Seasonal Trends 
Visibility Vs Authority 
Social Influence 
Content Performance 
10 minutes
Reading time
1-50
Brand's Reached
Report Updated September 2021
In our 2021 online dealership report, we analyse the car sales industry brands such as Autotrader, arnoldclark.com and Evans Halshaw.
We’ve created a digital ranking to help car dealership brands understand where they score in comparison to the competition.
This report consists of car dealership industry trends & ‘league tables’ measuring brands on metrics that are considered essential for ranking in Google.
A low score across all categories will yield in poor online performance.
Using our car dealership industry analysis can create a yardstick for you to understand what needs working on to improve how well you are seen online.
The car dealership market has decreased -3% in the last 12 months.
We work this out by measuring the total online growth of 48 different dealerships over the year.
So, if your brand doesn’t fall in the -3% this year, then you are staying ahead of the market.
Some car sales brands this year have taken a beating:
On the flip side, some brands have accelerated ahead of the market. These are our ‘winners’:
autotrader.co.uk (3%)
evanshalshaw.com (27%)
cazoo.co.uk (464%)
jardinemotors.co.uk (98%)
heycar.co.uk (157%)
Here is a quick rundown of the top 10 car dealership industry sites:
High competition keywords are where all the competition is – it’s competitive.
It helps to understand what the high competition phrases are, what sites are already achieving them and how.
Find what is working, reap the rewards.
High competition keywords are typically dominated by big sites i.e. Autotrader.
These big sites are usually pretty good. They are large with a sound technical setup.
Snoop on them and see how they are structuring their pages. Learn what they’re doing to rank on competitive keywords.
“used cars” – the most competitive keyword car dealerships battle for. The top position means being the first brand seen by 60k monthly searches.
That’s 110k people who ACTUALLY want to buy a used car seeing your forecourt every month.
Enter the high competition table:
| Keyword | Order | Competitiveness | Local Monthly Searches (UK) |
| used cars | 1 | 75 | 110000 |
| used cars for sale | 2 | 69 | 90500 |
| car dealerships near me | 3 | 67 | 74000 |
| car dealerships | 4 | 66 | 60500 |
| sell my car | 5 | 61 | 49500 |
| used car dealerships | 6 | 72 | 27100 |
| used cars for sale near me | 7 | 70 | 27100 |
| used cars near me | 8 | 71 | 18100 |
| used cars uk | 9 | 70 | 18100 |
| buy used cars | 10 | 75 | 12100 |
| used cars for sale uk | 11 | 73 | 12100 |
| used car dealerships near me | 12 | 63 | 14800 |
| buy my car | 13 | 67 | 8100 |
| used car finance | 14 | 50 | 6600 |
| used car leasing | 15 | 45 | 8100 |
Here they are, the heavyweight keywords.
All high volume, all with a high competition score. There isn’t much room for small dealerships to rank well on these.
But big brands? These are gold medals you can swing about as bragging rights.
What keyword opportunities are available for online car dealerships?
What kind of fruit do SEOs like best?
Low hanging. 🥁
You might not get that, but it makes SEO’s laugh. ‘Low hanging’ is a term used for easy to grasp keywords.
i.e. not-competitive keywords.
These are the keywords that smaller brands really need to focus on.
Enter the opportunity competition table:
| Keyword | Order | Competitiveness | Local Monthly Searches |
| 0 finance used cars | 1 | 36 | 5400 |
| used car prices | 2 | 33 | 2900 |
| used hybrid cars | 3 | 34 | 2900 |
| used 7-seater cars for sale near me | 4 | 37 | 2400 |
| 7-seater cars used | 5 | 34 | 1900 |
| used car pcp | 6 | 35 | 1900 |
| car dealerships london | 7 | 38 | 1900 |
| when will car dealerships reopen uk | 8 | 39 | 1900 |
| when do car dealerships open | 9 | 34 | 880 |
| sell my car to a dealer | 10 | 30 | 590 |
| sell my financed car | 11 | 28 | 390 |
| sell my broken car | 12 | 20 | 210 |
| car dealerships in east london | 13 | 21 | 210 |
| sell my car for parts | 14 | 22 | 210 |
| sell my classic car | 15 | 26 | 210 |
So, these auto dealership industry keywords have a half-decent search volume while still maintaining a low competition score.
Notice many opportunity keywords are more specific than high competition ones.
How are online dealerships performing on social?
Social media is great for getting in front of consumers daily.
Each year we produce a social media rank that looks at who is making the greatest impact on social.
Here are the top 5 making waves:
autotrader.co.uk have taken the top, with 535,652 social followers & 6,120,000 monthly brand searches, what are they doing right?
They post every day across all platforms
New tone/ approach for each platform (people behave differently on each)
Having a good review profile is essential in any industry, never mind as a car dealership.
Having third party reviews embedded in your site is a means of reinforcing your reputability (from sites like Trustpilot).
It’s now crucial for Google to see that you are a reputable business to rank well.
arnoldclark.com has taken the No.1 spot as the most reputable brand, with 99,492 reviews at an average of 4.6 stars.
They’re quick to demonstrate their reputation on the home page
Here are the top 5 car sales market brands who are crushing it in terms of online reputation:
Page speed is essential. If you’ve got a slow site, both your conversions and rankings will suffer.
Here’s what PageSpeed Insights identified as the top 5 fastest car dealership brands:
The car sales market report is free, it’s all part of our genius ploy to get you to pay attention to our search marketing agency.
Why? Because we really, really want to sign a car dealership client, we think we could do a very good job.
Not all brands meet our thresholds when we put these reports together. If your brand is missing from this report, get in touch for more car sales industry.
