Brainstorm for a Car Classifieds website. Would you guys mind help me brainstorm?
-
Hey Mozers...
Would you guys mind help me brainstorm?
My client contact me and he wants to build a car classified kind of website for Utah. He wants to make the website from scratch, he has a pretty good budget and plan on using online marketing together with traditional marketing.
If you were building your own car classifieds sites and budget was not a problem what would you include in your site? (ex: responsive, native ios app, blog, free tool for tell the user the value their car, etc)
How would you do the online marketing?
Which car Classified site do you like? why?
Thanks
- Felipe
-
Thank you for your inputs Jeff, I really like your ideas specially the professional photos idea. The client is big car dealership inventory should not be a problem
-
Felipe -
Cars used to be sold via classified ads in newspapers, until Craigslist came around. Craigslist removed a huge source of revenue - classified ads - away from newspapers. That, and the fact that nobody receives newspapers anymore.
I would say that any classified car site, even one focused on Utah, has to compete with Craigslist. How to do that? Craigslist has the audience of people looking to buy cars, and a ton of people who want to post cars for sale.
Craigslist, due to it's minimal, almost text-only design, loads really fast. It allows people to upload images, and list a price. It makes it really easy to find cars.
Whatever this site that you're building for a client needs to do everything that Craigslist can do, but more.
One thing I don't love about Craigslist is that you can't search specifically by car model, year, type to hone in on the results.
A better search option would be really helpful.
That said, if you're just starting out, you'll likely face an inventory volume problem - so you don't want to have too many empty categories.
Another thing that doesn't work as well for Craigslist is that the quality of car images tends to not be great. Probably this is my bias, because I'm a professional photographer. But an iPhone shot of a car just doesn't work well to sell a several thousand dollar car.
Perhaps one idea is that to launch the site, anyone who wants to list can drive the car to a location in Salt Lake City, or somewhere else, and have someone on the classified team take professional photos of the car, against a nice backdrop, and also give nice detailed macro close up images of the cars and trucks for sale. Including one of the open engine compartment, the odometer, etc.
One other idea for functionality: allow users who come to the site to get an email alert when a car matching the description of what they're looking for (i.e. I want to buy a Toyota 4Runner w/ a manual transmission).
You'll obviously want to do tie-ins to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, to allow people to pin something they want, and share when they list something.
That said, posting on Craigslist is free. And it's touch to compete with free. (Craigslist makes their money for job postings, and everything else is free.)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Consulting for HUGE Website. How Big Is TOO Big Of A Change?
SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do... MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have. If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them? Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
Web Design | | BrianGilmore
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the Article I want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff. EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.0 -
Website Redesign - Will it hurt SERP?
Hi - I am planning to redesign my blog and I was wondering if this will affect my rankings? The new website template (custom designed) is much more user and seo friendly. The content, url structure, internal linking structure, meta tags, and site structure will remain exactly the same, but the visual design will be different (new sidebar widgets, and slightly different layout on inner pages). The current website is ranking very well (mostly top 5), has a healthy backlink profile, strong social media presence, and great traffic. I have heard that switching to a new template will dramatically hurt the rankings. Is this true? Are there any exceptions? Any ways I can prevent the rankings from dropping? Would really appreciate your input. Thanks in advance. Howard
Web Design | | howardd0 -
Is there a Consultant out there to help convert C#.net functions into PHP Wordpress functions?
We are going through a transition from SiteFinity (C# .net windows environment) to WordPress (PHP Linux environment). We currently have custom forms that make calls to webservices and also store data into SQL Server tables. Not sure how to do this in PHP and could use some help. We are located in Irvine, CA. We would prefer someone onsite, but can also work with someone remote if we must. Time is of the essence. Thanks.
Web Design | | balboafinance0 -
I need to buy a website template with seo focus - any tip? what technology is better?
Due to lack of resources, my company usually buys website templates and we adjust it internally. So we can always be with new designs, spending less money. With all this changes of google panda recently, I will change my website again. Usually we buy then from templatemonster, but some templates are far away from seo standards. Do you have tips where to buy than? Should I search for a specific technology or layout? Is this JS Animated website a goog choice?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Removing important section of website, safely
Hi Mozzers, It's been requested that a top level page on a website I'm working on should be removed. It concerns me firstly because there are some nice links coming into that page. I'm also worried because website director has suggested the menu option for that page should simply be removed from all navigation, so you can't find the 'removed' page via his website, but it remains as an indexed page passing linkjuice to website. Is that a risky approach from an SEO perspective? What's the best approach to this? Thanks in advance! Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Bing free mobile website
When editing my Bing business listing, I have noticed that they offer a free mobile website. I was actually looking to build one and I'm not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I want to be able to customize it as well. Anybody tried it already? arBS3.jpg
Web Design | | echo10 -
Using Wordpress as CMS for large Websites
Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind. Cheers!
Web Design | | RishadShaikh590