Car Buying Website & SEO: How We Halved Broken Motor’s Ad Spend

Broken Motor buys unwanted, damaged and broken vehicles, from insurance write-offs and MOT failures to non-runners and scrap, with free home collection and instant payment. With more than forty years in the motor trade and thousands of vehicles bought every year, they are very good at the hard part: valuing a car fairly and collecting it without fuss. What they came to us with was a different problem. Almost all of their leads were rented.

The challenge: leads you have to keep paying for

Broken Motor were spending a small fortune on Google Ads every month, and quietly worried they could never stop. The maths was the trap most businesses fall into: the moment you pause the ads, the leads stop. All that traffic was rented, not owned, and the rent kept going up.

On top of that, this was not a template job. To give a seller an instant, accurate quote, the site needed a live link to the government vehicle database, so a customer can type in their registration and pull back the right vehicle straight away. Behind that sat a custom-built back end to handle the valuation, the offer and the collection booking in one clean flow. Complex to build, but essential to how the business actually works.

What we did

Two things, in the right order.

First, we built the site properly. Fast, clear, and structured so search engines and AI tools can actually understand what Broken Motor does and who it is for. The registration-plate valuation tool sits front and centre, and the sell-your-car journey is stripped back to three obvious steps: enter your reg, accept the quote, book free collection. Clarity is not just a nice-to-have here. When someone is selling a broken car, the business that makes the decision easiest wins.

Second, we went to work on the organic side, the free traffic that keeps arriving long after you stop paying. Proper technical foundations, pages built around what people actually search for when they want to sell a damaged or non-running vehicle, and content structured so it earns rankings rather than renting them.

The result

Over time, the numbers moved the right way. We cut Broken Motor’s Google Ads spend by around half, while their organic traffic climbed. Same flow of leads, a lot less rent.

That is the quiet win most businesses miss. Paid ads are a tap you can never turn off. Good SEO and a clear, well-built website are an asset you own. One costs you every single month. The other pays you back.

The lesson for any business renting its leads

If your enquiries stop the second you stop paying, you do not have a marketing problem, you have an ownership problem. Ads have their place, especially early on, but a business built entirely on rented traffic is exposed. Build the asset alongside the ads, and over time you can turn the tap down without turning the leads off.

That is exactly what we did for Broken Motor, and it is a conversation worth having if it sounds familiar.

Leaking money on ads that stop working the moment you pause them? Book a 30-minute call with Dan and we will show you where the ownable wins are.