Reducing Dealer Dependency on Paid Search Engine Marketing

We can preach about the importance of website performance until the end of time. But a better website doesn’t just provide higher engagement and a better experience for car shoppers, it can also save your dealership thousands of dollars every month.

Here’s how 👇

Site Speed & Search 🔎

Google has been using site speed as a ranking signal for desktop searches as far back as 2010. And in 2018, the Google Search team has announced that it will begin using page speed in mobile search rankings, as well.

While this is a big win for consumers, it might not be for your dealership. When real users have a slow experience, they’re much less likely to find what they’re looking for or to purchase from you in the future.

For many dealers, their slow site equates to a huge missed opportunity, especially when more than half of all visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes over 3 seconds to load.

Don’t rent search visibility from Google, own it ✨

At Driverseat, our main objective is to provide the best possible car buying experience for your visitors. We know what keeps car shoppers engaged, but we also know how to keep Google happy. That’s why your Driverseat website will out-preform any other website provider right out of the box.

That said, talk is cheap – so we want to share an example and provide some quantitative data. For illustrative purposes, we have changed the name of the dealership in question to protect their privacy – We’ll call them “ACME Motors” moving forward.

ACME Motors joined Driverseat in July of this year. We took a baseline measurement of their Organic Search keyword distribution prior to the switch. At the time, ACME Motors was ranking for 3,462 keywords, with the following distribution:

For some additional context – when ACME Motors switched to Driverseat, no additional content was created, and only existing content was moved over. That said, within just 60 days, ACME Motors was now ranking for 8,597 keywords.

Aside from ranking for more than twice the number of keywords, you can see significant improvements in the ranking positions that matter most (1-10th spots – aka the first page of Google).

As a result of this organic boost, ACME Motors chose to stop running paid search ads to their new Driverseat website.

Here’s the result after just 1 month on the platform ⬇️

A 79% increase in organic search sessions 🚀

Drastic improvements in Search Performance 💥
• 3.37% increase in the number of SERP impressions,
• 35.1% increase in the number of SERP clicks,
• 30.7% increase in SERP CTR, and a
• 95% increase in the number of sessions originating from SERPs

As a result, ACME Motors is able to drastically cut down on their paid search spend, while getting a lot more organic traffic to their website – completely hands off.

How do we do it? 🙋‍♀️

First and foremost, the Driverseat website platform is built on a modern technology stack used by industry leaders like Facebook, AirBnb, Youtube, and more.

This infrastructure has never before been seen in automotive, and offers many tangible benefits compared to the traditional dealership website implementation. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and bring the latest in tech to every car dealership that we work with.

If you’re interested in taking a deep dive into how our team is able to pull this off, then read on... But, if you’d like to experience the power of Driverseat for yourself, schedule a quick demo and we’ll show you how your dealership can save thousands every single month, while improving your customers’ car buying experience and generating more leads in the process.

The deep dive 🤿

Here are just some of the things we do to make sure your dealership outperforms your competition, every single time 👇

• Every dealership website powered by Driverseat is served on the edge, – meaning that your site’s content is always served on servers that are physically closer to your visitors. By doing this, we’re able to minimize trip distance that data has to travel, which improves speeds even on slow or unreliable networks.
• Every page is statically generated, – meaning that all pages are generated and cached as static files on the CDN. Ultimately, this means that your website doesn’t need to make a new request to the server when car shoppers visit a page, as is the case with other website providers.

  With Driverseat, every page is pre-loaded and ready to receive a visit from your shoppers at all times – drastically improving loading times.

• Loading of third party scripts is deferred until the page is interactive. By doing this, we’re able to improve your visitor’s browsing experience without removing functionality of third party vendors that help you run your business.
• Many various optimizations to keep the JavaScript (JS) sent to a minimum. The amount of JS (in kilobytes) your website sends to visitors impacts your site’s web vitals.
• Every site is server-side rendered – meaning that your website will be ready for visitors before it even reaches the browser, resulting in a great boost in speed.
• We reduce the amount of JavaScript computation done in the browser.This drastically improves website performance on low-end devices.
• Every website uses proper schema (HTML and structured content) to make sure that both – users on accessible devices, as well as search engine bots can better understand the content on every page.
• By using Next.js, we can make sure that search engine bots will see HTML content. This drastically improves technical SEO, since crawlers are able to find content in the HTML shipped to the browser.
• All images are converted to a next-gen format, to further improve performance. Every image on your Driverseat website will be served in a WebP format – delivering the same quality as a JPEG while drastically reducing image size.
• We continuously monitor all of the web vitals for every deployment. This allows our team to make sure that we stay on track with every update and continue to push our performance.

Learn more about the technology that powers Driverseat

We’re very proud with the results that Driverseat is able to achieve for our dealerships, and we want to share the keys to our success when it comes to performance and search engine visibility.

If you have any more questions about the technology that powers the future of car dealerships, you can schedule a call with our CTO – Alex will be happy to answer any remaining questions that you may have.