Automotive dealers have a number of choices for automotive website platforms. With new management teams often comes a change in website marketing platforms. It’s not uncommon for new dealership management team to blame poor Internet sales result on the existing ”look and feel” of their website.
If this is a reality, car dealership owners need to understand the implications of changing their web platform. Dealers need to understand how website changes can affect their search rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. If a majority of car buyers shop the Internet prior to a purchase, then changing your rankings on the major search engine is a serious matter.
Two cases this month urged me to write this article. The Pasch Consulting Group provides search marketing strategies for car dealers. PCG builds secondary Internet marketing websites for dealers that are not leased; they are the property of the dealership.
Readers may not think that these two examples are typical, but they happen more than anyone would admit (or document). I had a hard time finding people writing about their SEO experiences in changing an automotive website platform, so here is a start.
As automotive SEO consultants we are not involved in selection the base inventory management website. In both of these cases, we raised our concerns about the platforms because we were invited in for comment. In both cases, management had a hard time understanding the potential impact of the platform changes. Now they know.
Since we don’t compete with primary automotive platform dealers like Dealerskins, Reynolds & Reynolds, Cobalt, Data One Sofware or TK Carsites, in offering a base inventory website platform. Our concerns are simply based on our previous knowledge that website cutovers need to be planned to avoid big drops in search traffic and sales.
BMW Dealer Cutover
In the first case, a BMW dealer left DataOne Software and moved to a company we will refer to as “DealerSoftwareX“. In this cutover, the homepage of the dealer’s website went from a Google PageRank of 4 to a PageRank of 0. That’s correct, zero. I’ve been involved in many website cutover’s and this should not have happened. I am a bit puzzled why this happened. I’m not saying that DealerSoftwareX deliberately made this happen but the cutover caused it and I’ve not seen such a drastic drop before; I have done many cutovers.
Secondly, the BMW dealer had over a thousand indexed pages for new and used cars included in Google’s index. The cutover to DealerSoftwareX created new HTML page names for all the inventory pages on their website. All of the old indexed pages in Google and Yahoo were now effectively broken. DealerSoftwareX did the right thing. They redirected the old pages to the home page which is the correct step to take This ensures that anyone clicking on an old indexed page in Google or Yahoo, gets to the new website.
But what most car dealers don’t understand is that in the next 30-60 days, the indexed pages that are redirected will be dropped from Google’s index. That means the dealership website has to restart their page indexing and hope that Google indexes the new pages quickly. In DealerSoftwareX’s case, Google has already indexed a number of the new website names indicating that their platform is searchable by Google.
The bad news is that the new Page titles and META tags implemented by DealerSoftwareX are not ideally optimized for search; we would do it differently. They have dozens of pages with duplicate HTML page titles. The second piece of BAD NEWS is that all the new pages start with a PageRank of ZERO. That’s not DealerSoftwareX’s fault but it’s a high price to pay for a website switch.
In the cutover, hundreds of older pages that could have matched buyers search queries will no longer be there. In the second case study that you will read, this will result in the number of indexed pages in Google going from 461 to only 22. That’s a tough hit if your business attracts buyers from organic search. In the case of the BMW dealer, the drop is not as severe.
This drop in the number of indexed pages, after a cutover, is not unique to DealerSoftwareX. In fact, unless you own your own website platform, this will happen with all cutovers if you don’t mirror the exact page names in the previous website. That’s were PCG’s marketing microsites stand out. Since they are owned by the dealership, they can be re-skinned without changing the page names. This allows the dealer to create a new look for the microsites without breaking well indexed pages.
In our opinion, DealerSoftwareX should have made sure that the website homepage ranking did not drop to zero. This is something that is going on with their home page redirect because I have personally cutover websites to new platforms and the home page PageRank never dropped to zero. It can drop, but not to zero. The fact that they did not alert the dealer to such a drop is concerning.
In summary, this BMW dealer now has to plan for the natural drop in search traffic for the next few months as well as dealing with the issue of a much lower PageRank. If we were not involved with this client, I am not confident that these conversations would be going on.
Nissan Dealer Cutover
In this case we had a Nissan dealership move from Dealer.com to a company we will call ”DealerSoftwareZ“. In this cutover, DealerSoftwareZ forget to redirect all the old pages to the homepage. So, the 461 pages that they had indexed in Google, when clicked, gave an error message for 460 of the 461 pages. Only the homepage link worked. No one noticed this until we brought it to our client’s attention.
Wow, this could have been a big mess if we did not diagnosis the site post cutover. If we did not alert DealerSoftwareZ to fix their 404 Redirects, the dealership would have lost a significant amount of organic visitor traffic since 99% of their previously indexed pages were broken in Google search results.
The cutover also created a dilemma for organic search. Their old website had 461 pages included in Google’s index. The new website provided by DealerSoftwareZ uses an inventory model that hosts their inventory “off-site” so when Google looks at the new website, it will only see 22 pages. That’s a big drop in potential “fly-paper” pages that can attract car buyers to their website.
If quality content and web page count is a fact in organic search, dropping from a 461 page website to a 22 page website is certainly a concern for us. This news was a bit of a shock for our client.
In this case, the cutover did not change the dealer PageRank for their home page. It is still pegged at 4, which is what should happen. What happened with the BMW website is just plan scary.
Summary
These two cases highlight the need to have an independent consult working with car dealers that are committed to Internet Marketing. It also shows why a third party consultant needs to be involved in a automotive website cutover. The web platform provider is NOT going to critique their own product.
If you would like to discuss your specific Automotive SEO needs, give us a call 732-842-4720. We used replacement names for the software platforms because in this industry, writers like myself, have been threatened by lawsuits for telling our side of a story. So much for freedom of speech. If you want to know the exact cases study names to check the data yourself, give us a call.
