What is here.
Automotive SEO ROI calculator
Combined gross per unit, close rate on web leads, non-branded organic leads and the real cost of the search line. Returns break-even in units, return multiple and cost per unit acquired, with optional fixed ops fields.
Run the calculator →Advertising budget benchmark
Total spend and units sold against the NADA Data 2025 averages: $586,246 a year, $739 per new vehicle, and a four-line split where three search channels take 60.6% of everything.
Check a budget →Why these two, and why they are free.
Both tools exist because the same conversation kept happening. A dealer asks what SEO should cost, or whether it is worth it, and the honest answer depends on four numbers the store already holds and one number the vendor is usually unwilling to state. Nobody was doing that arithmetic in the open, so the sales conversation ran on assertion in both directions.
Publishing the arithmetic removes the part of the negotiation that should not be a negotiation. A store that can calculate its own break-even before a call is a store that cannot be sold a projection, which is a fair trade for whatever the transparency costs.
Neither tool collects anything. There is no email gate, no result held back behind a form, and nothing is transmitted to any server. The figures entered stay in the browser and are gone when the tab closes. A tool that demands an address before returning a number is a lead form wearing a calculator's clothes, and it is worth being clear that these are not that.
The benchmarks come from NADA Data 2025 and are printed on the page beside the result rather than held as a proprietary dataset, so the comparison can be checked against the source instead of taken on trust.
- Not a forecast
- Neither tool projects growth or applies a vendor multiplier. They compute what the entered numbers imply, and nothing else.
- Not a lead capture
- No email address is asked for and no result is held back behind a form. The audit is offered on the page and is a separate decision.
- Not a substitute for the reads
- The hard input in both is one most stores cannot produce without looking: the non-branded lead split, and the real SEO allocation inside a platform contract.
- Not benchmarks for every business
- NADA describes franchised new-vehicle dealerships. Independents, service-only shops and powersports stores should read them as directional.
The pages behind the arithmetic.
Each tool has a written argument underneath it. The calculators are the short version.
- Automotive SEO ROI sets out the full calculation: why branded organic has to come out of the numerator, why last-click attribution systematically under-reports this channel, the payback curve by month, and the four conditions where the return case does not hold at all.
- What dealership SEO costs covers the other side, including published market rates and how to put competing proposals into the same shape before comparing them.
- Where the advertising budget goes works through the whole NADA picture rather than the search lines alone, which is the context the benchmark tool assumes.
- Car dealership SEO is the hub for the work itself, and pricing is published openly, so the denominator in any of this arithmetic is never in question.
Both tools stall on the same input.
Non-branded organic leads, and the real SEO allocation inside the platform contract. The baseline audit produces the first one and tells you what to ask for to get the second.