Agreed. It starts with the Website. When I was in retail I jumped and went with a NON OEM approved website and marketing vendor. We killed it and dominated our market. Now, after some time with vAuto, I have come to work for that vendor. We consistently outrank 3rd parties and OEMs. SEO is built into the website and constantly optimized. The only SEO we charge extra for is content articles. I would also add that the OEMs don't want any one dealer to dominate because they want the traffic and the data for themselves.
What every dealer should want is to increase sales, increase efficiency, reduce overhead, and beat the competition. Not just beat the competition, destroy them and take their market share. Automotive retail is not a business where “good enough” wins. It’s competitive, data-driven, and dominated by companies with far more resources than any dealership.
And make no mistake:
your competition is no longer just the dealer down the street, it’s Jeff Bezos, Carvana, Cars.com, AutoTrader, and every other marketplace that wants the same shopper you want.
This is where the industry’s “made-for-the-masses” website and SEO vendors fail dealers.
Mass-produced vendor solutions can never give one dealer a real competitive edge
Your website provider will
never deploy a marketing or optimization strategy that gives one dealership a major advantage over another. They can’t. Their job is to keep
hundreds or thousands of dealers moderately satisfied, not to help any one store dominate a market.
If you and your competitor are both on the same platform, do you honestly think that provider will prioritize
your results above everyone else?
Of course not.
Even worse:
If you accidentally discover something that performs extremely well, the vendor will roll it out to every other dealer by the end of the month, including your local competitors and announce it as a “new feature.”
This is exactly why most dealers plateau online.
Dealership websites are built for inventory distribution, not competitive SEO
Every dealer has the same basic requirement:
Get inventory with photos, comments, pricing, and specs from the DMS to the website with as little manual work as possible.
Website providers focus on meeting OEM compliance, keeping pages functional, and onboarding dealers quickly.
They are not built to win SEO battles or dominate long-tail search.
And this is why most dealers lose traffic to marketplaces.
OEM programs also do not prioritize making one dealer dominate a market
It’s important to understand that the OEM’s goals and the dealership goals are not the same.
The dealership wants to be the #1 dealership in their state.
You want to own every important keyword “Honda cars,” “CR-V lease,” “best used Civic,” etc.
But is that the OEM’s goal?
Not even close.
The OEM wants shoppers to see
every dealer.
They want data from
all dealers, and they want consistency across the brand.
They do not want one rooftop swallowing every customer in a region, it destabilizes allocations, co-op programs, and the balance between stores.
This is why OEM-approved website vendors and OEM digital programs are restrictive:
They are engineered to benefit the
manufacturer, not to give your dealership an unfair advantage.
Co-op programs often amplify your branding problem
Many co-op-approved social and content vendors push out slick-looking posts, ads, and banners but they are:
- generic
- identical across all dealers
- optimized for the OEM, not the individual store
- often not linking back to your website
- sometimes burying your own posts by auto-posting minutes after you do
Convenient? Yes.
Competitive? No.
Useful for increasing brand presence? Yes.
Useful for increasing
your sales? Not usually.
SEO/SEM programs can work but not if they serve multiple masters
When you hand your SEO or SEM to an OEM-approved vendor, remember:
- they want your data
- they want to study what works so they can replicate it across the region
- they will never build a strategy designed to dominate other dealers
If you’re a Honda dealership, dominating keywords like “Honda cars” sounds like the goal.
But Honda doesn’t want
one dealer to rank everywhere, they want
every dealer to have a fair shot.
This is why you cannot rely on the OEM or mass-market vendors to build strategies that make you the best in the state.
If a dealer wants to outrank third-party sites and reclaim buyer-intent traffic, the only path forward is:
- custom-built website infrastructure
- content you own (model pages, trim pages, long-tail research)
- permanent pages that don’t disappear when inventory sells
- strong internal linking
- technical SEO designed specifically for your rooftop
- strategies that are exclusive, not shared
- and tools that are optimized for your market, not everyone else’s
If you want to win, you have to stop using the same tools as your competitor and expecting different results.
