Vehicle Inventory Indexing, Is It Important?
When investigating different automotive website providers, or site solutions, you may notice that some sites have their inventory indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN, while others do not (see the tip below on how to tell if an inventory page is indexed in a search engine). The question becomes, is it important to have your vehicle inventory indexed in Google and other engines? The short answer is ‘Yes’. Of course, since you may be about to make a decision on what website provider to use, you want an explanation on why, not just the short answer.
When discussing automotive SEO we often hear the terms “long-tail” and “short-tail” search phrases. Short-tail are short phrase searches that bring in a large number of visitors. In the world of car dealers these short-tail phrases tend to be “Make City” (fill in the make you sell and the nearest, largest, city to your dealership). Short-tail phrases are most often targeted by SEO firms on the index page of the website.
“Long-tail” phrases bring in less traffic, because are searched for less, but there are more of them (it’s estimated that if you were to rank well for many long-tail phrases you would likely bring in more traffic than short-tail alone). The great thing about long-tail phrases, however, is that they tend to be higher converting. More people searching for a long-tail phrase end up submitting a lead than those searches using short-tail phrases. An example of a long-tail phrase is “Make Model City”.
They are higher converting because when someone is searching for a specific model they are likely VERY interested in it, and may have already done the research, and are now just looking for the dealership to purchase from. While short-tail searchers may still be in the research phase.
So, what does this have to do with your inventory? Well, since your inventory contains “Make” and “Model” terms, and hopefully geographical terms, then your inventory is a great way to target these potential customers. Imagine someone goes online, searches for a model you have, and a page on your site with that specific model pops up! Talk about relevance!
If that’s not a good enough reason, there’s another benefit to having your inventory indexed. If you have 200 cars on your lot, that’s 200 additional pages on your website, each offering linking opportunities to other pages of your site. Internal site linking can help you succeed.
TIP: Want to know if a site’s inventory is indexed? There’s a couple of ways to find out. One, go to an inventory listing, copy the URL, then go to Google and search for “site:URL”, replacing “URL” with the URL you’re searching for (do not put a space between “site:” and the URL. It’s possible inventory pages are indexed, but the one you are searching for is not (if it’s new a new inventory item, for example), so it’s a good idea to also search for the top-level domain (like “site:http://www.domainname.com”) and see if any inventory pages come up.
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