AutoRank

They certainly could if they did go through autotrader. however autotrader is expensive to advertise your cars on and I believe you pay per car or pay a higher premium if you're a dealership? if you had a website that you could advertise unlimited cars on at no extra cost and get it shown on the first page wouldn't that be much better?

I think it all depends on the person and what they are looking for. A lot of People will use autotrader but a lot of people also want to get an insight into who they are buying a car from first. I certainly would like to learn more about a dealership and what kind of after sales/support they can give, it gives more of a personal touch when you actually know who you are buying from. Autotrader themselves quote: "71% of buyers visit a dealerships website as part of their decision making process" I have sent a reply to your email

Hey James, Some very good information there. AdWords is a very good source of traffic if you have the budget and target the right keywords, however, once you stop paying for AdWords, your ads will stop. This is the issue, AdWords is great for the short term, whereas SEO is more of a long term effort, once your website is ranked, it's ranked, even if you stop building links/doing SEO for a while. Of course your rankings are likely to drop over time but with the right company you can regain them. Getting your website ranked on the first page of Google shouldn't mean you should stop advertising on autotrader, motors, gumtree and ebay, it should be a combined strategy that gets you the most attention, visibility and to grow your brand.

Hey Guys, I do agree that a lot of buyers use autotrader to find used cars, it's a fact, however a lot of buyers will look for a local garage in terms of proximity that they can visit to look at a range of cars beforehand. This gives them the opportunity to visit and get to know the owner/dealer. I would partly disagree that you have to "guess what buyers are typing", obviously buyers looking for say, used cars in Cheshire are going to type in "used cars Cheshire' or "car dealers Cheshire" this is shown by the amount of monthly searches that a term gets. I have provided you both with audits that show keyword research and volume of searches, these are not potential search terms, these are "exact" search terms, this means that people ARE searching for that exact phrase. Sometimes thousands of people. Just my ¢2