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For SEO, the best bet is to make sure your site is search-friendly, and then to create great and unique content that people want to link to. There are no shortcuts that don't blow up on you eventually (just ask the GST dealers right now...). If you want an honest SEO guy to help you, Troy Hartenstine is a superstar and the only person I recommend in automotive: https://www.hartenstine.com/
 
After jumping back to the vendor side for a bit (and a brief hiatus away from the car biz altogether), I just now got back into the retail side of automotive. My first few days have been spent analyzing process, vendors and piles of reports. My conclusion: no one is going to be able to create the quality content that we can and every SEO vendor I have looked at seems mired in some kind of shortcut they have developed, labeled as "revolutionary" and backed with some type of reporting that matches nothing in our analytics.
 
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You'll probably find the providers who supply the best SEO strategies on page 1 when typing something along the lines of "car dealership websites", this sounds like it should work. Its probably a decent indicator as I do not see a dealer.com ad haha

Sorry, but this will only tell you which website or SEO provider has done the right things to optimize their own site, and not their dealers' sites. While some might draw a correlation here, they would be foolish to do so. When I ran a website company, we had the most search-friendly dealer sites available, but a competitor who provided 100% flash sites for dealers back then had a better corporate site from an SEO perspective.
 
Sorry, but this will only tell you which website or SEO provider has done the right things to optimize their own site, and not their dealers' sites. While some might draw a correlation here, they would be foolish to do so. When I ran a website company, we had the most search-friendly dealer sites available, but a competitor who provided 100% flash sites for dealers back then had a better corporate site from an SEO perspective.
True, but I do feel it's a great starting point. It is at least an indicator the company knows how to optimize, after that the next step is to sit in on some demos and research current sites of providers to see what provider fits best. would you truly sign with an SEO company who can not provide the best SEO for themselves...
 
I think it's an inidicator to find an SEO company, not a website vendor.
If you google "Toronto SEO" you're going to find the top 3 SEO companies in the city in the top 5 results.
If you google "car dealer websites" where I live, the top 3 results are not the most SEO friendly by any stretch of the imagination.
 
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There are a ton of third party vendors happy to take your money to "move the needle". The scary thing is that I think many of them actually believe the snake oil they are selling works. The real truth is that CONTENT is something that simply cannot be shoved into a bottle for easy consumption. You have to work at it and it is time-consuming (and possibly expensive) if you wish to be relevant. A good vendor will tell you that upfront, otherwise run....
 
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