BZ Results SEO Analysis Report

Indexation reporting is the first SEO analysis I perform when comparing websites.  Websites that index well tend to be search engine optimized by a third party or the vendor builds a solid website that is search engine friendly out-of-the-box.  Websites that don’t index well signal something is wrong.

If a search engine cannot see the pages on your web site, it certainly cannot serve those pages up in the SERPs (search engine results pages).  Dealers can (and have) done things to prevent search engines from indexing their web pages, but a pattern of indexation problems is an indication that the architecture may be antiquated or poorly conceived. Prior to Google publishing alerts  for website owners about how to improve their search rank – by building search engine friendly websites, only the small community of webmasters were aware of SEO best-practices.  Thats only about seven years ago.  Many automotive website vendors are still using pre-Google architecture.  But thats not the case with BZ.  This is an example of poorly conceived architecture.  The websites are built around a business idea that results in a very unfriendly search engine design.

That is what the following graph and an analysis of other sites built by the same vendor begin to illustrate.

Herb Chambers Toyota is the example BZ Results dealer in this Indexation comparison.

DealerComp only lists attributes that are clearly the responsibility of the vendor. Unlike other Automotive SEO reports, DealerComp does not consider search engine rank to be the sole responsibility of the vendor – rather it is a dealer responsibility to see that proper keyword selection and implementation are executed.

The following attributes generally indicate the organization of the vendor – how uniformly their client sites are maintained, and give insight into the web site architecture. Architecture and maintenance are both critical to good SEO.

DealerComp is currently tracking the BZ Results web sites listed in the table below.

• BZ Results web sites are inconsistent regarding Robots.txt files (NP = not present).  Although this is not always critical, it is considered good SEO and is recommended by Google and other search engines. The correlation between those sites that do have a robots.txt file and the number of pages indexed suggests that it does help.
• BZ Results web sites do not consistently have Sitemap.xml files. A sitemap tells search engines how to navigate the pages of the web site.  In this case, how to find the pages of the website which are buried several directories deep.  BZ Results architecture is atypical and seem to confuse search engines, resulting in poor indexation. The way to offset the unconventional architecture of these websites would be to have a state of the art Sitemap.xml file in the root directory.  (Not in a subdirectory)
• Indexed Pages are reported by Google on 11/03/2009. The overall indexing of BZ Results web sites are sub-par as seen in the Indexation Comparison (top).
• BZ Results web sites use Flash which is known to cause problems for search engines. The length of time it takes to load the Flash content of the default (home) page is a negative. Slow loading sites get poor search rank and sometimes causes a search engine to fail to index altogether.

Scores are relative on a scale of 10 = Best, 1 = Worst

• W3C Score indicates BZ Results sites have relatively few HTML errors and none had critical errors.
• URL Scores indicate page content is reflected in the URL. Today this seems to be an increasingly critical attribute to getting good page rank on search engines. BZ Results URLs rank average-poor. Read more about SEO friendly URLs.
• BZ Results web sites use a template for H Tags, but DealerComp has observed wide variations. Typically there are multiple H1 tags which is a poor SEO practice. Usually there are multiple H2 tags emphasizing non-keywords. This can hurt the search engine (keyword) rank by causing search engines to focus on the wrong keywords. See DealerComp H Tag best practices.
• BZ Results web sites include the BZ logo as an Alt Tag while other Alt tags, if present, are empty. DealerComp typically observed few other images on BZ Results sites, therefore this practice may cause search engines to misidentify the dealership branding of the site. At a minimum there should be multiple images that include the dealership name to offset the bz-logo image Alt Tag.

Overall Analysis

BZ Results web site architecture is atypical and seems to retard good search engine indexing by locating the home page several directories inside the Root of the domain. While the reason for the architecture seems designed to handle multiple dealerships hosted on the same domain, this is not good for SEO.  As mentioned a sitemap.xml may help but even those sites that do have robots.txt and sitemap.xml do not index on a competitive level because of the basic website architecture. This is pre-Google architecture or architecture design without regard for search engine optimization.  Generally search engines do not spend time deep-indexing unless there is a wealth of content with good navigation (re. a “library”). Dealership web sites do not typically have a library of content. This architecture combined with a Flash-heavy design,  causes too many obstacles for search-bots, cutting short the bots visit, preventing complete indexing.

The H tag and Alt tag methods and implementations are wasted SEO opportunities and are a liability to good search engine rank. The inclusion of an Alt Tag using the BZ brand is contrary to good SEO practice exacerbated by the lack of other images (the result of using Flash). Multiple H Tags of the same priority and poorly chosen keywords is prevalent.

Dealers using BZ Results web sites would get better results by proactively managing keywords in title and H tags, and all other meta tags in house. It appears that most dealers in this report are not paying much attention to their SEO capabilities. Some simple SEO would significantly improve their competitive search rank.

Analysis by DealerComp.com – Best of Automotive SEO reports compiled by request.