Cars.com Organic Growth Opportunities

Current Performance

• You rank for 5.7m organic keywords and drive 9.1m monthly organic visits (≈$9.4m in traffic value), supported by an Authority Score of 78—a strong signal of trust and ability to compete on head terms.
• Top queries skew heavily toward brand + high-intent marketplace terms like “cars.com”, “cars”, “used cars”, “cars for sale”, plus financing utility demand (“car loan calculator”, “auto loan calculator”).
• Traffic is concentrated in core hub pages: the homepage (~1.2m visits / 13%), /shopping (~335k / 3.7%), and /car-loan-calculator (~109k / 1.2%), with meaningful long-tail contributions from research model pages and price/location shopping pages.

Growth Opportunity

• You’re #1 in keyword coverage but only #3 in traffic; CarGurus leads with ~14.8m monthly visits on fewer keywords—your biggest upside is improving visibility per keyword (rank/CTR) on the terms you already cover.
• Double down on scalable, bottom-funnel templates that already work (e.g., model-year shopping pages, city/state SRPs, price-under pages, certified pre-owned, FSBO) to expand long-tail capture and consolidate rankings.
• Use your backlink base (13.9m backlinks from ~88k referring domains) to push more non-brand category pages (shopping/research/comparisons) into top positions via stronger internal linking, refreshed content, and SERP-focused page enhancements.

Assessment

You have a best-in-class footprint and authority, but you’re leaving demand on the table due to weaker traffic yield versus competitors. The opportunity is to systematically turn your massive keyword coverage into more top-3 rankings across high-intent shopping and research pages. AirOps can help you scale these content and optimization loops efficiently to close the traffic gap.