We just finished digesting the 2009 Sorgenfrei Website Builder Rankings – 2009 Auto Dealer Site Trend Report. There are a lot of important takeaways here, about search engine optimization, automotive sites and auto sales.

Citing Automotive News light vehicle sales data, the report notes that retail light vehicle sales in the U.S. were down 21.2 percent in 2009, compared with a 2008 that in itself was disappointing. Competition for the 11.5 million vehicle units J.D. Power and Associates has projected sold in 2010 “will be intense as we slowly climb out of this recession and increasingly, the battle for their attention will be fought online,” reports Sorgenfrei.

The second in an annual series, the 2009 report looks at 12 vehicle brands in 20 major U.S. markets, based on output from 2400 sites built by 134 suppliers, and include 1,330,296 indexed pages of results. Rather than directly studying the value these sites deliver to consumers, the point of the paper is to examine the adeptitude of dealer site builders in delivering results for their clients. Upon determining from Hitwise that Google is responsible for 71.6 percent of all online searches via search engines, and that 21 percent of all traffic to the automotive category came from Google as of November 2009, the study became about Google rankings in search results.

Some determinations – or at least conjectures – were made about Google’s secret ranking algorithm:

* That it is constantly being tweaked

* The correlation between the raw number of a site’s indexed pages and placement performance is weak

* It might be that Google’s algorithm takes into account volume, importance / strength and consistency of links.

Google search results location is more important now than one year ago, according to a study by Searchlight Digital. The points it made were that 49 percent of all consumers click on the first listing in the organic results. The top 5 links are clicked by 82 percent, and 96 percent of all click-throughs come from the first page of results. For a website to display on page two or later (listing number 11 or later)  in the Google search results is the kiss of online death.

The five vendors that delivered the most first-page (top 10) search results for their automotive clients, in order of rank were:

Dealer.com, with 389 top 10 placements

The Cobalt Group (Dealix, UsedCars.com), with 159 top 10 placements

Cars.com, with 137 top 10 placements

Source Interlink Media ( MotorTrend, Automobile Magazine), with 85 top 10 placement

Reynolds Web Solutions (part of Reynolds and Reynolds, owner of CarLocate.com), with 84 top 10 placements.

Of these top five, all but Source Interlink Media maintained their 2008 rankings. Source displaced AutoTrader.com from the number four spot.

Narrowing it down to ranking for Top Five placements, the rankings in order were Dealer.com, The Cobalt Group, Cars.com, Reynolds, and DealerSkins. In looking at the number one results spot, Dealer.com still remained number one, Cobalt maintained second place, but the three, four and five spots went to BZ Results, Izmocars, and Dealerskins.

When looking at the percentage of each vendor’s overall placements that landed in the number one spot, Izmocars took first place, though its number of top spot placements were only nine.

In summary, the 2009 Auto Dealer Site Trend Report projected cutthroat competition for this year’s auto buyers, and a weakening correlation of indexed pages over last year’s study.

“Our analysis of the Top 10, Top 5 and Top Spot placements show Dealer.com as the most proficient vendor in getting their clients included high on the first page of Google’s results,” the report summary stated.

Here are the top 20 vendors with top 10 placements, in order of rank:

1. Dealer.com

2. The Cobalt Group

3. Cars.com

4. Source Interlink Media

5. Reynolds Web Solutions

6. AutoTrader.com

7. BZ Results

8. TK Carsites

9. Dealerskins

10. Motorwebs

11. Edmunds.com

12. Izmocars

13. ADP

14. EBiz Autos (actually tied for #13)

15. Yahoo

16. XIGroup

17. Search Optics

18. Autofusion

19. GSMarketing

20. AutoOne Media

Download your own free PDF of this report here.