Site structure question

[wparlaman]

Hello Everyone,

I have a question regarding site structure and I would like to mastermind it with everyone.

So I am optimizing a website for a Ford Dealership in Boston, MA.

The way the site architecture is set up is as follows:

Home >>>> New Inventory >>> Inventory Page (with search refinement choices)

After you refine your search (lets say we choose a Ford F150 in white) it shows a page with images, price information and specs. (Nothing the bots or users can sink their teeth into)

My thoughts are to create category pages for each Ford model with awesome written content and THEN link to the inventory pages.

So it would look like this:

Home >>> New Inventory >>> Ford 150 Awesome Category Page>>>>Ford F150 Inventory Page

I would work hard at getting these category pages to rank for the vehicle for our GEO targeted locations.

Here is my questions:

Would you be annoyed to first land on a category page with lots of written text, reviews images and videos first and then link off to the inventory page.

Or would you prefer to go right from the new inventory page to the actual inventory page and start looking for vehicles?

Thanks you so much,

Bill

[icecarats]

I like your plan from a relevance standpoint. Speaking from my gut I think it would work; purchasing a new vehicle is rarely a 'hurry up let me get to the buy button already' situation. That's a lot of money to most people, so I think the conventional wisdom of 'get them to the funnel right away' might not be appropriate to this situation. People are going to hit the site for two reasons from what I can tell 1)Feature Research/Do I want to buy this, which your rich category approach above supports. 2)Price Check/Inventory Check. I'm going to assume you can't buy these online, and that a person has to walk into the dealership to buy something. In the second case, it's possible that price seekers might resent that extra click, but I'm guessing if you made it very obvious where they would have to go that would be offset by the better relevance/information given by the expanded category pages.