by Sean
The biggest real gain in the index came out of Aberdeen
If you run search for a car retailer, one number in this year’s index deserves more attention than it will get. John Clark, the family-owned group based in Aberdeen, added 69,816 visits in the twelve months to July 2026. It grew 50.66%, from 137,824 to 207,640, and moved from rank 27 to 23. Across 294 brands in a market down 13.0%, that is the largest genuine absolute gain anywhere in the dataset. Click below to access the latest Car Dealerships market report.
It did that on 8,100 monthly brand searches and a Brand Reach rank of 40 out of 50.
The 64 franchised dealer sites in this index added 293,311 visits between them, a pooled 4.91% in a falling market. John Clark produced 23.80% of that on its own. One regional group, trading mostly across the north-east of Scotland and into Tayside and Fife, delivered almost a quarter of the growth of the entire winning layer of the sector.
Every franchise gets a page in every town it sells in
The site those visits land on is organised around a single question: which cars can I actually get to. Each manufacturer John Clark franchises has a section, and the towns are in the heading rather than buried in body copy. The Audi section opens on “Welcome to Aberdeen & Dundee Audi”. Beneath each manufacturer sits a page for each place that manufacturer is sold.
Those location pages carry real detail. The BYD Dundee page at john-clark.co.uk/byd/locations/byd-dundee/ opens with “BYD Dundee is located at Myrekirk Road, Dundee DD2 4SU” and then gives driving directions from north and south, naming the A90 and the Kingsway ring road. Address, postcode, route, and the specific models on site.
This is a query class a results page cannot finish. Google can tell a searcher what a BYD Dolphin costs. It can summarise the reviews and the range figures. It cannot tell them which one is sitting in a showroom they can reach on Saturday morning, because that fact changes by the hour and it belongs to whoever owns the car. The searcher has to go somewhere to find out.
You can check this on your own site in about a minute.
The used-car pages go wider than the franchise list
The franchise sections only reach manufacturers John Clark sells new. The used-car side reaches further. JC Select, the group’s used-car business, runs a manufacturer page for cars it happens to hold in stock, and the list runs past what it is franchised for: it lists used Audis, which it sells new, and used Porsches, which it does not. Each of those pages is titled against five towns, Edinburgh, Dundee, Perth, Inverness and Stirling.
The same pattern repeats underneath the franchises. The page at john-clark.co.uk/byd/used-cars/aberdeen/ is used stock for one manufacturer pinned to one town. A page per manufacturer, a page per town, a used-stock page per town, across 21 brands and more than 60 businesses. Somebody searching a manufacturer and a place meets a page about that manufacturer in that place.
The clearest example is a page for a town the showroom is not in. john-clark.co.uk/geely/locations/geely-dealer-near-aberdeen/ is headed “New Geely Dealership Near Aberdeen”, and the dealership is in Dundee, roughly 40 miles south. The copy handles the gap head-on: “If you’re travelling from Aberdeen, take the A90 south toward Dundee.” The page is built around the search phrase and answers it with a journey.
If your group runs one used-car listing page with filters bolted on top, that is the difference worth looking at, and turning it into pages a searcher can land on directly is category architecture and faceted navigation work.
Cinch holds stock too, and holds it centrally
Cinch sells the same commodity and organises it differently. Its cars sit in a small number of preparation and delivery hubs, and its homepage sells the convenience of that: “Buy Used Cars Without The Faff”, shop by shape, a free instant part-exchange valuation, an app to “Browse, shortlist and compare cars”. Browse, shortlist, compare, value. Those four questions now get answered at the top of the results page, before anyone visits a website. The searcher reads the summary and stops there.
Cinch’s visibility rests heavily on that kind of demand, and it fell by 136,099 visits over the year. It holds 301,000 monthly brand searches, 37.16 times John Clark’s 8,100, and 62,818 reviews. The loss is 1.95 times what John Clark gained, on 37 times the branded demand behind it.
This is a sector pattern rather than one company’s year. The 12 sites in this index that hold no physical stock, the marketplaces, comparison sites and motoring portals, went 12 for 12 negative, down a pooled 14.11%, and account for 74.83% of the entire sector’s decline, which makes how Autotrader holds its search position worth reading closely.
What else changed inside the year
Pages are the visible part, and you should weigh the rest before copying anything here.
The group got bigger. BYD opened in Aberdeen and then Dundee, and Geely arrived in Dundee, Stirling and Edinburgh. A new manufacturer brings a whole new set of pages with it: a brand section, location pages, used-car pages. Part of this gain is simply a larger site than the one measured a year earlier.
The franchise map also moved mid-period. In February 2026 John Clark took on the Volkswagen dealerships in Dundee and St Andrews, and in the same network realignment handed its Volkswagen businesses in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy to Eastern Western Motor Group. Both sides of that swap grew, with Eastern Western up 54.22%. That transfer sits inside the measurement window and cannot be isolated from the rest of the movement with the figures published here.
Then there is everything the index does not see: paid media, manufacturer co-operative marketing, pricing, and how heavily the group’s stock was advertised on third-party sites. All of those move organic numbers. What this index can show is direction, and the direction holds across 64 dealer sites rather than one.
What to ask about your own pages
The pattern is wider than any single group. Of the 15 sites that started the year above the index average of 353,792 visits, 14 finished lower. The 30 biggest brands by reach averaged a 16.44% decline, while the 20 smallest averaged 19.34% growth. Size and recognition did not defend a position this year.
So the question for your next planning session is a narrow one. Take every commercially important page on your site and ask what a searcher gets from it that a results page cannot hand them without a visit. A specification, a price guide or a general comparison is competing directly with an answer they already have on screen. A specific car, at a named address, with the opening hours and the route to reach it, is something only your business holds.
Your showrooms are the part of your site nobody else can summarise.
If that audit turns up more pages than you have time to fix, that is where we come in. A page per manufacturer per town across 21 brands only earns visits if every one of those pages is crawled, indexed and linked from somewhere that matters, which is why technical SEO, indexation and internal linking makes up the bulk of what we do for retailers with stock in real places. If you want someone to look at what your site is currently doing with the pages you already have, get in touch.
Further reading
- using guide content to support category pages, A working method for deciding what supporting content around a commercial page actually earns its place, which is the audit this article asks you to run.
- 2023 Car Hire Market Report, Car hire runs on the same tension between branch-level stock and central aggregators, so the numbers there make a useful comparison for a dealer group.
- 2023 Car Finance Market Performance Report, Finance is the next question most car buyers ask, and this report shows who is visible when they ask it.
