Dealer.com SEO Analysis Report

Laird Nolle Automotive and Flatiron Subaru below, were the Dealer.com examples in this Comparison of car dealer websites. Because Subaru sites are OEM mandated, it is not a qualified example, but we included it to get some idea how these limited-feature sites perform against some of Dealer.com full-feature sites – which Laird Nolle seems to be. There was little reason to begin this comparison including other vendor websites as I typically do, since there is a Dealer.com website in almost all the other vendor comparison groups. So we can get right to the point much quicker in this analysis.

DealerComp is currently tracking the Dealer.com websites listed in the table below.

The following tables focus on the tangible mechanics of Dealer.com dealer websites. We measure those attributes that indicate how compliant Dealer.com websites are with basic search engine conventions. How a website gets indexed by search engines is a good indication. If a search engine cannot see the pages on a website, it may indicate an architectural problem. That’s when we look under the hood to see what the problem might be and if it is uniform across all Dealer.com websites.

Dealer.com websites Indexation vs. Inbound Link Comparison

The Dealer.com dealer websites index well. Dealer.com infrastructure seems to be solid. The deviations in indexed pages are due to other reasons upon closer inspection.

The indexations vs. inbound links is not coorelated and expected. Inbound links are achieved mostly via off-site SEO techniques. Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt files are always present, leading search engines to index all the pages a website has to offer.

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

• Dealer.com infrastructure seems to be solid. Uniformity is a good thing.
• Unfortunately, a flaw in the Sitemap.xml file may be hurting page rank of Dealer.com websites which is why there is a less than perfect score.

• W3C Scores are average because there are a number of errors on all Dealer.com sites that could be significantly reduced. DealerComp does not expect perfect W3C scores, because these errors are unlikely to cause search engine rank problems. But from a professional point of view, its always nice to see a 100%.
• URL Score reflects how much page content is found in the URL, indicating how search engine friendly they are. Today this seems to be an increasingly critical attribute to getting good page rank on search engines. Dealer.com URLs scored above average. Dealer.com URLs are adequate but contain a large ID string that is not desirable for good URL SEO. Read more about SEO friendly URL formation.
• Dealer.com websites have multiple H1 tags which have generic keywords. Dealer.com default H tags are sub-par because the template is poorly conceived. See DealerComp H Tag best practices.
• Dealer.com websites often have too many images. Alt Tags were almost always empty. Those that are not, contain generic keywords explaining the poor scores. (with one exceptional website in this group that we attribute to either in-house SEO or because the site is used by Dealer.com as an example)
• All Dealer.com sites had no canonical (see Google’s canonical explanation). Because Dealer.com vociforeously claims to provide superior search engine optimization, it is noteworthy that they can’t get this right – and its not an intermittent thing. Every Dealer.com websites is missing canonicals resulting is a score of 1.
• Also lacking on a few sites is character declaration. Character declaration is not a critical omission. W3C explanation why character declaration is increasingly important.

Overall Analysis

• Dealer.com provides a solid platform for the dealer who; a) has little online competition, b) is new to the internet, c) who does not need to be above average competitive online.
• Dealers have excellent opportunities to place content and keywords on their websites. A child could use their interface. And perhaps that’s what we would recommend dealers using Dealer.com websites do – get someone, anyone, to update the content and meta tags. Of all the Dealer.com websites reviewed here, there were many examples of dealer-neglected SEO opportunites. 90% or more have the orignial setup keywords. That’s a shame.
• On the other hand, if you have (or are) an in-house SEO professional, Dealer.com is not the right vendor. Dealer.com sells SEO and PPC services resulting in policy that is resistant to any attempt a professional may make to access the basic attributes an SEO professional needs. You will struggle to get webmaster or analytics codes installed. SEO professionals will want to avoid Dealer.com websites.

• No Canonicals is the biggest and oddest issue with Dealer.com websites. I can only ask “why?”

• W3C scores are average due to many HTML and other code errors; none serious, but persistent.
• H tags are generally a mess. Multiple H1 tags are common. Five (5) H2 tags are common and some contain a paragraph of text. All are generic keywords that don’t help a bit. A good SEO oppotunity wasted.
• Alt Tags are worse that the H Tag mess – mostly empty, missing another important SEO opportunity.

As a parting note, DealerComp does not usually take the occasion to speak about customer support as an SEO issue. But Dealer.com has customer service issues, even when compared to some of the other larger dealer website vendors. As mentioned, Dealer.com support (and therefore the websites) are not friendly to SEO professionals. It is apparent that up-selling gets in the way of good customer support.

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. DealerComp filters out keyword selection that might influence the results of this SEO analysis report.

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