How your website reads in search results

Every page of your website already has a title and a description written for search. For example, a vehicle page is titled "Used 2019 Honda Accord EX for sale in Orlando, FL", the way people type the search. You do not have to do anything to get that.

If you want different words, the Search button in the visual builder lets you write your own.

See what would help first

The Website page has a Search section with a card called How your site looks to search engines. It reads your own site and lists, most important first:

• what needs fixing, such as a main location with no city or state (your titles cannot say where you are), no phone number, or cars published without a photo;
• what could be better, such as a generic home page description, an empty About text, cars with no price or description, or pages you made that have no search description;
• what is already good.

Every line that is not green has a link to the one screen that fixes it. The card checks what your site says about itself. It does not measure where you rank, and nobody can promise you a ranking.

Open the Search control

1. Go to Website and open the visual builder.
2. Click Design in the top bar (or Site design at the top of the editing panel), then Edit search results under Search results.

Every field is optional. An empty field means your site writes that line itself, and the grey text in the field shows what it writes. Like everything else in the builder, your changes go live when you click Publish, and they are saved with each version so you can restore them.

Your main pages

Home, Inventory, Financing, Trade-in, Reviews, About and Contact each take a title and a description.

• The title is used exactly as you type it. Your dealership name is not added for you, so include it if you want it there.
• Search engines show about 60 characters of a title and about 160 of a description. The counter under each field tells you when the end may be cut off.
• If your About, Contact, Financing, Trade-in or Reviews page has its own search fields filled in (under Pages), those win over what you type here.

Every vehicle page, written once

You cannot write a title for each car by hand, so the vehicle pages take a pattern: a line with variables in braces that your site fills in for each car.

Example: {year} {make} {model} {trim} | {price} | {dealer} becomes "2019 Honda Accord EX | $24,995 | Sunset Motors".

As you type, the line under the field shows the result for one of your real cars. When a car has no value for a variable (no trim, no price), the variable and the punctuation around it disappear, so you never get a title ending in a stray "|".

A sold car always keeps its own "Sold" title and description. Your pattern is never used to advertise a car nobody can buy.

If you mistype a variable, the field tells you which one, and the builder will not publish until it is fixed.

Filtered listing pages

Your site makes pages such as "Used Toyota" or "SUVs" from your inventory. They take a pattern too, with {subject} (for example "Used Toyota Camry"), {count}, {city}, {state} and {dealer}.

On those pages the filter sidebar leaves out the filter the page is about (no Make filter on the Toyota page, no Body type filter on the SUVs page), since the page already decides it; every other filter narrows the page as usual. On a price page such as "Under $20,000", a shopper can still set their own lowest price, or a lower highest price, inside that band. Changing a filter keeps the sort and the list or grid view the shopper picked.

Hide a page from search engines

For any page under Pages (a staff-only offer, a landing page for one ad), your About and Contact pages included:

1. Open the page under Website → Pages.
2. Open SEO (search engine listing).
3. Tick Hide this page from search engines and save.

The page still opens for anyone with the link and stays in your menu. It is left out of your sitemap and asks search engines not to list it. This applies as soon as you save, without publishing.