​The importance of local search / Google My Business

We’ve recently conducted research on the impact of local search in the UK automotive dealer sector, and was surprised to find that many Google My Business (GMB), or the re-branded Google Business Profiles, have not been set up correctly or fully optimised.

GMB is the number one way in which local consumers find local businesses, providing high quality referral traffic and generating 35% of the leads that visit your dealership. No other channel generates more phone calls or leads for the dealership.

GMB is the most precious real estate on the web outlining your business. It is imperative that your Google score is over 4.0, as this provides a great barometer of customer service and can be the difference of the consumer visiting your dealership or a competitor. There are many easy and tactical ways to increase the score through reputation management by introducing QR codes onto the sales advisors’ desks- no better time to ask for a review than when a consumer has just purchased their shiny new vehicle!   

Updating your vehicle range through products is a great way in which you could drive traffic into the website for consumers to shop for a specific model. Remember to include the image and the price, and from today, you can also add your used stock feed, so that on a mobile device, you have a SRP and a VDP for every vehicle in your stock feed. It is important that you include a UTM tag on the link in your feed that links back to your website so that you can see those visitors who came from GMB.

Dealers haven’t taken the time to make their business stand out. The average franchised car dealer is missing product, offers and a video walk around. Adding promotions such car of the week, a service offer and promoting your EV strategy, linking back to well optimised web pages will help as GMB listings are ordered by SEO strength. GMB is an organic ranking tool that is a reflection of your website, each supporting the other.

If you need help transforming your business, want to receive better visibility and do more business whilst improving the efficiency of your marketing budget by spending less on PPC, then please get in touch – we are happy to have a business chat on all things automotive. 

#seo #marketing #business #autodealers

Ian Godbold

BackComment