Is this new? Truecar & organic search

[Dave Erickson]

Something caught my eye this morning that I had never noticed before from Truecar and I was wondering if it’s something I just happened to have missed or it’s new? If it’s something I missed I’m going to be pretty embarrassed by posting this.

Here it is:

Truecar seems to have created the subdomain dealer.truecar.com/state/city/model which brings you to a fairly well optimized landing page for that model and city. At first I thought this wouldn’t the case for dealers that actually signed up with them as that would seem to sour the relationship, but I went ahead and confirmed in the following example.

1. Scott Robinson Honda in Torrance is a Truecar dealer
2. Dealer.truecar.com/ca/Torrance/Civic-Hybrid-report.html ranks on Google page 1 BEFORE scottrobinsonhonda.com on the search term “2012 Civic Hybrid Torranceâ€

I’m not trying to pick on Scott Robinson, but if I were a Truecar dealer I’m not sure I’d feel so good about them putting effort into outranking or ranking very closely to me to ultimately take traffic that would have been ordinarily destined for me.

On the flip side if I were a Truecar dealer the chances for more leads in other cities would be higher.

In either case I’ll be putting more efforts into organic search results in respect to my city and models.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Dave, this practice has been going on for years now. Edmunds, Automotive.com to name just a few others that practice this. Of course it doesn't surprise me that TrueCar has a strategy around this. And we give them the power and allowance to do so, while stroking them a check every month to leverage our names (sometimes) to obtain leads - only to sell back to us at some point.

Have a strategy around dominating page one of the Search Engines for relevant keywords.
Quit signing up for these services - giving them the power to do what they do.
Place your marketing budget into high converting - lead to show traffic (most of the time from your own website)

 

[CAORYAN]

Wow jeff tell us how you really feel

I have an seo model I played with for a classified site that is similar to this one. Craigslist does this and it works great for them. I am not sure they are looking to steal traffic but rather use those good ranking pages to drive traffic to more inventory/pages on their site. Kind of a backwards approach but works.

You are right, the power is in the dealers hands and if you aren't funding their project they probably wont compete.

Dave, this practice has been going on for years now. Edmunds, Automotive.com to name just a few others that practice this. Of course it doesn't surprise me that TrueCar has a strategy around this. And we give them the power and allowance to do so, while stroking them a check every month to leverage our names (sometimes) to obtain leads - only to sell back to us at some point.

Have a strategy around dominating page one of the Search Engines for relevant keywords.
Quit signing up for these services - giving them the power to do what they do.
Place your marketing budget into high converting - lead to show traffic (most of the time from your own website)