Tom Winter
Key takeaways
- 4:0555-60% of car shoppers start their journey online, and 80% use video during purchase; 30% plan to buy entirely online, with online sales projected to reach 26% of used car transactions by 2025.
- 6:0875% of dealerships fail to rank for non-branded keywords; dealerships can compete with OEMs by dominating local search through location-specific pages, reviews, and local optimization strategies.
- 15:19The buyer's journey spans three funnel stages (top, middle, bottom); dealerships must create content for each stage—educational content attracts early researchers, comparison content engages consideration, and transactional content drives sales.
- 19:26EAT (experience, expertise, authoritiveness, trustworthiness) signals include customer videos, team credentials, brand mentions, reviews, transparent pricing, and fast-loading sites that build customer trust and signal authority to Google.
- 47:07JLR and Inchcape's stock locator case study tripled organic traffic from non-branded searches, generated 100+ backlinks, and produced 600+ qualified leads monthly by centralizing real inventory, optimizing for local intent, and applying schema markup.
Questions Tom Winter answered
Use tools like SE Ranking to identify intent type (navigational, transactional, commercial, educational), and check CPC (cost per click) from Google Ads data—higher CPC generally indicates higher transactional intent since advertisers pay more for commercial keywords.
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients49:02
Focus on specific cities where you have dealerships rather than trying to compete nationally against OEMs; show real inventory on maps for audiences willing to travel (200-400 km), and create location-specific landing pages for each dealership or region.
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients50:09
Look at competitor content to identify what drives their traffic, then check SE Ranking for search volume behind keyword ideas; organize ideas by funnel stage (TOFU/MOFU/BOFU), and note the trend toward conversational search queries as people adopt AI search.
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients53:06
Page speed has major impact when loading time drops from 10 seconds to 7.5 seconds; aim for top 20% performance rather than perfection; use specialized automotive CMSs with built-in hosting instead of WordPress to simplify optimization; schema markup remains important for helping crawlers understand content.
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients55:06
In Tom Winter's words
“The problem is that 75% of dealerships websites fail to rank for non-branded keywords. But the biggest myth that we see among dealerships is that we can't compete with big guys because they have different budgets.”
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients6:08
“Google only shows AutoTrader, Cars.com, or maybe OEMs—which I believe is not true. Because the reality is you can dominate local search if you play the right game.”
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients7:10
“Everybody's fighting for bottom of the funnel, but the journey starts on the top of the funnel. You have to be at every single stage of this journey to let them know that we're here and you can trust us.”
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients16:19
“Show that you do this every day because people want to trust you because you have experience. It's not the experience of Honda or Jaguar—you're showing yourself. You're the person that will greet them when they walk into the dealership.”
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients20:27
“Use AI as a cyborg method—human working with AI together, not against each other. You have to work with it, feed it with context: your brand voice, your expertise, your goals.”
Automotive SEO: How to Dominate Your Neighborhood and Get More Clients43:01