Chinook Auto Sales, Calgary

The brief

The dealership had a website that listed cars and gave a visitor no way to act on any of them. There was no enquiry form, no finance application, and nothing that turned somebody looking at a used Forester at eleven at night into a name in an inbox the next morning. Inventory sat on a single grid page, so the site could compete for one broad query and nothing else. The brief was a full rebuild: a page per vehicle that could rank on its own, working forms including a finance path, and the local search work to put the profile in front of people shopping for a car in southeast Calgary.

What we did

1. 1

   Give every vehicle a page that can rank on its own

   Year, make and model in the URL, the heading and the structured data, with the real photographs and the actual price rather than a call-for-pricing placeholder. One inventory grid competes for one query. A page per car competes for the query a buyer actually types, which is almost always a specific vehicle rather than a category.

2. 2

   Put the form on the page the buyer is already looking at

   Enquiry and finance forms on the vehicle page itself, not behind a contact link in the navigation. Somebody deciding about a specific car at eleven at night will not go looking for a contact page, and asking them to is where most dealership sites quietly lose the lead.

3. 3

   Compete where car buyers actually search

   Buyers search by manufacturer and by the dealership down the road, not by the name of a lot they have never heard of. The profile and the site were built to surface on those searches instead of only on the business name, which is the difference between being found and being looked up.

4. 4

   Report the actions, not the impressions

   Form submissions, calls and direction requests, counted separately and reported monthly. Impressions and keyword counts are on this page too, further down, where a reach number belongs.

The profile is being found on other dealerships' names

The most useful thing in the local data is not the view count, it is what people typed to arrive. The largest discovery terms are manufacturer and competitor searches rather than the dealership's own name - Toyota in Calgary, a named competing dealer group, Mitsubishi, Nissan, used cars in Calgary, Toyota dealership in Calgary. That matters because a profile that only surfaces on its own business name is being looked up by people who already knew it existed. Surfacing on the searches a buyer runs before they have chosen anyone is the part that grows a business, and it is much harder to achieve.

Why the leads number is counted rather than compared

There is no percentage next to 260 enquiries because there is nothing to divide by. The previous website had no enquiry form at all, so the honest baseline is zero, and a percentage change from zero is not a number - it is a way of writing infinity that looks like a statistic. Any results page that shows you a percentage next to a figure that started at nothing is either confused or counting on you not to check. The count and the window are the whole claim here.

What these numbers do not show

Four things worth knowing before you weigh any of this. The organic click figure is a twelve-month total rather than a monthly rate, which works out at roughly 140 a month - if you see that number quoted as monthly anywhere, including by us, it is wrong. The search figures come from our reporting export rather than a raw Search Console download, and we would rather say so than imply a level of verification we have not done; the profile figures are raw and reconcile exactly. Enquiry volume is not sales, and how many of those 260 became cars off the lot is the dealership's number rather than ours. And the business had genuine room to grow, because a site with no form converts nobody - the same work on a dealership that already had a functioning enquiry path would not produce a comparable jump.