COLUMBUS, OHIO – Auto Dealer Traffic, Inc., an automotive search engine marketing (SEM) company, has launched a used-car inventory marketing service that changes the way consumers find used cars on the Internet. The new service optimizes an auto dealer’s vehicle inventory so that it achieves the same high, natural search engine ranking that major automotive portals receive when auto buyers search for used vehicles online. With a high ranking, consumers can find and connect directly with their local dealership, eliminating the intermediary step and need for third party lead provider portals.

“This new service takes the control of used-car sales away from the portals and puts it back into the hands of dealers,” said Todd Swickard, president of Auto Dealer Traffic, who added that dealers will get more used-car leads from the service with much higher close rates.

Portals are large enough to be easily read by search engines and have their key words rank high in searches, which result in a large volume of traffic. By comparison, search engines have difficulty reading the inventory of dealer Web sites because of the site’s smaller size and structure.

The new technology developed for Auto Dealer Traffic’s used-car inventory marketing service solves this problem by making the dealer’s entire used car inventory search engine crawlable. As a result, dealers can expect their vehicles to appear on the first results page when customers using Google, Yahoo, or MSN search for a used car by make, model, year, and city.

For the past few months, Auto Dealer Traffic has been testing the new service at Roush Honda in Westerville, Ohio. According to Gary Harkin, vice president of marketing, the dealership has generated more traffic to their Web site and more buyers to their showroom than ever before.

“Roush Honda’s inventory now commands premium ranking, especially when detailed keywords are entered into search engines. The best part is we’ve had a 25 percent close rate on these leads, which is significantly higher than any of our purchased leads,” Harkin said, who notes that he no longer has to rely on used car leads from third party providers.

With the new service, dealers only pay one low monthly service fee to keep their inventory optimized and appearing high in the search engine rankings. Any inventory changes are immediately captured so that vehicle listings remain current and accurate.