Coastal Cars Select

Zero to 800 organic visits a month in six months

Industry

6 Month SEO Campaign

About

Taking on the campaign the website had no organic traffic at all and pushing Coastal Cars Select into a local powerhouse

Coastal Cars Select is a family-run used car dealership at Moffat Beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The team brings more than 35 years of combined industry experience to a yard that stocks utes, 4WDs, SUVs, sedans, hatchbacks and premium vehicles, backed by flexible finance through a panel of lenders, free trade-in valuations, warranty options and an on-site mechanical workshop. Buyers outside the region are served through interstate delivery anywhere in Australia.

The dealership’s promise is built on inspection rather than salesmanship. Every vehicle goes through a 150-point mechanical check and comes with a history report before it reaches the yard, and the workshop that inspects the cars is the same one that services them afterwards. Those are exactly the reassurances a used car buyer is searching for. The problem was that nobody searching for a used car on the Sunshine Coast was finding them.

Semrush recorded almost no organic visits and only a handful of ranking keywords, and the line had sat at zero for as long as the domain had been tracked. In a market dominated by franchise dealerships with national brands, dealer group budgets and decades of accumulated links, an independent yard was invisible by default.

The growth story

Search performance.

Oct 2024 – Sep 2026Monthly

Traffic

Organic, paid & branded search traffic

≈3.5klatest organic traffic

Keywords

Organic rankings & SERP feature visibility

Explore monthly values

Selected month

812

Monthly organic visits

420

Organic keywords ranking

Keywords in Google's top 10

The Challenge

Used car search on the Sunshine Coast is contested by some of the best-resourced websites in Australian retail. Franchise dealers for Toyota, Hyundai, MG and every other major marque carry manufacturer-backed domains, national inventory feeds and marketing budgets that an independent yard cannot match. Coastal Cars Select had a new domain, an Authority Score in single digits and no page that ranked for the terms its customers actually typed. The second problem was that the site had nothing for a buyer to read. Used car searches are full of questions about GST, consignment, servicing intervals and which ute to buy, and those questions are increasingly answered inside Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini before a searcher ever reaches a dealer. Coastal Cars Select needed pages that could rank, and pages that could be cited.

Built a search-led site architecture from a standing start, covering inventory, finance, warranty, trade-ins, servicing and delivery

Structured a buyer's guide blog around the questions Sunshine Coast car buyers ask Google and AI engines

Grew authority from nothing to 222 referring domains and 552 backlinks in six months

The Strategy

Build the footprint from nothing

There was no existing ranking to protect, so the first phase was about giving Google something to rank. We mapped how Sunshine Coast buyers search for a used car and built a page for each intent: a Used Cars Sunshine Coast inventory hub with paginated stock, a Sell Your Car page for trade-ins and outright purchases, and dedicated pages for finance, warranty, interstate delivery and mechanical servicing. Model pages for the Ford Ranger and Mitsubishi Triton, the two most searched utes in the region, gave the yard a way to compete for high-intent vehicle searches that franchise dealers usually own outright.

Answer the buyer's questions

Used car buyers research before they visit, and much of that research now happens in AI answers as well as search results. We built a buyer’s guide blog around the questions people actually ask: whether there is GST on second-hand cars, whether selling a car is taxable income, how consignment works and which second-hand utes are worth buying. Each article was structured so a fact could be lifted cleanly by an AI engine, with the dealership’s inspection standard and service area as citable detail. Within six months, nine of the site’s pages were being cited in AI answers across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini.

Authority for a new domain

A new domain with no links does not rank, however good its pages are. A monthly link acquisition program built the profile from a standing start to 222 referring domains and 552 backlinks, lifting Semrush Authority Score to 10 and giving every new page a foundation to rank from. Technical work ran alongside it: the legacy .com domain was redirected to the .com.au site, indexing and internal linking were cleaned up, and page speed was tuned so that new pages were discovered and ranking within weeks.

Become our next success story

Coastal Cars Select went from zero organic visits to more than 800 a month, and from no rankings to 420, in six months against franchise dealers with a decades-long head start. If your business is starting from nothing or stuck behind bigger names, we know how to build the footprint that closes the gap. Let’s talk about what a strategy-led campaign could do for you.

ORGANIC TRAFFIC WENT FROM ZERO TO 812 VISITS A MONTH IN SIX MONTHS

420 KEYWORDS RANKING, 90 OF THEM IN GOOGLE'S TOP 10

NINE PAGES CITED BY CHATGPT, GEMINI, GOOGLE AI OVERVIEWS AND AI MODE

The Results

Six months on, a website that had never drawn organic traffic now brings in more than 800 visits a month. The line left zero in March 2026, climbed to around 500 a month by May, settled between roughly 300 and 400 through the winter months while the new pages bedded in, then stepped up to more than 700 in August and 812 in September, the highest point on the chart. The keyword footprint grew from a handful of terms to 420, and 90 of them sit in Google’s top ten, on a domain that did not rank for anything at the start of the year. Of the site’s Google positions, 3.1% already sit inside AI Overviews, and nine pages are cited in AI answers across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini. Around 440 of the monthly visits now come from people searching for the dealership by name: the brand is being looked for as well as found.