Is There Actually a Market for Franchise-Level Websites at $399/mo for Independents?

[SavvyNick]

The best example is CarGurus on the VDP question they bury them the same as Carmax and Carvana and those guys are dominating the space.

 

[DjSec]

Our approach is the opposite of the typical “try to make every VDP rank” strategy

No one does it so not doing it would be typical

because that’s a trap.

This is false because:

VDPs already do rank just not for dealers.

Cars.com
CarGurus
AutoTrader
Edmunds
TrueCar

These sites rank millions of VDP pages for long-tail keywords every day.
If ranking VDPs were “a trap,” these companies wouldn’t exist and they wouldn’t be worth billions.

The problem is NOT that VDPs can’t rank.
The problem is that:

• Dealer VDPs load too slow
• Dealer VDPs have duplicate content
• Dealer VDPs lack structured data
• Dealer VDPs have no internal links
• Dealer VDPs have no supporting topical authority
• Dealer VDPs disappear when the vehicle sells
• Dealer VDPs use generic templates
• Dealer VDPs ignore long-tail keywords

VDPs aren’t designed to be long-term SEO assets, and trying to force them to rank for competitive keywords creates volatility, cannibalization, and constant re-indexation problems.

If your VDPs don’t rank, your entire SEO strategy collapses.

Why?

Because:

• 70%+ of organic dealer traffic should be used car inventory traffic.
• Shopper queries are overwhelmingly long-tail.
• High-intent searches map to VDPs naturally.

Examples:

• “2019 f150 xlt for sale near me”
• “used tahoe under 25k”
• “2018 camry se in stock”
• “awd suv near me under 30k”

If you eliminate VDP SEO, you are throwing away 70–80% of all organic opportunity.

What your calling a “trap” is actually:

The #1 most valuable type of organic traffic a dealership can get.
You don’t try to force every VDP to rank.
You build a supporting ecosystem that pushes authority into the right VDPs.

I totally agree on the thousands spent on third parties. Coming from a long term Auto retail background tis hard as a dealer to not buy in to that cycle of wanting "more exposure". I wish i would have had a better understanding of this when i was in store.

the reason that money is spent on 3rd part platforms is because they rank their VDP's for those keywords.

I appreciate your feedback and would love to get on a call with you and our team to discuss further.

Any time 770-897-6107 just ask for Gregg and if your not ranking VDP's what is your approach and do you have a sample site?

 

[DjSec]

The best example is CarGurus on the VDP question they bury them the same as Carmax and Carvana and those guys are dominating the space.

They bury them in their nav structure so humans don’t browse thousands of inventory pages manually,

BUT they massively expose them to Google through:

1. giant XML sitemaps
2. deep internal linking
3. powerful category pages
4. VIN-based structured data
5. high authority domain signals
6. canonical architecture optimized for search engines

They absolutely push their VDP pages to Google just in a way that is invisible to average users.

 

[SavvyNick]

I'm afraid the data doesn't lie. Here is a VDP page for Cargurus I took this screenshot a few minutes ago. If you look at the canonical link for the VDP page, Cargurus is linking Used SUVs / Crossovers for Sale near Land O Lakes, FL - CarGurus which is not the VDP page I'm on. If you're not familiar with canonical linking, this is a way to tell Google if you're page is just a copy of another page, or if you want it ranked.
You would never canonical link to a search results page if you were trying to get a page ranked. This is actually common practice among all the websites you listed to negate all SEO value of VDP's. Cargurus and others understand how google's index works and thus bury VDP's and focus on Search Result Pages instead which has helped them outrank every dealership in the country.
When trying to find best practice it helps to study those who are winning which is what we did when designing our platform.

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Also here is a link for one of our sites. https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-jarrettauto-com/4njgvrq0oz?form_factor=mobile