bounce and the site lose ranking. I did a random search with the longer tail keywords and found some dealers sprinkle in to the third parties. It comes down to SEO being done right for the dealer, not the cheap fix many get sold, but doesn't work.

1. Separate teams don’t solve the problem:​

The agency itself still benefits from keeping performance “balanced.” If one dealer is getting 10× more traffic and 10x better rankings than dealer B ... dealer B is going to want to know why.

At that point the agency has two choices:

• Copy the strategy and give it to Dealer B
• Admit they’re intentionally allowing one client to outperform another

Almost every agency chooses the first option, because they don't want to say the team working on your competition is better than the team working on your site.

So even with separate teams, the system doesn’t allow one dealer to dominate the others.

2. On VDPs:​

Most dealerships are on:

• Dealer.com
• DealerOn
• Sincro
• Dealer Inspire
• or OEM-mandated templates

My understanding from what I have seen is:

• The VDP status changes
• It’s often removed from the sitemap
• The canonical changes
• The page loses category links
• The dealer’s inventory feed overwrites the page
• It gets deindexed or falls out of visibility because it’s no longer linked anywhere

Google sees it as orphaned or gone, which kills long-term ranking potential.

Third-party sites avoid this because they maintain full inventory archives, structured clusters, pagination, and stable URLs.

Dealer sites don’t.

This is why:
No OEM dealer VDP ranks long-term for any meaningful long-tail keyword.

If this wasn’t the case, we’d see dealers outrank Cars.com, CarGurus, Edmunds, Autotrader, and TrueCar on long-tail search.

3. "Customers Bounce”​

Normally customers only bounce when:

• the page doesn't actually match the query
• the content is generic
• there’s no content
• the VDP template is identical to 10,000 other dealers
• the page takes to long to load

Long-tail pages convert precisely because they match how buyers search:

• “trucks under 15k near me”
• “awd suvs under 20k Dallas”
• “used f-150 xlt 4x4 black Houston”

When we build clustered buyer-intent pages, we’re not promising the exact VIN, we’re ranking the category and intent, not the single unit.

4. “It comes down to SEO being done right”​

If SEO were being done correctly across the industry:

• dealer VDPs would rank
• dealer category pages would outrank third parties
• dealers would appear for long-tail commercial-intent searches
• OEM-mandated websites wouldn’t all show identical templates
• dealers wouldn’t rely 95% on third parties for organic traffic

But for 15+ years, the pattern has never changed.

Every agency says they “build for ranking,”
but the results across thousands of dealer sites say something else.

Dealers can work with OEM programs and good agencies,
but the competitive edge comes only from the assets they control themselves:

• their own long-tail pages
• their own content clusters
• their own local search strategy
• their own technical setup
• their own independent website structure
• and an information moat that can’t be copied or pushed to all their competitors

That’s the part agencies (even the good ones) cannot and will not deliver.
Not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t give one dealer a monopoly over another dealer they serve.