In this sixth installment of Dealer Diagnostic, we sit down with Zach Billings, Wikimotive’s Co-Founder and CEO, to discuss the search signals dealers still overlook. Zach explains how buying-intent searches, customer reviews, and clear inventory pricing can shape who finds your dealership—and how the experience on your site and in your showroom affects what happens next. He also shares a website fix dealers can start this month and explains why cutting waste and cutting opportunity are two different things. Read the full transcript below or watch the conversation.
[Embed Episode 6 video here]
Which search visibility factors are dealerships still overlooking?
The number one factor in visibility—we could be talking about SEO or GEO, but SEO is where most of the opportunity is. The number one factor most often overlooked is: Were we focused on transactional topics?
So often, the results and the alignments that we talk about are about rankings and citations and just traffic. All of those things come so much more easily when you’re talking about informational topics, which are very high funnel. They’re way up here, and they don’t mean that people are ready to convert.
When you focus on a low-funnel topic—a model for sale, a brand dealer near me, things like that—now you’re getting that ready-to-go consumer who’s either going to convert on inventory or is looking for service. And those are the people that you need to be focused on if you want to get the outcomes that matter.
Dealer Takeaway: Review which searches your SEO strategy targets. Prioritize searches that signal someone is ready to shop for inventory or book service, and track whether those visits lead to inquiries or appointments.
Why do customer reviews carry so much weight in traditional and AI search?
Because they don’t lie.
They are crowdsourced. They’re the only reliable measure of crowdsourced information about your dealership: the positives, the negatives, and everything in between. And ultimately, they’re a large data source, with many dealerships having thousands of reviews.
There is this great pool, this great cross section of consensus on what’s being done well at your dealership and what’s being done poorly. And that can be synthesized into a clean understanding for an LLM or distilled into a clean understanding for a consumer to read in a paragraph or two. And either way, that leads to consumer decisions as they read a summary about this dealership and a summary about this dealership, or it leads to ranking decisions.
Does an LLM want to put you first or put you second?
Either way, reviews matter more than many other individual signals, and you can’t game them. The only way to improve them is going to be to do it at a grassroots level.
Dealer Takeaway: Look for patterns across recent reviews. If customers keep pointing to the same problem, work with the team responsible to fix the process behind it.
How much do site speed and the shopping experience each matter?
Website performance in the sense of converting people: conversion rate optimization. A lot of dealers come to me now. This is a hotter trend recently than it’s been in a long time, and I’m happy to hear that. There are a lot more dealers looking at which calls to action are going to convert people the best. “I feel like I don’t know which verbiage to use. I have either too many options or not enough.”
So, paring those down, making navigation clean, getting people from wherever they enter the website through to the thing that they want to see and then through to the lead submission easily, with low friction and without decision paralysis—that kind of website performance matters tremendously because that’s your conversion rate optimization.
The flip side of that is there’s still a huge fixation on website speed and a lot of really granular nuances, Google’s Core Web Vitals and things along those lines. And focusing on those is essentially technical SEO.
While that is completely correct in alignment, and fundamentally that is right to do, the reality is, in our industry, it’s: How do you outrun a bear? You’ve got to run faster than the other guy. You have to be pragmatic about what you can do within OEM-approved website platforms, and it’s not everything. So it matters a lot in some ways. I would focus on the user experience side of that coin.
Dealer Takeaway: Test whether shoppers can find the right vehicle or service page, identify the next step, and submit an inquiry. Prioritize problems that make those actions harder.
How do accurate inventory and clear pricing affect search visibility?
Accuracy could mean different things to different people, but I would say it means the price is actually the price you’re going to pay, so that’s transparency. It would mean merchandising, so making sure that the picture actually represents the car properly.
It would mean that the LLM also has the ability to see the information as accurate to the piece of inventory. So, for instance, if the LLM can only see the MSRP in the code, but you actually have $5 Grand in discounts and it’s not able to see the bottom-line offer price, that is an inaccuracy that is definitely going to penalize your visibility in LLM answers around inventory searches.
So, the bottom line is it definitely has an impact on inventory searches with LLMs. The secondary impact it has on SEO is that the more accurate and transparent your VDPs are, the more likely people are to convert, and that behavior signal helps reduce friction on SEO.
Dealer Takeaway: Spot-check your vehicle detail pages. Confirm that photos match the vehicle, the offer price and its terms are clear to shoppers, and your website provider makes the offer price readable in the page itself.
How should dealers balance search tactics with the customer experience?
Dealerships are not focused so much on tactics and not enough on customer experience that I think it’s completely out of whack, but we have to remember that they do different things. One is how you make decisions, specific decisions to serve particular needs in your marketing. I need more people who are interested in Silverados versus Tahoes because I have more Silverados to sell, and I need to bring those people in, right? That’s tactical.
You need to do that in your marketing to get the right attention to your website. But at the same time, if you’re not focused on customer experience, be it their experience on your website or in the showroom, you squander both the opportunity with that person that you just paid to bring to your website with tactics and also future opportunity.
Somebody has a bad experience with your store. You now have a bad review, which creates fewer people in the future, which creates desperation and more bad reviews. It’s a feedback loop, right?
And the same is true on the positive side. Positive reviews lead to more business, and a better experience on your website leads to more business, which leads to making decisions when the sun is shining, which is a much healthier way to make your tactical decisions when you’re not desperate.
Dealer Takeaway: When you promote a priority model or offer, follow the shopper’s path from the search result to the website and into the showroom. Check that each step delivers what the marketing promised.
What’s one overlooked website fix that could help dealers capture more leads this month?
The single most overlooked opportunity that a dealership can improve this month is their website.
And it’s not changing website providers. It’s not throwing out all of the things that you’ve got on your website and changing tools. Those are easy fixes.
It’s going and using and evaluating your website like a consumer, looking for the friction points, the things that are confusing, having some family members do the same thing, figuring out where your website is not firing on all cylinders, and improving that experience.
You’re all doing expensive marketing: paid, organic, social, etcetera. You’re bringing these people in, and then you squander the opportunity with a service scheduler that can’t ever actually get to the appointment stage.
Go use the website, figure out what’s broken, and fix those things. You will dramatically improve the efficacy of all of your marketing in one shot.
Dealer Takeaway: Ask someone unfamiliar with your website to book a test service appointment on their phone. Have them show you where they get stuck, then fix and retest that step.
What’s getting too much of dealers’ attention as they try to grow on tighter budgets?
Right now, the thing that I see dealerships spending too much time worrying about is generally AI as a broad subject.
But I’m going to say the prevailing trend of the moment that isn’t AI is slashing costs. And that’s happening right now because the market has been in a steady volume decline for a period of time. We have a reduced SAAR this year versus last year. Dealers are feeling that pinch.
And what it’s leading to is bad decision-making. So I’m seeing this sharp increase in dealers looking for places to cut. And cuts are fine if you have waste. Please do cut wasteful marketing and reinvest it somewhere else that makes more sense, but reinvest it.
The flawed thinking here is that we’ve got X number of customers or X number of leads right now, and we’re going to cut our marketing to somehow fix the problem.
The problem is that you’re not selling enough cars, and what you want to do is cut the opportunity-building mechanism to sell more cars.
These things are at odds. What you have to do when things are slow and it’s not working the way that you want is look for smart ways that you can be staging investments now to be able to reap what you sow tomorrow, when other dealerships are making foolish decisions to cut and give up market share.
You sometimes have to spend money to make money, and trying to cut to fix your problems is not how you’re going to get there.
Dealer Takeaway: Before cutting a line item, review the qualified inquiries and appointments it helps generate. Redirect wasteful spending toward efforts with a clearer path to sales or service opportunities.
