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Right now, in order to boost our authority for this specific area we're schema markup in our local listings area in order to help the search engines associate our site with our given area; we've also got a Google Places account up and running (though it doesn't seem to be showing up very often currently). Our hope is that when we gain some traction in this area we'll be have the authority to move into larger markets.

My thought it it may just come down to content, though I'd very much like to get some divergent opinions from people. We're trying to keep the site simple and clean for the visitors, but obviously that counts for very little if the site isn't performing.

I looked at your on-page SEO & it looks weak.

• Your only instance of the main keyword (Bozeman Audi) points to a .png image of a map, from this page.
• Your keywords in the URLs are only after the question mark which Google is most likely ignoring (typically an onsite search phrase after the question mark).

Yukon, I would assume you are referring to our home page, we are not ranking our home page but internal landing pages. For example
Billings Used Cars - New and Used Cars, Trucks, SUV's

Another example.

This is a random page, this page has zero local keywords on the page, I assume it has zero local keyword anchor-text pointing too the page.

I'm not suggesting to stuff keywords, but it doesn't really look like your targeting local keywords at all.

Is this van in Dallas, TX, or Akron, OH?

I guess what the previous SEO company was trying to drive traffic to landing pages, which then users would begin searching for their next car after hitting the landing page itself. I see your point however and will address it

Sits the core of the site is Wordpress, I bet we can find some way to dynamically implement they key words onto each page without being a huge hassle.

IMO the biggest problem from a user/traffic point of view would be the vehicle images are not very useful (just my opinion).

I've personally shopped for cars online, the only cars I considered had the real photo of the car/s. I would never in a million years inquire about a car that had a canned image that was found on the internet. I need to see the real car that's for sale, the more detailed the images, the better, I want to see all four sides of the car, the interior, the engine compartment (bare minimum for me).

I would be surprised if this image below ever created a sales lead for a 2010 used car in 2013:

The sad thing about the images is the fact that those "canned" images are being provided by the actual car dealership selling the car lol

Yeah I know a few websites that give really good API calls for AWESMOME images that dont look stock either.

Not trying to derail the original questions but I wanted to stress my point on how much influence images of the real new/used car have on a buyer.

Carmax is a popular car site, the brand isn't as impiortant to me as the number of images that Carmax has for this same model car as the car you have listed on your own site.

• Carmax has 35 detailed images of a single van for sale.
• You have 1 canned van image that's not even the car that's for sale.

I'm not trying to dis. you or your site, I'm just saying images are what the traffic wants. I guarantee Carmax knows that images create buyer leads online.

I guess my point is, a few highly detailed pages would probably bring in more leads than the 34K canned sales pages that don't show the actual car being sold. If your local to the car dealer/s you might consider taking your own photos of a few cars & create very detailed sales pages that target local traffic.

I know the detailed images would be massive work, but you have to be better than the competition & give traffic what they want. Right now, your doing exactly what the dealerships are doing, who your trying to generate leads for (I guess the dealer has a site). Sounds like the dealership/s with the canned images doesn't know much about online traffic.

You shouldn't take a project in the first place when you can't deliver results.

Site looks nice, just needs some On-Page & off-page SEO work.

34,000+ unoptimized pages will get buried in Google SERPs. If a page and it's links doesn't target a local/target keyword it's not going to rank for a local keyword, simple as that.

Doesn't matter If you rank #1 for a local keyword, there's no incentive for traffic to ever contact you as a lead.

When a person makes a major purchasing decision like buying a car/truck, they rarely do it on a knee jerk reaction, especially on the net when there's thousands of other sites that show what they're actually buying.

I would fall back & reconsider the whole business plan until you can show traffic what they're actually supposed to be contacting you for in the first place (an actual vehicle).

[edit]
Some of the things I've said in this thread might sound harsh, but I'm telling you straight up, no schmoozing or fluff.

KingMighty, I'm surprised that you are using Wordpress for something so database intensive, my first choice would be Joomla and second Drupal. How is WordPress working for you. Are you using an off the shelf database or a custom one.

We are a car exporter in Asia, Europe and Australia so in related field sort of. We don't get many people here from Automotive industry so nice to have some company.

there's seo and then there's local seo

if you highly optimize your site for onsite local seo, you would barely need backlinks

you're dealing with cars, no matter what you'll need good backlinks

but it starts with on site seo, you basically HAVE to tell google that you're local, and you're not, you've recognized this... the only way to do that is onsite seo. (and i'm actually a hater of onsite seo, but it's absolutely essential for local seo)

get a real local seo expert, looking at your site, whois, and all that, you do NOT have an expert.

Hello kingmighty,

I just considered of evaluating your website: autoagent.com, to be precisely said, it's not upto the mark. It's very sad that you shed over sump of money to optimizer's.

When i first loaded into the landing page....

"Hmm, pretty impressive"

Checked to source page - "title-ok" "meta description-ok" "meta locale-ok" "using cdn-????"

But seriously, where is content!

Things to cover:-

Home page

1)Site structure
2)Site load speed(first:7.4 sec, second:2.03 sec) effective use of cache
3)Use CDN(combination of w3-toal-cahce and cloudfront would be great & reliable)
4)Usage of alternate text for image optimization
5)meta description, keyword not available in all pages.
6)Improve content in every page(highly recommend)
7)Make use of H1 tag(recommend) -home page

Inventory page

When i saw the source page .....

oops "no meta-description" "no-keyword" -hard to find in google

Things to cover:-

Inventory:-

1)Meta description(highly recommend)
2)Use cdn to store static files i.e; images, js, css
3)Increase social rankings(fb, twitter mainly)
4)OMG! no image optimization. Use alt tag for every image!
5)Internal anchor text usage(within domain)
6)No matter what anchor text gives juice! (inbound, outbound) -OPTIMIZE

These are some on-site advice i can give. Without these, you shouldn't move for off-page optimization

Well getting into local traffic:-

This can be easily achievable, it's not a rocket science!

For local traffic:-

1)Use keyword+city(or)locality in title & meta tags, if so any in meta-keyword.
2)Your dealer profile has review-cum-comment box, make the same for "inventory" & "vehicle profile page"
hint:- use snippet
3)To boost trust, place trust symbols
4)Write more in vehicle profile description!
5)Use meta-tag in vehicle profile description page(highly recommend) & inventory pages too!
6)Some people may be lazy at typing for info, use Phone number(your companies) as call to action! Do some A/B while getting traffic.
7)Never use content from any other source, write upto your own! -specially in vehicle profile page. As classified website's are more usually hit by algorithm updates!
8)Usage of image microdata, since it deals with city, name, description.
9)If you are targeting a local, make sure to implement these k-strategies
in url: keyword+city | business name
in meta description: keyword+city+description
in content: keyword+content -density(1-4)


-This is because of competition!

If you want to leverage heavy traffic for any keyword the visitor entered locally, you have to show the location schema of your dealer.

Process:-
*When visitor search for x-car-2013 + new york or any city
*search engine shows up schema type first, thus resulting in .....

x-car-2013 + your-dealers-address | your business name

This results in showing up your website page in top#

I mean, using location(small business) schema of dealer in vehicle profile page, rather than your inquire box!

if you do so, the visitor may straightly call up the dealer from your web-page due to dealers schema markup and you *loosing* back-end leads!

So! better chance to pickup traffic/leads from your website is from keywords. The so called local thing doesn't work!

Choose highly targeted keywords and use it wisely where it needs. As from your web-source files, i saw that you are not using any seo plugin's right? Try some, it comes in handy & reduces a lot of work.

Some handy advice's

1)Try to redesign your website if you are serious into business, anywhere from(3000-7000$)
2)Use some newspaper advertisement
3)Use local radio advertisement
4)Use flyers to get deals(good chances)
5)Never try to implement fake review's!(very strict)
6)If visitor came to your website & inquired you & got a lead, after successful purchase, ask to write a review, if they like! [converts simply]

Anyway, hope your website get's more & more leads and becomes one of the top leading auto websites in your locality! Wishes in advance!

-MightyGeek

Firstly, I am not an SEO service provider... all I do is SEO my personal niche websites like most others on this forum.

Take this FWIW:

My first approach to SEOing a site like yours will be to look at the type of keywords I want to rank for and how my on-page navigation will help me achieve this with minimal off-page work.

So for instance if I want to dominate the following type of KWs:

"car brand" + "for sale" + "city"
eg: sabaru for sale new york

Then I will look at how best to achieve this with my onpage structure/navigation. The best step to take next will be to do a few searches on Google for these type of keywords and see which site is already dominating.

I see AutoTrader all over the show and that is no surprise... just look at this page of theirs that depicts a part of their on-page navigation: Browse New, Certified and Used Cars for Sale by Make and Model or by City - AutoTrader.com

From that page you can ask your SEOer to drill down and he will see the relationships between the KWs and the site structure/navigation as well as URL structure which is helping AutoTrader rank so well for those type of kws.

Hi,

Since you've had a lot of SEO advice I'll make my comments from a slightly different perspective.

When someone is out looking for a new car they can go straight to Ebay and similar sites and see almost every car available in their local area (because most local dealers also advertise their cars on Ebay) plus any other regional car advertising sites.

These will have all the details, price, images etc. of the cars and the contact details of the seller.

So..... my question to you is - Why should they come to your site in the first place?

What is your USP?

If I did a search and your site came up and I realised I had to submit a form just to get more information - I'd click away and go looking elsewhere, and probably find better information.

I'm not trying to be negative about your site or your business - just giving you the simple question about what value you are bringing that means people should look for a car via your website.

If you can answer that question - you should make your answer more obvious in the message of your site.

For example, if you advertise a lot of Dodge Vipers then instead of just having a form to submit a request for information - that form could be to submit a request for information PLUS a guide for "the right questions to ask when buying a Dodge Viper".

As that type of detail may be more than you can handle right now - something like a "car buyers tips to getting the right car at the best price" sort of guide might make some people take the time to fill in your form as they get something useful even if they don't end up wanting to buy the car.

Also - I think it would help you if there was some local social proof, for example, some videos of local people who found their car from using your service, so that others can see that it's useful and why. Also, if you feature local people - they're likely to tell others about your site (because they want their friends to see them in the video).

You get what I'm saying?

There's a LOT more like that which you could consider.

Andy
p.s this stuff all helps with local SEO and SERPs too. Videos can rank well - and above all of the websites for some search phrases.

I've visited some of your inbound links, they aren't from topic related websites.

Exactly, which our last company that did our SEO did not do any. Ive gotta find niche related sites to help us out,

Ah okay, and we are direct, meaning no sharing is going on

yeah theres not much we can really do about that, I mean even Autotrader and others suffer from Dealer stock

I just checked the Carmax van link I posted above, with the 35 images. I can't prove it's already sold but the page is gone, I should have copied the VIN# (I didn't think about the VIN# when I first posted).

I know you probably don't want to keep hearing about detailed images, but that's what the traffic/leads want (details).

Yeah we are trying to figure out what to do about that, I think we have a solution.

KingMighty, I looked at your site and just wanted to give you my perspective.

Last October, I totaled our car. My wife and I wanted a similar car, so we knew the make, model, year range, and price range. We looked on the web at several sites similar to yours.

If I had seen your site and it covered our area, I would have still passed on it and clicked back to the search engine for other listings. Why?

Because:
1. On your home page, I have to type in the make and model and no option was given for year range. Since I am not a good speller, I want drop down menus so that I can simply click on the make, model, year range, and possibly price range.

2. You do not give the location of the car. While it is nice to know what may be available, I want to see the car. I want to call to make sure that the car is still available and then I want to go see the car. (We found that most of the cars on the internet had been sold and were no longer available. It was a waste of time to go to look at a car without calling in advance to make sure that the car was still for sale.)

3. I am not going to give anyone my name and contact info just so a salesman can call me. If there is some incentive such as a free CarFax report, discount, etc, I might consider giving my name and contact info, but I certainly would not give them without an incentive.

One service that it appeared that no one offered was an alert service. We knew what we wanted, but no one on the web asked us or had a form to fill in asking us what we wanted and offering to email us if such a car became available.

As for SEO, I believe that you really need to beef up your home page for Billings, Montana, and surrounding areas. Work in the names of some of the surrounding towns and counties. Also, on the individual car pages, more detailed info and photos with proper alternate text will help.