Auto Dealer Websites
Is This for Me?
If your main focus is keeping a trained sales team working at full capacity, you are in the right place, this is how you do it.
If you demand tangible results from every dollar, or if you are worried about getting screwed by another promise that falls flat, stick around.
If you are pissed off that you may have wasted thousands on useless factory scams, or if you suspect that your money has gone to prop up an OEM profit center that misrepresents the facts and pockets the difference, then stick around, this is for you.
If you are sick of wasting mental bandwidth and burning money on digital scams that fall flat, stick around; there is a simple solution.
If you suspect that the whole SEO game is a bunch of shit and that it shouldn’t take four months, let alone four years, to see results, you are not alone, stick around.
If you’ve already tried everything and can’t seem to flood your calendars with test drives no matter what you do, this is exactly what you’ve been searching for.
If you hate excuses and simply demand more than your fair share, then congratulations, your life is about to get a lot easier.
What Remora Does for Dealers.
We serve polished website software to hundreds of car dealers that organically rank their ready-to-sell, on-the-ground inventory first in commercial search. Remora's dealers own their markets in organic search by ranking their on-the-ground cars ahead of the big classifieds, shady OEM interests, and publicly-traded lead aggregators. This entirely unique, trust-building advantage builds a defensible lead edge over your competitors. Simply put, Remora tech makes our dealers rich.
How Remora Wins.
Our team has dedicated over a decade to solving the unique technical hurdles that brick-and-mortar dealers face every day online. We serve pre-perfected and custom themed websites, crushing SEO, and slick proprietary tech advantages that our optimal operators exploit to take more than their fair share. Serving an outstanding mobile experience that converts, while dominating commercial organic, makes an actionable lead advantage and consistently brands you as the trusted leader in your community.
Game Changing Results.
For those of you that do not know me, I'm Christian Jorn. In 2005, I started my professional sales career at a small, salt-of-the-earth Ford store in Central Florida. At Santa Fe Ford, I built a solid work ethic. I grew, and I learned how important accountability is when working with a team. I achieved my goals. I became financially free, and I became a man.
During my journey through Santa Fe Ford, I operated and trained our business development team. With three full-time BDRs and me, we boiled hard and stacked ridiculous profits until late 2007 when our entire special finance department train wrecked. All the banks stopped buying.
Previously, at the University of Florida, I had applied myself to computer science and dabbled with SEO on my own. Years later, I found myself facing an empty sales pipeline due to the Worldwide financial crash. It dawned on me that SEO could solve our problem. After an exhaustive search, we hired the only SEO provider that was selling me on the proper deliverables that I knew must be completed to build organic rankings. I bit, we hired them.
Before
Santa Fe Ford was a small dealership struggling to sell 80 cars a month.
The reality of their product left us disappointed. There were endless excuses, zero tangible results, and, surprisingly, a complete void of tech expertise at the company. After about six months of frustration, I came to realize that they would never actually do the work that was promised, the work that would be required to rank our store organically in Gainesville. I decided that I wasn’t going to struggle because of some snarky dot com. This is my life, these are my employees on the line, so I did it myself. I built my first car dealer website, launched it for Santa Fe Ford, and the rest is history.
The new site paid off and many lives were changed from the impact that was made. In a retracted recession, with all the money frozen, our sleepy 80 car store started selling over 150 within a few months.
“It helps business. You sell more cars, it helps your service department, it helps your parts department, it helps your whole organization. Traffic has increased, sales have increased, everything has gotten better.”
Greg Waitcus, Santa Fe Ford
#1 Achieved
After
Dominating organic search for more than a decade has fueled explosive growth.
After changing my life, and feeling the rush of winning firsthand, I came to understand the raw power that organic search has over the success of dealerships. My new mission became completing the product that was already working so well for Santa Fe Ford, and then getting the finished solution into the hands of as many tech-savvy dealers as possible. Now I lead a company that builds, refines, and serves pre-perfected, top-of-the-line car dealer websites and winning tech to hundreds of top performing dealers.
Enterprise Tech Makes Leads.
Metal, Gone.
Building lead advantages with SEO, explained.
Fire the brain damage. This gift you give yourself keeps your focus on selling cars and training your team while our flawless tech crushes search on your behalf. Remora stays vigilant while you serve online shoppers a pre-perfected site that turn your shoppers into sales.
Our winning tech builds a lead advantage in your market by dominating the top spots of valuable organic search and map results. This unique edge leads to being the first chance to sell active online car shoppers in and around your area. Optimal operators quietly dominate their market in organic search and often do not spend any money on AdWords. The for-profit factory programs hamstring dealerships that abide, which means your OEM is unwittingly hard at work creating a rich opportunity for stores that actually differentiate themselves online with a crushing tech advantage.
The business that winning organic search brings to your store is what makes it worth the effort. An ever-flowing treasure trove of fresh new opportunities is the daily reality for dealers that beat the classifieds in organic search for critical key phrases.
Win Your War.
Explosive growth is the expected outcome for dealers that win the valuable commercial search. Fiercely fought over organic key terms and phrases have always been dominated by the craftiest optimizers in the World. Winning for top money terms, like "payday loans," is worth thousands of dollars every minute that passes. Every day, every second, on every search phrase with a commercial intent, SEO is a tech War.
Dealers are mired in an extremely competitive organic search predicament of their own. Massive international entities work hard to steal every searcher that your current tech ignores. Enormous fortunes have been built on the backs of stolen traffic from your backyard and surrounding markets due to neglectful and dated dealer website tech. Crushing TrueCar, CarGurus, AutoTrader, Carscom, and OEM interests in search changes the game. Consumers trust #1 Google results way more than they should. Take advantage. Dealers that win benefit from the trust that comes from being #1 in Google and build themselves a pipeline bursting with fresh opportunities to sell cars now.
Every minute, search is a War.
As a growing dealer, you must ask yourself, “Who is fighting for me? Am I winning my war every day, or am I accepting everyday excuses while I get crushed?
Who's fighting on my behalf?
If you answered, “Me, I represent our SEO efforts,” then you have probably lost. An elite team is required to properly crush Autotrader, TrueCar, CarGurus, JD Power, Carcom, Carscom, AutoBytel, and the other massive online entities that insert themselves and are monetizing your market by dominating nearly all of the buying-intent search phrases in organic that would otherwise drive local business directly into your store.
If you said, “my factory does that for me,” then you have definitely lost already. When did your factory enter the War of SEO?
“Factory providers do not attempt to compete with tech that eviscerates your market based on merit. Tangible advantages between 'their' dealers are incompatible with OEM programs.”
Christian Jorn, Remora Inc
Your factory’s digital service providers bid zero to service OEM programs.
Let that sink in.
Because successful bids are held to zero, approved providers are also required to insure your OEM's program scam at their own expense.
Let that sink in.
This means that these companies are actually sponsors that are purchasing an advertisement from your factory. These sponsorships are not your OEM's endorsement of the the quality of the provider, the underlying tech, or the company at all. Optimal operators that understand this stark reality tend to differentiate themselves and evicerate their market by crushing their competitors and classified pariahs with our dominating tech advantage.
“The program is a profit center for the factory, that's why.”
- Scott Cohen, Senior Manager, Marketing at FCA
The Winning Formula.
We know that the classifieds and lead aggregators are more than happy to soak up your untapped search market and sell it back to you at a nifty profit. Typically, dealers are not aware they are getting crushed by these huge conglomerates in local organic search. This dearth of responsible tech in the car business means that Remora’s tech edge can make your store the only result that matters to online shoppers.
I.e., you can buy their car from them today, and sell them one.
Brick-and-mortar automotive dealerships have what Google’s shopping consumers want, and what none of those classified pariahs can deliver: Cars. You buy cars. You sell cars, and you help people with their personal travel needs. You solve sticky financing situations and shoppers can walk into your store, buy a car, sell you theirs, and get a loan for the difference. What lead aggregator or classified service serves the travel needs of your community?
They are the affiliates, you are the source. You have the goods. Google wants to list your inventory first for their car shoppers. Yes! Google would rather rank your dealership ahead of any and all affiliates because Google really hates affiliates for a very sensible reason. Any affiliate is in direct competition with Google, the World’s largest affiliate.
There is a catch for Google, though, and it is that they must automatically rank something for every search their users can dream up. Otherwise, it would seem that Google is broken. Classifieds and lead aggregators (both affiliates), take full advantage of the fact that nearly all car dealers are inept when it comes to their website's tech and organic perfomance.
Winning in organic changes the math on the value of your company. Your cars are perfectly aligned for Google’s car shoppers and nearly all dealers are asleep to this while they passively concede the richest source of local online buyers to classifieds and lead aggregators.
Winning on the myriad of buying-intent search terms that are typically covered up by enormous behemoths changes the game. The wool-first, sponsorship-based, factory marketing scams create a perfect launching pad for dealers that differentiate themselves by deploying our tech.
It’s clear that winning changes the math on the value of your store, and that one outstanding SEO expert can create tons of new business right now. Problem is, where do you find them? And when you do, how much of your business are you going to have to offer them to get their attention? The best optimizers in the World are never looking for work, and are rich already. Another problem: Few people know who the top search crushers even are outside of a few tiny circles that rarely commingle.
Proven SEO, a Rare Bird.
The Unadulterated Truth.
It is possible to crush your market in organic search if you have the right information, the right technology, and if you follow the proper steps in their proper order. It may seem cost prohibitive or even impossible to compete, let alone consistently win, in organic search against the biggest classifieds, OEM interests, publicly-traded lead aggregators, and nationwide mega-groups. Most dealers do not understand what is required to succeed in organic search and end up wasting lots of time, effort, and money.
Can I Do This Myself?
Yes you can. I don't know about surely, but sure. You can corner your market and convert your local online shoppers into actionable appointments and foot traffic all by yourself. To build a defensible and tangible advantage in search, your factory's heap of pure garbage will be of no help. We are talking about creating lasting success by building a dominant market position. Think about it. What actual role could any factory rep ever have in anything that would result in a ridiculous lead advantage for your store alone?
Regardless if you choose to do this on your own or not, once your tech stack is perfect and winning, you’ll have differentiated your store, eliminated waste, and you’ll have built a steady and reliable source of fresh leads.
How do I do it?
Achieving search domination on your own will start with finding and hiring top tier experts in several highly sought after technology fields. You’ll need an amazing software engineer that can write from scratch, a talented web developer, a great designer, a couple of dedicated system admins, and a proven SEO expert with a great plan. For consistent shopper experiences, fast page loads, and 99% up-time, you’ll need to deploy your newly built dealer website software from an established worldwide content distribution network. This way your shoppers will be served the fastest and most reliable web experience on Earth, regardless of their device or connection speed.
Consider This.
Building this database-driven website platform that will gracefully integrate with your existing dealership management systems while also outranking your competitors, lead aggregators, and the giant classifieds will take years.
If you are an optimal operator that demands more than your share right now, then you are always seeking growth and winning in organic search is a need. We are the only company that is dedicated to solving the organic optimization needs of high-performing dealerships that simply must win.
To Do It Yourself.
You can take a page from the experts that are winning right now in the toughest spots of the web, reverse engineer their techniques, and learn from what they are doing. That will not be enough; these international money printing campaigns on the highest-return search terms of the web are important to understand, but most of their techniques don't translate to the nuanced challenges faced by automotive dealers seeking to influence online shoppers.
Onsite and offsite search ranking results. Google LLC US Patent US8843477B1
Understanding the underpinnings of search engines will be critical for cutting through the noise. You’ll want to dive right in on Google’s developer docs and patents. We know Google has an insatiable need to own everything, and we know that U.S. patents become stronger the more clearly the invention is described in publicly published and issued patents. This means that Google publishes and consistently updates the blueprints of their search engine invention. For eager optimizers, start with these two insightful and regularly updated Google patents: Onsite and offsite search ranking results and Using structured data for search result deduplication.
Understanding the concepts that are detailed in these and many other important patent publications are key to gaining a clear understanding of how Google organizes results in the way that they do.
Now that you’ve achieved a deep understanding of the inner workings of search, you’ll want to juxtapose this newfound knowledge from the patents with what you’ve learned by reverse engineering the techniques of the World's best optimizers that are winning now.
Are You the SEO Too?
Certainly your plan requires you to be confident in what you now know. If you are not going to be the SEO, “critical” is the word you’ll use when describing the optimizer tasked with the success of your project.
If the SEO won’t be you, your optimizer will be the first hire you make as everything will be built to fit within tight requirements according to your chosen optimizer’s plan. Missteps in early SEO planning are common and immediately torpedo your whole project.
Proven and trustworthy SEOs are notoriously difficult to entice, they have the most difficult aspect of the World Wide Web solved already. Shorthand: They are already super rich. Turns out, making enormous piles of money is a simple matter when you are able to place your interests first when online shoppers are using phrases that have clear commercial intent.
I could hire a consultant.
When seeking legitimate SEO help, consulting can be a viable option. Fees are extraordinary. Good consultants typically will only help with the planning phase leaving you to do all, or nearly all, of the required software build-out and ongoing implementations. Since search engines are constantly making drastic updates, be aware that more consulting will be needed over the years, as well as drastic changes to the underpinnings of your software. You cannot just build this and forget it; your tech team is here to stay. All of these engineers, designers, and developers are long-term hires.
It’s worth it for the real-world results that come from winning organic search. If you want the SEO pro to stay on too, be ready for a mega compensation package that starting in the $300-800k range. Pro SEO contracts often include short- and long-term performance markers with contractual bonuses so large that they end up representing a significant equity share in your company.
Some SEO pros will consider equity in your dealership if your books are clean, so that could be an option if you do not feel comfortable making the grand plan and managing lots of developers yourself. Building car dealer software that wins in search will be a big risk, it will take many revisions over years, and, of course, it never ends.
So, you can do this all on your own. All you’ll need to do is invest $3,000,000+ in expert software developers and several years of your daily management time. Assuming everything goes perfectly and you keep up with the ongoing algorithmic changes throughout the process, you’ll have built a defensible online edge that crushes organic search results for your store.
Assembling Your Team.
To do this yourself, one designer should be enough, but one systems engineer is not. This is your tree's trunk, this is how you will be represented to the World. What if something happens? With two reliable systems engineers on staff, you can expect to maintain around 97% uptime over the long haul. System admin redundancy will be needed to handle common problems that crop up with factory incentives, feeds, CRM lead parsing, and your existing merchandising systems. So before you launch your software into production, you will want to find and hire at least a few great system admins for redunancy.
Hire well; This is going to take talented and trustworthy experts to pull off. The end result of several years of your management time will need to result in finished software that is strong enough to consistently beat the classifieds, lead aggregators, untoward factory interests, and all dealers to be worth the investment. This is a massive undertaking.
Ok, let’s back up. You can do this. You can make a plan, and you can hire great experts to do all of the heavy lifting. Leaving redundancy considerations out for the first couple of years while you build this out, you’ll only need one graphic designer, one front-end coder with great JavaScript, one software engineer, one solid systems admin, and you, the SEO.
5 experts can build this out in 3 years. Salary expectations are between $85k and $285k/yr+++
All you’ll need to do is dedicate the whole of yourself for the next several years to solving the Rubik’s Cube of car dealer SEO, and then build a better tech infrastructure than CarGurus, TrueCar, and Autotrader for organically ranking cars. Then, all that's left is to find and hire expert developers that work well together. After you’ve built a great team and spent several years entrenched in project management and software development, assuming your SEO research and planning was correct and has stayed current throughout the whole process, you’ll have created an insanely valuable advantage that you can hold over all of your competing dealers. This will make you rich, or much, much richer, and you’ll have achieved all this great success by yourself.
If you don't have the extra years of management time, and extra millions of dollars to bet on a crazy long shot, there is a reliable shortcut for you. Hire Remora and stay focused on selling while our tech eviscerates your market.
Now That You Are The Expert.
With a clear understanding of the techniques behind the most elite optimizers in the World, you are now ready to formulate a plan that will consider the unique database-driven requirements of your dealership and inventory. Your finished software must consistently rank your on-the-ground cars organically ahead of the biggest classifieds, publicly-traded lead aggregators, and your straight-ahead dealer competitors for all of this to ultimately be worth the effort and expense.
Ok, this is going to be quite a plan. It’s dangerous experimenting with your own company where going a little bit sideways can have a devastating real-world impact on your business. You may want to prove your plan first by deploying on your smallest dealership first.
You can certainly shortcut the whole learning and planning phase by hiring an expert optimizer to build out a detailed plan for you. If you are insisting on doing this inhouse, we strongly suggest that you still learn how to do it yourself. These hires will be an enormous risk.
If you contract an optimizer, how will you evaluate them?
Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes each year. Being tied to an expensive expert while not understanding the underlying tech that is responsible for tangible results will make future decisions and required revisions nearly impossible. More downsides of being in the dark about the tech will show up through lazy, insufficient, and misguided early planning from the optimizer. This kills your project before it ever begins. You are in the software business now baby! It’s vitally important that you know all of the details of effective search optimization in your database-driven environment.
This worthy undertaking will require an expert team of elite coders, or your pre-existing expertise of low-level systems code, front- and back-end code and scripting languages, digital graphic design and creation, project management, systems administration, and management of Worldwide content distribution networks. Most dealers do not have these skill sets available. It’s ok, you can do it with a small team. Of course, gathering the team will only be a start. You’ll need to actually build this crazy train to realize the benefits from your newfound plan and deep knowledge of how to rank your cars first in organic search.
SEO Is Science, Top Tech Wins.
When you understand how critical your findability in organic search is, you’ll realize that this is actually the heart of your advertising efforts, and that your overall success is consistently fueled by your organic positions in search engines. For optimal operators, only the best will do.
Can You Explain the Game?
Yes. It starts with summarizing a few of the more fringe Google patents. Modern-day Google relies heavily on the Chrome browser for input. Chrome passes anonymized user behavior back to Google in near real-time for analysis. There is a privacy setting for this in Chrome and it is checked on by default when you first install Chrome. Google values website behavior data highly and uses a dark UI to ensure it stays enabled.
This infrastructure means that Google can always see and understand what users do on every website in the world with or without Google Analytics. Google anonymizes and uses this real-time user behavior data as an indicator of that user’s satisfaction with the organic search results they provided. The holy grail of feedback for search engines is actually knowing what the users did after they click on a #1, #2, #3, ... listing for every phrase they searched.
Today, Google Chrome is the most used browser in the World. This means that they have a perfect feedback loop in place at all times, and always know everything about your company’s tech stack, your website users, their behavior, and satisfaction. Google clearly understands what your users do when they are on your site and they keep a map of the experience that your entity provides to online shoppers. Google is particularly interested in the user experience you provide on mobile phones and they reward sites that make Google’s users happy by delivering preferential treatment (top rankings) on valuable organic search result pages. This constant feedback loop represents an incredibly profitable opportunity for brick-and-mortar car dealers that differentiate themselves with winning tech.
The Science of SEO Is Known.
The most critical factors involved in ranking sites have never been at dispute by the larger SEO community. There are known quality markers that Google uses to score your company, and thereby your level of preferential treatment in results. These undisputed factors are either helping or hurting your findability in search at all times.
One best practice of top ranking automotive dealers is that they serve an outstanding mobile experience to their customers with fast-loading assets and pages across all devices. Google has always rewarded site speed and device flexibility. This is one reason that it is so important to serve quick pages via a lightweight codebase with absolutely no bloat. Unique meta data throughout the site and clean schema markup are important practices of top performing database-driven sites as well. These markers are clear signs to Google that your site was built professionally and specifically for your use case in your industry, and for your dealership.
Surprisingly, some large dealership groups are running this $79 car dealer website facelift on WordPress! Built for blogging, WordPress is great for Moms posting about little league practice and soccar schedules, mainly because it’s free. It’s terrible for legitimate dealerships. WordPress is not an appropriate platform if you are spending money advertising 2, 20, or 200 million dollars worth of inventory online. This is because of inherent and enormous code bloat, impossibly slow page load speeds, and limitless limitations. WordPress is fine for low stress applications, but it is not enterprise. How many Fortune 500 companies do you think use WordPress to power their most important websites?
Is This For Me?
We are perfect for optimal operators that are sick of worthless promises and excuses from their current car dealer website and automotive SEO providers. If you are ready to deploy an overwhelming sales advantage by eviscerating your market with winning tech, then you are in the right place.
Hundreds of top performing car dealerships use our dominating tech edge to build a defensible lead advantage that keeps their sale pipelines bursting. Crushing organic search changes the math at your store and is easier to achieve than you think.
