Rev Up Your Visibility: Local SEO Audit for Car Dealerships!
Podcast Transcript:
With more and more updates to the Google algorithm, Google AI overviews, and all the things that are happening in search engines, specifically, how do you stand out at the local level when your customers are searching for you nearby? That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about on this video, where we’re going to go in together and we’re going to do a live Google business profile audit, as well as, Google maps visibility and talk to you about how we are optimizing profiles to make sure that they are visible when customers are searching locally.
All right, let’s get started.
Hey, welcome to another episode of Local SEO Unlocked. My name is Christian Hustle. Pleasure to have you here. If you are new to the channel, hit that subscribe button, hit that like button as it’ll help us promote the video with other users on YouTube. And With that said, let’s just jump in because it really is getting harder to stand out on places like Google, Google maps, because the algorithms are getting smarter, right?
They’re AI powered and, and all the things that we hear on the media. So how the hell do you stand out? How the hell do you stay at the top and do you drive more customers? So I’m going to switch over to the computer and I’m going to show you this dealership. This was March, 20, 2024. Uh, so it’s been just a few months and this is in a very competitive area as you can see Um, I can actually zoom in zoom out.
You can see a lot of red which means we are off top 10, right? This is way past top 10 means hard to find and as of today as i’m updating this in the end of may You can see much better standing right? This is a downtown area very competitive bunch of car dealerships nearby And yet we are achieving that top one top two even top three farther out beating competitors So this is the kind of results that I want you to set in your mind as possible Even in 2024, this isn’t trying to hack Google, right?
That’s not what we’re trying to do. We are following guidelines, but there are certain things that Google may not like for you to know, because every time a ranking factor is discovered and shared wildly, People start abusing it. So it’s not like we’re going against google guidelines It’s just they may be hiding the truth a little bit here on this one So let me guide you through some of the things that we are looking and then we jump into the google business profile So here we have average ranking right for this specific dealership and we are looking at things like review rating We’re looking at number of reviews, but more importantly, share a voice.
This means how positive are their review sentiment? What are people saying about the dealership? Are people enjoying it? Is this something that they’re positively talking about it, or it’s just a horrendous experience every time they visit the dealership. This is something that we work with our clients very closely, because if we do see here a average of 80 percent or even lower than that, there’s a lot of work to do on the, on the location side.
Right. If we are on the 90s, hopefully high high 90s, we’re in a great spot and google is going to like to see that Another thing that we are definitely going to keep an eye on is categories business categories in google business profile It’s a very strong ranking factor And you’ll be surprised a lot of car dealerships and a lot of other different verticals and industries use the wrong one And in the example of car dealerships, we’ve been testing a lot of You know if you’re talking about a kia for chevy dealership There are some categories that will let you select a four dealership and that’s good, right?
It’s it’s a perfect fit if you want to rank for four dealership But if you want to rank for other things, maybe you know used cars in this example that i’m going to talk about today Maybe you should consider playing with that first category Particularly in this area what we have done is obviously with the partnership with these dealerships that we work with You Is figure out how can we connect the primary category to their inventory?
So let me give you an example. When there’s plenty of new cars on the, on the lot that are not pre sold and they’re just sitting there, we swap that primary category for Ford dealership. And we focus all our efforts for that month or two or three into new car keywords. Now, as we saw a few years ago, there was a slow new car inventory.
We switched everything to used cars, including the primary category was used car dealership. And we were able to rank for used cars instead of ford as much because obviously ford it’s in the name, right? It’s part of the the business name is going to rank no matter what So if you test that and you switch it over to used car dealerships, you may see some additional rankings visibility and clicks Coming from people who are searching for used inventory.
So that’s another great little tip But with that, let’s jump into another audit that we do right before we go into the business profile. And by the way, you can go to wubound. com slash local SEO audit tool. And you get access to this specific report that I’m about to share with you. You just basically simply fill out the name, right?
Whatever it is for dealership. And then just select the one from the list and run that real report. Now, this is what this report looks like. So it’s going to look into things like your link authority, the rankings, local listings, reputation management. It’s going to do a really comprehensive GVP audit in social channels.
Now, this is an active client. They’ve been with us for several months. Obviously, it’s all green, which is what we want to see, which is what we want to show you. Um, if you run this report, don’t be surprised, especially if you’re not doing local SEO as a strategy, as part of your strategy, which hopefully I, I hope you do, but if you’re not, don’t be surprised to see some yellows and some reds.
That’s good, right? Like you you found areas of improvement to really optimize your location All right, let’s jump into google business profile now so we can talk about the back end What are the things that we are doing here and for this same example? I’m gonna go into edit this profile and we’re gonna look at some things The first thing that we’re gonna look at is business category as you can see we switch it to use car dealer Which really help with visibility for car dealership use cars use cars business Near me, etc.
So even though this is just specific to use card dealer It really boosted impressions and I will show you what it looks like on google search console as well Probably on the next video. We’ll talk more in depth into that But it is all connected to really think about that business category, especially when you’re talking to corporate I know that they’re very picky with this primary category but if you come in with a strong business case and you show data on why you think that is better to You I mean, in this example, go for a used car dealer category versus a Ford dealer category.
Trust me, at the end of the day, we all want those impressions and we want those clicks. Now, description is something that we played with. We haven’t really attributed ranking improvements or traffic improvements to description. That just doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It definitely is important because one thing is, it’s optimizing for rankings and impressions and things like that.
But once you get that people will come to your profile and there has to be a really good description So this is one of those things where we’re not just optimizing for for robots We are optimizing for humans too because at the end of the day is a human taking the action getting the clicks Driving to your location.
So take description at a very Important level regardless of if it impacts your rankings or not I think it’s crucial to add it as well. You know, some of the other ones are pretty obvious I’m, just gonna skip through those, you know opening date phone numbers Website is one that I probably could spend several videos talking about it.
So website url Is basically where do you send a traffic when people find your email? Your business profile. What do you want to send them to when they click on your website now a lot of companies Just send them to their home page. Let them struggle. Let them, you know, find whatever they need and It’s going to take them several clicks who cares that’s one approach Our approach typically is to send them to a more specific page.
Let’s say that you have a A multi location brand you have multiple stores across the city or multiple cities And you have local pages i’m going to talk a lot more about local pages on a future video So i’ll drop the link in the description if we talk about local pages in a different video So I don’t want to go in too much in depth I’ll drop the link in the description if you want to go learn more about local location pages But the important part of this is that if this person is looking for a dealership In san antonio, you send them to the san antonio page on your website not to the home page because You Let’s say that you have six six dealerships across texas or across even san antonio They don’t need to go to the home page because they want the one that is nearby or they know what specific location They want to go to so it is a better customer experience But second search engines love it because you are giving them all the data.
There is about this specific location That will help you give more context get more keywords and overall give more content To google to read and learn more about this location So think about this one very specifically and if you want to learn more about that I’ll drop the link in the description social profiles another up and coming I don’t have case studies on this one, but we have started to see that google is using these profiles As one obviously proof of legitimacy, but two is displaying the links on search on search results So again the more questions Links that we can have on search results is the more real estate the more ways that people can find you And obviously not counting that people may be searching for you on those platforms as well So definitely make sure that you’re adding social profiles as well The next thing I want to talk about to you is location and areas because this one is a very interesting one This is something that for the last several years In our strategies, we have been adding zip codes to service areas.
Now, it is very hard to really pinpoint your rankings to this field, but we have had success. We’ve had tremendous case studies of success on visibility and traction and things like that. And either it’s adding the city that you’re servicing or specific areas. SIP codes, which are SEO reporting audit tools, and even Google business profile data will give you the SIP codes.
I would just grab these SIP codes that are triggering searches, are triggering visits, and add them to your service area. Because the more information you give Google, the better they are to know your business and to be able to rank you and give you a solution to that search. The next several things, business hours, special hours, I’m just gonna skip that.
Now, all the other fields are self explanatory. Fill out as much information as you can because it’s really going to help Google understand more about the location. Is not as SEO directly linked, so I’m just gonna skip them and I’m gonna give you another 10 minutes. Another example here of things that we like to do.
So the other thing that is highly recommended is if your dealership, if your business, you know, let’s say it’s a large center and you’re able to provide other types of services that may be considered different services, consider creating separate Google business profile listings. If you can have a different address, I mean, it may be the same address, but at least different suite number, different entity or different way of operating.
And if you can prove this to Google, you can create separate listings for each of these. So for example, you can have a listing for your service center. You can have a listings for your coalition center. You can have one for your service maintenance center. You know department you could even have one for your used department and then keep the new dealership side of things separate Now this gets very complicated as you know following guidelines and making sure that you don’t get your profile suspended But it is going to be a great way to network your entire hub your entire hub of services And really pass traffic from one to another and pass authority from one to another now Let’s start wrapping up because obviously this video went much longer than I anticipated But on a different video is where we talk about local pages or location pages And I just want to show you this example same property same dealership And even though we have all the algorithm updates going on on google And all the things happening on AI, this dealership is exploding in impressions.
One of the latest strategy was local pages. So that’s why I’m going to drop the link in the description for you to go check out that video, how we optimize local pages and how we bring them into Google business profile strategy to really achieve the growth that your dealership deserves. All right. Well, thank you so much for watching hit that subscribe button Give it a thumbs up as well share it with your colleagues or your boss and more importantly drop questions in the comments I love to read them.
Hopefully that triggers more ideas for more videos. All right. Well, thank you so much for watching I’ll catch you on the next one
