About SEO Car Websites

The short version

This started at a car lot, not an agency.

In 1996, Don Kelley left the franchise world and opened his own independent used car lot in North Carolina. The software independent dealers needed didn't exist, so his son Ryan - then a computer science student - wrote it. By 2002 the family had closed the lot and gone all-in on serving dealers, and we've done nothing else since.

I'm Matt Kelley, the second son. I joined in 2005, taught myself HTML and CSS in 2007 when independent dealers started needing websites, and I've personally built more than 750 of them since. My wife Brooke runs marketing - NC State business school, and the person dealers ask for by name when a campaign needs fixing. Landon Tallent handles sales and support, and if you read our Google reviews you'll notice dealers write about him the way people write about a good mechanic: by name, with stories.

SEO Car Websites is our national brand - the same four people, focused on one thing: automotive SEO and websites for independent dealers anywhere in the country.

Why dealers stay two decades

Some of our dealer relationships are old enough to vote. A few things explain that:

• You call, a person who knows your account answers. There is no ticket queue and no call center. There are four of us, and we like it that way.
• No contracts, ever. Month-to-month since day one. We keep customers by being worth keeping.
• We tell you when the cheap option is the right option. Plenty of dealers have called about the $999 plan and been told to start at $149. That honesty costs us money monthly and has paid for itself for twenty years.

The way we treat customers comes from our faith: do excellent work, tell the truth, and treat people the way we'd want to be treated. We don't always get it perfect. It's the standard we aim at every day.

We build with AI, and we say so

Plenty of agencies use AI and hide it. We use it and lead with it. AI handles the code basics and first drafts in every build - that's why custom work costs $149 a month here instead of thousands. The hours it saves go into the parts AI can't do: knowing your market, talking to you on the phone, and finishing every page by hand before it ships. Telling you how the work gets made is part of telling the truth about the work.

Why a dealer in Texas or Ohio should trust a team in North Carolina

Because the work is the same everywhere, and the research is specific every time. Every engagement starts with a phone call and a deep look at your market - your competitors, your buyers, your Search Console data. The playbook is public on this site; what you're paying for is twenty years of knowing which parts matter for a lot like yours, and a team that actually does the work every month.

And because the receipts are public: here's what happened when a dealership near Charlotte handed us their search picture in February 2026.