Events, Happenings & Cool Stuff

A true savvy car dealer in Lakeland can have great success selling new and used cars online. The reason is simply cost. Car dealers that rely on Autotrader and Cars.com are forced to make more of a profit on each sale because of these ridiculously priced third party used car websites.

A dealer that gets consulted by the right person can save 10’s of thousands of dollars every year because of the free traffic from search engines. But beware of who you listen to. These flash based template sites is what kills a car dealer. They have very little search engine value and force dealers to pay extra for people to find it.

Here I will list the top 10 dealers in Lakeland who have a shot getting decent traffic, and maybe you can get a great deal from them. I judge these sites for amount of backlinks, Alexa Rank and Google Pagerank. (See below for my opinion and explanation of each)

1. Lakeland Toyota: They have 222 backlinks from 35 different websites. Other than the Yahoo Directory most are weak, but this gives their site an easy rank because of the lack of knowledge in the car industry. Their Alexa Rank is 3,450,830 which isn’t great but better than most local dealers. According to Alexa, the average visitor only stay on there website for 1.3 minutes. That is too short, which means people are leaving the site quickly. Perhaps a redesign is in order. The Google Pagerank of Lakeland Toyota is 2 which is very weak, but it simply doesn’t matter anymore. Pagerank means nothing for serps (see below).
2. Regal Automotive: They have 215 backlinks from 46 different domains. They do have a juicy link from www.polktheatre.org. Many people don’t realize how valuable a link like this is to your website. Their Alexa Rank is 4,757,283 with the average visitors staying on their website for 2.6 minutes a day which is more than Lakeland Toyota. Their Google Pagerank is a 3, a bit better than Lakeland Toyota. This company should be number one if they followed Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. There are 3 things I would do to that site that would easily make them on top. The problem is whoever they get their information from is using tactics from a couple of years ago. This stuff changes so frequently you need to stay on top of the game. They really don’t have to worry though. One thing I like about their site is it’s not flash based like the others. Flash is dead, and people hate it.

OK, I have to cut the list short. Why? There isn’t another dealer that even shows up for quality searches. I just googled the search term “car dealers in lakeland fl” and went to page 10. The only dealers that came up were Lakeland Toyota and Regal Lakeland, along with Regals other websites.

One Lakeland Car Dealer that would have been on this list was Lakeland Automall, but they made a change that killed their internet presence. The last website they had used to have them show up on some Long Tailed keywords. Looks like they got beat by the smooth talking salesman, whoever sold them that.

Personally I can make this easier by just saying who the 2 worst car dealer websites in Lakeland are (In No particular order):

1. Jenkins Nissan: Pop up alert! How annoying. You go to their website and you get a pop-up coupon. Anyway, besides that they have a better amount of average time on site per visitor according to Alexa with 4.3 minutes. Their Alexa Rank is 9,962,582 which tells you everything, they have a sloppy website.
2. Central Florida Eurocars: I’m not sure if they’re trying something new, but their current website isn’t bad. A little too much white space in it, other than that I think they have a shot at selling cars online if they can get some traffic to it. It looks like they have their current domain redirected to na new one, which they just bought in April of 2009 (fieldsmotorcars.com). I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that Fields BMW bought them out. That’s another company that can’t be found out there so I doubt this change will make much of a difference. I believe they have another dealership in the Orlando area, but I’ve yet to see them pop up. Whoever makes the decisions for that company isn’t Savvy at all.

Above I was mentioning Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank and Inlinks. If you don’t know what they are, I will briefly explain:

Google Pagerank: Don’t be fooled by this. As long as you have a 2 or better you will be fine. It has nothing to do with SERPS (Search Engine Results Page). If you are trying to get a link from another website this is where it comes to play. If you can score a link from a Pagerank 4 or better website pointing to your site, it will help your site get crawled more frequently and it will increase your pagerank. Google only updates your pagerank every 3 months or so, so don’t bother checking every day. Technically they update it daily, but they only show you an update quarterly. Pagerank starts at n/a, then goes from “0″ to “10″. If you can get a 4 or better that is fabulous to brag about, but remember it won’t help you search listings. Let me give you a prime example. Car Dealers with Cobalt websites will automatically become a pagerank 4 because of a link they get from Chevy.com. The main site is a pagerank 7, and if you have a Cobalt site they will link to you passing pagerank. But, how many Cobalt sites come up in searches? Not many. Besised BZ Results and Izmo Cars, that about as bad as you can get.

Alexa Rank: Alexa Rank isn’t very accurate, but the number tells you everything. The higher your Alexa Rank is the worse you website is. If it’s greater than 2 million you need to fire your internet director and call in a pro.

Backlinks: This is the most important factor on how your website ranks. The more links you have pointing to your website from other websites will give you “authority” thus making your properly formatted website show up in more search results from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Many companies buy links from other websites, but if Google catches you they will de-index and ban you. Many car dealers donate to local charities. If you do ask them for a link, it will benefit you huge. You won’t see results overnight (it takes time), but after 2 or three weeks you will see a difference. How would you know? I hope you look at your stats, and I’m not talking about server stats. You need Google Analytics. Insist the website company you use installs this and gives you full access to it. The server stats they show you measure spiders making you think you’re getting more visitors than you think. One last thing…when obtaining links be sure it is a “dofollow”. When the link is placed, go to that website. Right click and “view source”. Now you will see the code. Find your link, if there is a “rel nofollow” next to it it’s won’t help you much. That’s telling Google not to flow any pagerank to your website.

To end this I’ll briefly explain who I am. I’ve been working the internet since 1994 selling many things online. The most important thing I learned is how to get traffic to a website. I started out selling seafood online for other companies. One was in Boston and one if Florida.

I started my own website that sells business cards online about 2 1/2 years ago. Because of the large amount of traffic I was getting I was forced to open up a storefront in Lakeland Florida where I am now. 90% of my customers are in other states, and I now sell T-Shirts, Promotional Products and Signage, including Vehicle Wraps. My printing website gets 800 unique visitors every day, and I don’t spend one dime in advertising!

Last year I took a job at a car dealership in Florida who had 3 rooftops. Myself and Patrick Bennet built them a killer search engine friendly website that blew away all of their advertising including their $300,000.00 piece of crab BZ Results site they had. We were on the road to right directions until the GM resigned so I bailed myself. The car industry is too cut throat, and the new guy coming in was a dinasour when it came to the internet.

Our latest venture is used cars listings for large and small dealers. Our test site in Lakeland became so successful we recently launched in Utah and Sacramento California.

You want to see 2 dealers in Lakeland that know how to sell cars? Check out Lash Auto Sales and Joseph Motors. These 2 dealerships know how to do it, and obviously they get more leads from our site than any other dealer (including the dealers on our Orlando and Tampa site.