The True Cost of Templated Dealership Websites: Missed SEO Opportunities and Heavy Ad Spend

Turn-key templated dealership website solutions are pre-designed, out-of-the-box platforms that dealerships can quickly launch to create an online presence. While they offer an affordable and efficient way to establish a basic website, these solutions often come with significant limitations, especially in terms of SEO, local targeting, and customer reach, which hinder a dealership’s ability to rank for products, inventory, and services in search engines. Here are some of the major drawbacks of these platforms:

1. Limited SEO Capabilities:

   Turn-key dealership websites are typically built with only basic SEO features. While they might help the dealership’s name appear in local searches, they lack the advanced SEO capabilities required to rank competitively for high-intent keywords related to their products, inventory, and services. This means that most of the time, these websites only rank for the dealership’s name, leaving potential customers searching for specific vehicles or services unable to find them in search results.

2. Poor Product and Inventory Indexing: 

   A critical flaw in many templated dealership websites is that inventory listings are often not indexed in search engines. Without proper indexing, search engines cannot display these listings to users searching for specific makes and models, limiting the dealership’s organic reach. This lack of product indexing also means these sites miss out on vital traffic from customers actively searching for available inventory, reducing the likelihood of generating organic leads and sales.

3. No Technical SEO Foundation:

   Advanced SEO elements such as structured data, schema markup for inventory, and localized content optimization are typically absent from templated dealership websites. This lack of technical SEO prevents dealerships from effectively reaching users who are searching with high purchase intent. Since these websites aren’t built with SEO-friendly architecture, they miss out on essential optimizations that would help search engines understand and rank their pages for relevant search queries.

4. Inability to Target Specific Markets and Locations:

   Templated dealership websites struggle to cater to dealerships with multiple locations. Instead of building individual, optimized pages for each location’s inventory, services, and unique customer base, these platforms often list multiple locations as simple addresses without proper geo-targeting. This results in missed opportunities to reach interested customers within each specific target market or location, significantly limiting visibility in search results for users looking within those areas.

5. Lack of Market-Specific Inventory Visibility:

   Without the ability to create unique, optimized pages for each location, templated websites fail to showcase location-specific inventory and services. This lack of differentiation and targeting means that customers in a dealership’s surrounding markets cannot easily find relevant inventory or services in their area, making it difficult for the dealership to capture local interest effectively.

6. Heavy Reliance on Paid Advertising for Traffic:

   Due to their limited organic reach, templated dealership websites force businesses to rely on paid advertising to drive traffic to their inventory, products, and services. This means dealerships often end up spending significantly on ads simply to make up for the lack of organic visibility, turning what seemed like a cost-effective solution into an expensive ongoing investment. Without organic traffic, dealerships are constantly paying to attract visitors who may have otherwise discovered their offerings through natural search results.

7. Missed Opportunities for Interested Customer Targeting:

   Since these platforms are not built with advanced targeting capabilities, they lack the ability to reach customers with high purchase intent. Interested customers looking for specific vehicles or services may go unnoticed by the templated website, as it doesn’t have the infrastructure needed to actively attract or engage these potential buyers.

In summary, turn-key templated dealership websites may provide a quick solution, but their limited SEO capabilities, lack of advanced targeting, and inability to index inventory make them ill-equipped for dealerships looking to build meaningful online visibility and reach. Without proper indexing, geo-targeting, and technical SEO integration, these solutions restrict a dealership’s organic growth, forcing them to overspend on advertising and ultimately limiting their reach and effectiveness in driving sales.