Table of Contents
Basic Ranking Factors Of SEO:
In the reports on finance and medicine, we showed that the ranking logic for different types of sites (service providers, aggregators, information sites) is very different, and that it is better to consider them separately.
Sellers and other types of sites:
Sellers – websites of companies selling cars; below we will sometimes also call them (perhaps not quite correctly) “car dealerships”. They occupy a leading place in search results – about half of all positions in the top 30 of Yandex and Google. Moreover, within the top 30 they are distributed unevenly: in the top 10 of both search engines, their share is higher than in the second and especially in the third ten. However, they are often inferior to the very first positions.
Here we briefly describe the other types of sites that are found on a car sample, so as not to return to them further.
Manufacturers are a very important type of site for our sample. By many requests, manufacturers are in the first position – including by requests such as buy hyundai, Volvo dealers, Renault salons. Apparently, this does not happen by itself (for example, due to higher relevance compared to sellers’ websites) – search engines must take special measures for this. Unfortunately, studying the ranking of manufacturers’ websites by our methods hardly makes sense, since a request usually accounts for no more than one manufacturer’s website.
Aggregators are the second most frequent type of site in the sample after sellers: about a third of search results for automobile sampling in Yandex, about a quarter – in Google. This is already a fairly large share, but the variety of aggregators is small, the issuance is highly monopolized. So, about a third of aggregator hits in the top 3 of Yandex or Google falls on two sites – Drom.ru (with subdomains) and Auto.ru, and half of the last third are Avito. Under these conditions, there will be little benefit from statistical methods.
Finally, about 10% of the results (in Google a little more, in Yandex less) are occupied by information sites. They rarely get into the top 10, and there is probably not enough data to study the features of their ranking in this sample.
General observations:
In contrast to what we saw, for example, on medical requests, the results of the “car” search in Yandex and Google are not fundamentally different from each other – especially if you do not go beyond the top ten. Unless Yandex often ranks Avito.ru and its auto portal Auto high, and on Google their visibility is much lower.
Car search is a competitive, expensive, and long-established market. For him, even more than for e-commerce, the unconditional leadership of large sites (they are also sites of large companies), in the promotion of which a lot of money has been invested, is characteristic. Beginners are not expected here – the entrance threshold is very high.
1. Three sites of one of the largest automobile dealers.jpg
Three sites of one of the largest Rolf car dealerships side by side in Yandex search results – the Jeep brand website (marked with the official dealer icon), one of the car dealerships website and the company’s main website (marked with the “user choice” icon).
2. Find ten differences between the brand website from the manufacturer and the websites from dealers.jpg
Find ten differences: brand website from the manufacturer and websites from dealers
Most of the sites in the top 10 of Yandex and Google for queries related to current car brands and models are either manufacturers, or large companies that sell cars, or no less large aggregators and message boards. Among the seller companies, official dealers prevail, which in Yandex can be marked with a special sign, which is placed on the basis of Auto.ru data.
We did not check whether the presence of the “official dealer” sign (as well as the signs “popular site” and “user choice”) affects the position. Most likely, if there is such an influence, it is indirect – through traffic and behavioral factors. Very often, sites that are not marked with any signs fall on the first positions – in particular, the sites of manufacturers and Auto.ru itself (currently the Yandex service).
Some seller companies manage to promote several of their sites to the top, which is completely unusual for other industries. A special place among them is occupied by the brand’s sites, which largely repeat the manufacturer’s site, because of which several very similar sites can be present at once, with the same pictures, texts, fonts and even “favicons”. They follow the tough canons dictated by the manufacturer, which greatly complicates the search engine promotion of such sites.
For less relevant models, issuance is changing: official dealers are giving way to car dealerships selling used cars, aggregators, message boards and various exotic items – for example, sites of companies buying cars at Japanese auctions. For models that have left the primary market, the share of information content is higher – reviews, articles, etc.
Most likely, these differences do not indicate that search engines use different ranking algorithms for old and new models.
Where the pages of discontinued models are preserved on the websites of manufacturers or official dealers, they still appear in the first places, cf. Hyundai-Avilon.ru in the first position at the request of the i30 station wagon in Yandex and the second in Google. But when the model leaves the priority sites, the top 10 penetrate the results, which previously also showed, but much lower.
Query:
The sample that collected statistics for this study included 300 queries, mainly devoted to current car brands and models – separately ( lada xray, elantra, i30 station wagon, Mercedes Vito minibus ) and with various modifiers such as buy, how much, car dealership, complete sets and prices, a new range of prices . There are no requests for repairs, spare parts, etc. The data was received in June 2019.
Requests were asked from Moscow, but only a small part of them contain a direct mention of the city: the official official dealer in Moscow . In Yandex, almost all commercial results are Moscow, and the word “Moscow” is highlighted in snippets in the same way as query words. On Google, localization in Moscow is highly correlated with the position: in the top ten Moscow sellers dominate, and then gradually begin to be diluted by companies from other cities.
3. Localization in Moscow.jpg
Most of the approximately 600 parameters are evaluated automatically, but for about 100 “commercial” parameters, mainly related to the site as a whole, assessors set values for us. Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to obtain assessors’ assessments for all queries in the sample, and assessors evaluated the results only for a part of the queries. There are 55 such “manual” queries in our automotive sample. This is not much – although in our experience it is enough to understand which parameters may be important for ranking.
However, due to the large number of “repetitions” in issuing for different requests, the values of “site” parameters evaluated by assessors are available for 86% of sites in Yandex search results and for 76% in Google search results (for “page” parameters manually estimated , pages without rating more. But many of these parameters are duplicated by “automatic” parameters, for which there are all estimates. A comparison of the results for a subsample of 55 “manual” queries and for a complete selection shows that although there is a slight difference between them, they are very similar to each other). Therefore, we decided for cars to take into account estimates of commercial parameters for the entire sample of 300 queries.
In charts similar to the one above, we compare the parameter values for automotive queries with their values for our “general commercial” sample for June 2019. We have been tracking data on this sample of 160 queries for more than four years; the Factors-2017 and Factors-2018 reports are based on it .
Parameters and ranking factors:
In this section, a brief introduction to the methodology of our work for “beginners”. Those who have already read our other reports may skip it.
Since 2014, the Ashmanov & Partners search analytics laboratory has been studying and monitoring Yandex and Google search (as well as Mail.ru), evaluating the possible impact on the ranking of various parameters. Now there are more than 600 such parameters (coincidence with the often-encountered estimate of the number of ranking factors in the Matrixnet is random). Among them there are commercial, textual, link, “social”, traffic, behavioral and technical (to the last category we include everything that was not included in the previous ones).
Some of the parameters are “auxiliary”: they are not needed on their own, but to calculate other parameters. Many parameters are binary (there is a property or not), the rest are numerical. For binary parameters, the average value for each sample can be indicated as a percentage: what is the proportion of sites that have this property.
