SEO Guidance

[HK Rides]

Hello,

We are a small, family owned, used car dealership in Los Angeles. We currently have about 6-8 cars on average listed for sale.

We were revisiting on how to grow our SEO, and came across just marking our vehicles as sold on our website instead of having them taken off right away. Would something like that actually help and how should we go about it? Just have it on our same Inventory page or have a separate URL for our sold inventory.

Another concern is can we even optimize our SEO given the small number of inventory we offer and how we don't sell just one type of brand?

Any other advice would also be appreciated, we use DealerCenter for our website.

Our website is below

https://www.hk-rides.com/

 

[Ryan Everson]

As a used car dealer with less than 10 vehicles in Los Angeles, California, I would honestly not put a huge emphasis on SEO. You are in the second largest city in the U.S. It is going to be extremely difficult to rank organically for broad used car terms no matter what you do.

If anything, focus on the basics like optimizing your Google Business Profile, building up reviews, and maybe making sure your homepage title tag, H1, and core on-page elements are properly optimized.

Marking vehicles as sold and keeping them on your website is not a proven SEO strategy nor one that dealers are actively using to drive rankings, so I would not worry about that. If anything, it may have a small effect on conversion rate by inducing a fear of missing out response, like the vehicle someone is looking at might sell soon.

Instead, I would focus more on Google Vehicle Listing Ads, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Automotive Inventory Ads, etc. These are very inexpensive channels you can use to get your cars in front of a lot of eyeballs. The best part is you are guaranteed impressions, not just hoping something eventually ranks like with SEO.

Also, it looks like you carry lower priced high line inventory, so engaging videos with a strong hook like “Get this Aston Martin for under $40k in LA” would likely perform very well on Instagram Reels and TikTok.

 

[DjSec]

Yes, you can grow SEO with 6–8 cars. But not the way most dealers think.

Inventory alone will not do it. You don’t have enough volume. So the strategy has to be different.

1. Keep Sold Vehicles Live?

When you remove vehicles:
* You delete URLs
* You lose indexed pages
* You lose any authority those pages built
* Google sees churn, not growth

When you keep them:
* You build URL count
* You can rank for long-tail searches

But don't just leave them optimize them!

Keep the same URL do NOT move sold cars to a different URL.
Add Clear Sold Messaging
And internal links and content about the car you don't find on other dealerhip sites.

2. Add a blog to the site and look for keyword gaps that are easy to rank for and link the blog post to your VDP and SRP pages.

3. Create SRP pages with content on them you can't find on other sites, that way you can rank them with or without cars on them.

 

[HK Rides]

Ok, so we should focus more on our social media presence and not worry too much about SEO?

Right now we advertise on Carfax, Cargurus, and Facebook Marketplace. We are in the process of cancelling Autotrader as that has been abysmal. In terms of bringing in more leads, is there anything else we should look into? We tried Google Ads two separate occasions and it did not do well for us each time.

 

[Shawn Ryder]

In a marketplace dominated by corporate entities like CarMax or AutoNation, the human element provides a powerful differentiation factor. Incorporating this narrative into the metadata and social content helps establish the dealership as a trustworthy, enthusiast-led business, which can improve click-through rates and build community loyalty. A unique facet of the HK Rides brand is the owner’s origin story, rooted in a childhood love for cars sparked by "Need for Speed". This narrative should be more prominently woven into the site’s SEO strategy.

There is obviously high competition of the "used cars Los Angeles" query, would recommended that HK Rides develop content focused on high-intent local silos. The dealership’s proximity to specific landmarks and adjacent cities like Inglewood, El Segundo, and Hawthorne provides an opportunity to target "hyper-local" long-tail keywords for used cars as well.

Just some thoughts...