Best Auto Dealer Website Inventory Manager

Lets face it, there are a lot of Auto Dealer Website and Inventory Management solutions available.

Everyone claims their company provides the best dealer website and inventory management services, but lots of them simply can’t produce what they promised their client.

And just because a sites web pages might look good to the dealer that just signed up for service, that don’t necessarily mean they look good to Google and Bing web search crawlers which is most important!

If you didn’t know it, there are only TWO major search engines on the web (in the USA). They are Google and Bing. Yahoo now mostly subs out their search content to Bing, and AOL is using Google to provide search queries to their members. Most of today’s ISP’s and content providers sub out their web search provider.

There are literally thousands of bots that come rushing in every time you post a tweet, or make a Facebook post. A good portion of these are nothing but content scrapers and market research companies hiding behind the anonymity of Amazon AWS Servers (amazon.com web services) that need to be shown the door.

Recently i was assisting a dealer client that was attempting to contract with a leading, and also quite pricey auto dealer website and inventory management provider. The dealer brought me in to guide him through the site setup process because of my knowledge of the car business, and most importantly my knowledge of the Internet and Auto Dealer Website and SEO.

There is so much more to choosing a good auto dealer website than how the sites pages look to humans. My personal choice is AutoRevo for their basic auto dealer website package. It’s very configurable and easy edit the content and to tweak the pages SEO and meta tags.

This project turned into quite an adventure. The company was a spinoff of another company who had a contact and supposedly tech person who had no idea what a name server was. She was relaying info back and forth by email elsewhere, and admitted she was new. OK, we all have been new at least once in our lives, i give her credit for trying.

But it took over 3 hours just to get this company’s name server settings so i could point the domain we were going to use their way. A few hours later the site was resolving to a plain white page that showed the company’s green favicon, but otherwise nothing else. Late in the afternoon another person emailed me that the domain was not yet registered, and to check the domains spelling. Long story short someone had misspelled the domains name in the server setup.

That was soon corrected and the website went live. I did a view source of the home page and noticed it had only a title meta tag, no description or keywords tag. And further digging into the page source revealed no OG (open graph) tags either. Open graph is very useful for sharing a auto dealer’s website content on Facebook and Google+.

To make a too long of a story somewhat short, the provider tried a $300 bump job for their better website, and admitted the basic site was a POS only after i advised my client what he was getting if he committed.

In all a good 4+ days were wasted, and the provider never did get the dealers images imported from their still operational current site. My client told them to stick it, and that was the end of that.

I have experienced this more than once and anticipated something would be mucked up during the move, and used another domain to set the new site up on. If we would have just switched the name servers on the still operational site, the dealer would have been totally screwed with no website at all. Also just the 404 errors on dead links would have killed a near perfect Google page rank.

It’s easy enough AFTER everything is set up on a new domain and given a chance to get indexed (30-60) days, then take the old domain name and roll it into the new site, while using 301 (permanent forwarding) for the old dead links to lessen the damage to the domain’s page rank.

I’m not going to mention who that provider was, that’s not the point of this posting. But i can be of valuable service if you are not happy with your current dealer inventory management system and website. I can recommend an excellent dealer website provider that can export your cars to Auto Trader, Cars.com, OVE, Craigslist, classifieds, etc. And do it at a very reasonable price.

As your new site is being set up, I will customize all your pages to your liking, and tweak your meta tags for optimum SEO. Tech guys are not car dealers, and will use generic meta keywords setting up your site as a rule. That’s another benefit i can provide to keyword your site properly for optimum seo and social media reach deep into cyberspace.

Are you using Facebook and Google+ to further your dealerships reach into cyberspace? Have you set up Google Authorship? I can be of valuable assistance in setting up those up.
If you only have a handful of cars and no nightly exports, i have a simple dealer website solution complete with integral inventory display manager for only $499 per year, with no setup fees, or contract. Pay for a year and get unlimited free support, free site maintenance and nightly backups, domain name, and quality web hosting. All for only $499 per year.

Let a professional retired auto dealer and internet guru guide you through the setup of a new website, or tweak your present sites pages and seo for optimal search crawler exposure.

Have questions? Comment below or Contact me. You will be glad you did. 🙂