The Dangers of Duplicate Content for Car Dealers
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Duplicate content on your webpage could be costing you your ranking in search results and potential customers.
Have you noticed that your page isn’t showing up as high for organic search results as it should be? Perhaps it’s not showing up at all. Have you checked your content recently?
Template car dealer sites use generic, stock content for each page of your website. This means that the same content they would use for a Lexus dealer is also used for a Chevrolet dealer. Recently, I found a car dealer site I suspected was built from a template and keyed a sentence from it into Google word for word.
Google came back with nearly 50,000 results for the exact same phrase. It would appear that every dealer in the state of New Jersey had a knowledgeable and skilled staff. Apparently, nobody had one that was interesting or unique.
If I were a customer, I would want to know what sets your staff and your dealership apart from the crowd, what made you different. Really, a car is a car. The dealership it is purchased from and the way that dealership treats their customers is what makes the car unique. With these stock pages, your dealership and your sales approach are a well-kept secret.
This duplicate content isn’t just costing you direct site visitors, either. Google has instituted a new filter for searches that removes sites with duplicate content from search results entirely. It indexes one site and returns just that site in organic searches. This means the site you are paying for monthly is actually costing you search engine results.
To fix this and to continue showing up high in Google results, a site must have unique and customized content. Even similar product descriptions could cost you in search engine rankings, so generating distinct content is a must. However, creating personalized, individual content can be both difficult and time consuming. Do it wrong, and you’ll still lose search engine rankings. Consider hiring a professional, such as the Internet marketing consultants at Single Throw Internet Marketing, to be sure your new content is done right and is effective.
Unique content will give you an incredible edge over the competition. It’s time to think outside of the sedan…er, box. Make your car dealer website as customizable as the cars you sell by giving it distinctive and interesting content. After all, content is the heart of a website.