Dealer Indexed Inventory

Auto dealers are experiencing huge sales increases thanks to increased usage of the internet. Car Dealers are not typically quick to change methods or strategies. previously, direct marketing was the primary source of advertising and capital investment for car dealerships. In today’s world, owners and GM’s of car dealerships and auto groups are finally becoming educated about the power of the internet.

What is car dealer indexed inventory?

To understand how a dealer website can benefit from indexed inventory, we must first look at how inventory is currently handled on most dealer websites. As this blog is published, most dealerships host their online inventory with third party vendors such as ADP or Homenet. These third party vendors collect all of the dealer’s inventory data and provide the dealership with the ability to present their inventory in an aesthetically pleasing way, to their clients via inventory listings pages. The vast majority of dealer website are currently framing in these hosted pages on their websites using iFrames.

The web page that the inventory is hosted on probably looks something like this… http://inventory.3rdpartyvendor.com/dealerinventory. As we can see the data is not on the dealers domain, and as such, is not going to be indexed by the Google in any way that can possibly benefit the car dealership. Most dealership website providers will simply try to gloss over this fact or hope the the dealer does not know enough about indexed inventory to know about the great opportunities they will be losing with framed in inventory pages.

Why Implement Indexed Inventory For your Dealership?

As an automotive technology company, we are always looking to push dealerships forward utilizing all available tools. Aside from faster load times, the main benefit of having the inventory actually show under your dealer domain is that it can be crawled by search engine spiders. When you have an iFrame on a page, it is as if there is a big black hole on your site as far as Google is concerned. They are not capable of seeing what content is being displayed within that iFrame. Since Google can’t determine what it is, they give the page a lower relevancy factor and of course are not able to display any dealer inventory in the search results.

By placing your inventory on your own domain (this means that Google will see something more like this… http://inventory.dealerwebsite.com/dealerinventory) we can alleviate this problem. Now every single car, and even the details about each car is potentially going to be indexed and ranked by search engines. This means when someone searches for a particular model car, Google and other search engines are able to show a carr in your inventory as a result in the organic search. This will lead them to your inventory page on your dealer website where they can be converted to a qualified sales lead. They can even share the car they found on your site with a friend or their entire following on twitter or Facebook!

Don’t let your competition pass you. It’s time to embrace dealer technology and more specifically web based marketing methods in order to increase your sales leads. By working with technology innovators you will be able to dominate your local market and even take some market share away from competing brands! Indexed dealer inventory is just another tool in your arsenal as you work to dominate your competition online.