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
-
Directory website creation
Hi, I'm in the process of helping a client with a wedding show & supplier directory. Could anyone give me pointers as to the best practice for the architecture? Because the suppliers and shows will be listed geographically is there a possibility for the site to seem keyword stuffed? thanks, MOZ brain, you guys always rock.
Web Design | | Libra_Photographic0 -
International Websites - Hosting, Domain Names, & Configuration
What is the best way to configure a website that targets a number of countries and languages around the world? For example, Apple has websites optimized for just about every country and language in the world (see: https://www.apple.com/choose-country-region/). When you choose the UK it takes you to: https://www.apple.com/uk/ When you choose China it take you to: https://www.apple.com/cn/ Etc. When you go to apple.co.uk it forwards you to the UK version of the website. The same is true for apple.cn. Is this the ideal way to set it up? I have also seen websites that have each version of the website on its own TLD such as exampleBrand.co.uk and exampleBrand.cn - in this example they don't forward to the .com. My concern with Apple's solution is SEO and hosting. Do consumers favor seeing their country's TLD in search results over exampleBrand.com/uk? For hosting, shouldn't the mainland China version of the website be hosted in China? Is it possible to just host a folder of a website in a certain country such as the cn folder for China? Any suggestions would be appreciated. I was unable to find much info on this.
Web Design | | rx3000 -
How to prevent development website subdomain from being indexed?
Hello awesome MOZ Community! Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing. An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content. The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines. My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites? Thanks!
Web Design | | SproutDigital0 -
How can a Pincode finder website be SEO optimised?
Guys, I wanted to build a simple Pincode finder website for India. The targeted visitors as is obvious will be from India. Alike other Pincode finder websites, the users in this case too will have to key in the location / area of whose pincode he is looking for and they will get Pincode from that very location / area. Other than this, users will also come to this website when they search for something like " <location name="">pincode</location>" on Google (for instance, users will search for something like "Hiranandani Gardens Powai Pincode") Along with data fethced from our sources via Indian postal departments and other data available in public domain, we shall be using data from Google Maps API too. My question in regards to the same is as follows: What should the page-structure / structure of the website be for ranking well on Google? What should be the URL structure? Other suggestions to rank well on Google in this regards? Competition: (You can search for the term "Hiranandani Gardens Powai Pincode" to know how these sites show data) http://www.getpincode.info http://www.pincode.net.in Pls. help...
Web Design | | ShalinTJ0 -
Need help with image resizing (re: slow site)
I'm trying to figure out why I'm having speed issues with my site, and using google speed test to help me knock out some of the issues. One of issues deals with image resizing. I have a responsive design and so even though on the home page the normal width is 580 of the blog area, the full post can go up to 1170. So I size all of my images to 1170 wide and let CSS resize them depending on the size of the browser. (The images on the most recent post are a little bigger than this because I was testing something.) I was wondering what the best practice was in regard to what I'm trying to do. Also feel free to check out my site and let me know of any other feedback / advice you have. Thanks !:)
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
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 -
Does File Compression software on a website benefit SEO?
Hi all. Should we be using File Compression software on our website files for SEO benefit? If so, do you like Deflate or gzip? Thank you for your help! Jay
Web Design | | theideapeople0 -
Footer Links for Design Shops - Do They Help or Hurt?
I work on SEO for a number of clients at our agency, including our in-house SEO for our own website. I use Open Site Explorer all the time to analyze my competition in the SERPs and try to gain links from this insight. However, I've noticed a number of agencies and design shops that place a link in the footer of websites they've designed and created. For example "Site design by ABC Agency (hyperlinked to the agency's home page). Or I've seen small logos or graphics that link to the designer's site and use the "alt tag" to get stronger anchor text. From a design perspective, I don't care for this, but as a SEO...I can see why. We've designed a number of websites and have more in the pipeline, but have not used this tactic before. It seems like an irrelevant link from a content/user standpoint, however, it seems to work for a lot of agencies and design shops. Any input from the SEOmoz community would be great. Is it a short-lived strategy? Does it help or hurt your link-building and "rapport" with Google, Bing, Yahoo? Thanks everyone.
Web Design | | PHDL0