I know there are a lot of people calling you to advertise on their website. Some offer it so cheap or for free that it’s hard to say no. The problem with signing up and having a link from those websites is since they are new or low traffic sites their PR (pagerank) will be low, most often lower than your PR, which brings down your PR. PR is an algorithm that Google uses to examine the link structure of your website and determine which pages are the most important and relevant to the search being conducted. This is a subject for another post that I’ll discuss.
Some promise the moon and stars with a cadillac price so you think it must be worth it. Once you realize what a mistake you’ve made signing up, your locked into a contract.
The truth is that there are 4 main players (in order of the most traffic): RVTraderOnline.com, RVUSA.com, RVT.com and RVSearch.com. So besides your own website, which is where you inventory absolutely needs to be listed, those four websites need to have you and your inventory on them as well.
Now, RVTraderOnline.com will set up pages that you can link to that will list the inventory you have with them in their format. Most often the look and feel of those pages don’t match your own so they don’t “flow” with your website and may confuse visitors. Plus, I believe they charge extra per month for that service. RVTraderOnline.com does accept a nightly inventory feed from RVUSA.com.
RVUSA.com on the other hand provides virtual inventory pages that look just like your website, in fact, visitors won’t even know they’ve left your website as seen on www.ptrv.net unless they look at the URL. It’s very seamless, doesn’t cost anything additional to set up or maintain and the best part is you only have to enter your inventory one time. As soon as you list a unit it’s displayed on your website, on RVUSA.com and on the applicable 60 mfg / model specific websites in the RVUSA.com network.
RVT.com does not provide inventory pages that I’m aware of but they do accept an inventory feed each night from RVUSA.com as well so once again, you only have to enter your inventory one time.
RVSearch.com also does not provide inventory pages that I’m aware of but they accept an inventory feed from RVUSA.com each night, which as I’m sure you can imagine is a real BIG time saver for you or the person you pay to enter your inventory online.
If you’ve got your inventory listed on your website and as many of those 4 websites listed above as possible, you should be all set. I’m not saying run out and sign up for all of them tomorrow. I’m saying they get the majority of the “RV” traffic. You might sign up for RVSearch.com and find it’s not working for you. Give it a good 90 days to determine it’s effectiveness. If you’re not locked into a contract, get out of it and try one of the others.
I hope this information clears any questions you have about who the big players are in the RV Industry online.
My 2 cents…
