Case study · Car Dealers · 2015
GD Cars case study: a responsive WordPress rebuild with SEO redirects
GD Cars is an independent used car dealer whose website had fallen behind the way people actually shop for a car: on a phone, in the evening, comparing three forecourts at once. We rebuilt the site on WordPress with a responsive design and, just as importantly, mapped every old URL to its new home so the search traffic the dealer already had did not disappear on launch day.
The challenge
The old site was not built for mobile. Stock pages needed pinching and side-scrolling, buttons were too small to tap, and enquiry forms were awkward on a phone. For a used car dealer that is lost leads, not a cosmetic problem.
The site had built up search rankings and inbound links over years. A rebuild that changed every URL without redirects would have thrown that away and handed the traffic to the dealer down the road.
The dealer needed to update stock, prices and pages without waiting on a developer.
What we did
We rebuilt the site on WordPress with a responsive theme, so one site serves phone, tablet and desktop with readable text, tappable buttons and forms that work with a thumb.
Before launch we crawled the old site, listed every indexed URL and built a 301 redirect map to the equivalent new page: stock pages, about, contact, finance and the odd blog post. Old links and rankings carried over instead of hitting 404s.
On-page SEO was set up as part of the build: titles, descriptions, headings and clean URLs, with stock managed in WordPress so the dealer runs the site day to day.
Services used
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