Best Layout For Dealer SEO

Patrick Bennett and I have been consulting for Park Auto Mall in the Tampa Bay Florida area for the past year. Since we took over, Park Auto Mall has a dominating presence in the Tampa Bay area.

A couple of months ago the dealership had some problems with their internet director, so I had to step in and regain control. Everything was hijacked by the former employee, including their Google Map Listings (which phone number rang to his personal cell phone), and their Google PPC account.

It only took about a week to regain control, then I stayed on board because of the savvy owner. Thanks to him, I have a virtual playground with full control of his internet department. Including myself, we have an internet team of 7 full time employees.

Since then, we have opened new channels including our YouTube Channel and Facebook Fan Page. During the past year, the owner constantly asked me if they should change website providers. He had a local guy build and maintain his website. Last year I suggested he stop using I-frames, and he did. After seeing a decent traffic spike, I figured we’d let a sleeping dog lie.

About 60 days ago the General Manager asked me to listen to a vendor pitch. It was from a company called AutoXLoo. I never heard of them, but anyone who actually comes by the dealership will always get my time.

I brought them into my office, and Joe pulled up a sample website. Not even 5 minutes into it, I told him to stop. I totally got what they were doing. They had everything I would have wanted in a dealer websites, including the side widgets. I told him a had to get him a meeting in front of the owner, and I did a few days later.

Fred was also very impressed with it, and I had explained to him why I liked it before the meeting. Here is what I really liked about it:

1. Most Searched Text Link Widget -  Obviously the longer you have a vehicle in inventory the less money you will make on it. As time goes by, your older inventory will always have more impressions than your new. This module will help your older inventory show up in searches by providing a direct text link from your homepage.
2. Newly Added Inventory – This widget will allow your new inventory to get crawled and indexed in all search engines in a day. Plus, with both of these modules your website will be forever changing in the eyes of the search engines. This means the Google Bot, Yahoo Slurp and others will come back more often. You will see that your page cache will update more frequently. Park Auto Mall’s former site was the same every single time a spider visited it, but now things are better (see stats below).
3. Inventory On Home Page – I want inventory to show up on the homepage, and this allows me to select not only how many to show, but it lets me decide which ones. I can either have it display newest inventory, a random list or I can pick them all. I chose a random pull because I already have the new ones linked to from the side widget. This will allow my other inventory to stay strong in the searches. If you look at Park Auto Mall’s website, you will see 12 vehicles come up. If you refresh (control & F5) you will see new cars. Now, every time a search engine bot stops by the page will be different every time. They love that, and they will give you more authority.
4. More Control – I have the ability to add whatever I want on top, bottom, left or right of every page. I can embed videos, clickable images to other pages, widgets and more. I can now engage our visitors. That is why we have average pageviews of over 6 pages per user. That may not sound like much, but when you’re getting close to 400 visitors a days it is. Our bounce rate since the launch is only 22%.
5. Vehicle Detail Page Videos – By default, AutoXLoo makes a video for every vehicle in our inventory. It displays a video tab on every vehicle page. We make our own videos, but we don’t have the time to make a video for every car. When we do make a new video, we can easily add it to our vehicle detail page and it will show up instead of the default video. You can see this Corvette listing as an example. (Click the video tab).
6. Mobile Phone Website – I’m sure all of us are aware of the increasing number of people that view our websites using mobile devices like Blackberries, Droids and I-Phones. Although smart phones are fully capable of viewing normal websites, they simply take too long to load. CarXLoo provides a mobile website with the main website. Their code automatically recognizes a smart phone visitor, and will redirect it to the mobile site (automatically). You can view the mobile site on a pc by going to m.parkautomall.com. It may not look like much on a PC, but it’s simply perfect on a smart phone.

I could keep going, but I want to get to the numbers. I have been working the internet since 1994, and I’ve launched and relaunched websites in a variety of industries including seafood, printing and the car business. Typically when a website gets a major overhaul it will usually take a dip for a couple of weeks. Lucky for me I have some strong backlinks going to parkautomall.com, so the dip only lasted a couple of days.

Since the launch a week and a half ago, I have already observed a 25% increase in website traffic. I use 2 different web analytics programs, Google Analytics  (of course) and Piwik Live stats. Piwik is a free open source program that you can use for free. We have a self hosted WordPress Blog, so I installed it on that server. This software gives me a wealth of information, and I use that on a daily basis. Matter of fact, I have it up all of the time. I can track each visitor as they navigate. I can even figure out where a visitor came from when a customer calls. I can see exactly what page they’re on, and were they came from. When I find out, I will select the appropriate source in Reynolds & Reynolds so I can have accurate reports. I only log into Google Analytics weekly to run reports. I even added a live visitor widget to our car blog (below right).

Here are some screen shots:

This screenshot is from my Piwik Live stats, and you can see the jump in traffic since the launch. I even excluded all visits from our buidling's IP address so we are not counting our own visits.

This Screenshot From Google Analytics Shows The Last 4 Days. It has only been 4 days since I installed it.

Between those numbers and our Tampa microsite, we’re getting over 600 unique visitors a day. Plus our YouTube videos have resulted in almost 7,000 video views so far. Not bad considering it’s only 42 days old. You want to see how we do it, check out this awesome vehicle video by Danielle or this one by Tiffany (there’s some funny outtakes at the end of Tiffany’s video of me trying to show her how to drive a standard).

Things will only get better as I juice up both websites, so check back in a couple of months to see more results.

Our Microsite Nets 175 - 275 additional visitors every day

Learn more about AutoXLoo here.