If you work for a new franchise I would get your own dealerships website to it's maximum potential for SEO/SEM and make sure to either take at least 20-30 awesome pictures of used cars.

I personally like leads that from through Edmunds.com. They are normally serious buyers vs AutoUSA that I get nothing but bullshit leads from. They are pretty much worthless, except for the maybe 1 or 2 sales a month, but it's not worth it to weed through all the other's I get to get those sales. Autotrader and Cars.com are great sites to push your used cars to along with all those pictures you'll be taking

 

we just cancelled Autotrader as well. It costs the store almost 6k a month! We can probably use that money elsewhere.

 

honestly I dont know the figures in terms of how much you will be investing. But dealix by far brings in the most in terms of number of leads. They also have at least one sub site for used cars. Just do a little research on it. These were all set up well before i started working here so I'd be lying if I told you I knew the entire process.

just like someone else mentioned before, look into pushing your competition off the first search page through your SEO/SEM. Make sure the content on your site is relevant and well written, get a google analytics account, play with some keywords...post youtube videos for some of the cars on the lot, make a facebook fan page, and keep a consistant blog on your site that you update regularly. if you can just do some of these basic things you should see some more leads start coming in.

But to answer your original question, dealix shows the most leads

 

Thanks. I am thinking of ranking for Google Places but it seems that they've changed their ranking system recently. My SEO skills are weak since I haven't had the chance to read more on it but I'll definitely be looking to get traffic from the search engines. Have you had any luck with cragislist by the way? And if you don't mind telling me, how many leads are you getting from delix on a monthly bais?


@CrazyCracker82, thanks for your input.

@john, we're also looking to cancel our account as well but not until we get a better program/service that can give us the best bang of your buck.

 

sounds like someone has a report due to their boss on monday

 

We're starting to sell cars on Craigslist but I still think Cragislist market is for cheap used cars. I'm also thinking of starting to list on Facebook through everycarlisted.com but the owner doesn't like the idea too much about Facebook.

 

My boss is actually a family member. So he's very lenient towards me just as long as I do my job. I actually don't have any report to give to him. I'm just looking for different ways to help his business grow.

 

I know a few guys in the Dallas market who are successfully selling high end cars through Craigslist. ie. hummer, corvette etc. Cheap used cars work better though. I too am looking to give craigslist a try. It's just a matter of time and research. As for listing cars on facebook, I personally haven't had any luck with it. If you had a fan page that had lots of "likes" then you will probably have a better chance since you can give updates periodically.

 

I guess it's now because of the holidays, but it picks up after Jan 1? What about the whole harsh winter in the north and east, or is that just on sportscars?

 

Craigslist is good and bad with selling....it's good because alot of people get on it, but it's bad because your cars are a few pages deep within a day/day and a half and then you have to delete the original post and re-post the new car, so you're doing that every few days, which gets crazy time consuming. There are some good 3rd parties that do that for you.

I would rather get used car leads from Cars.com vs Autotrader, hands down, any dayof the week.

There are some easy ways to Optimize the website for SEO without getting to deep into editing. Hotlinking is a great way to promote your site from within. If you are talking about Certified cars on one page, link the words Certified Used Cars to your used car inventory page (along those lines).

Most websites will give you the option for Meta-tags in the back end page. Just put a ton of phrases and words into the tag area that have to do with your store (market area, local towns or cities that you want customers from, individual models, etc).

Lastly, a great resourse to use is www.dealerrefresh.com This site rules because it's all internet car people. I personally know a few of the guys on there. The blog is great with articles and the Forum is just as amazing