You’re just about ready to run out for an errand when you realize you aren’t even sure if the place you need to visit is open. You pull out your phone and Google the name of the establishment, and right on the search engine results page you are greeted with the name of the business, the customer rating, the hours, a click-to-call option, and more. You didn’t even have to go to their website to find this info; it was all right there for you in the blink of an eye. This is Google My Business, and it’s a vital component to the online presence of businesses and their SEO. So, what can Google My Business do for car dealers, and how can DealerFire help? Let’s go over why it’s important and how DealerFire can work with you to make your listing shine.
Not only will your customers be happy about the convenience your Google My Business (GMB) listing gave them while they tried to look you up—and in turn possibly reward you with their business—but Google also looks favorably upon companies using this feature. When it comes to SEO, you want Google to be giving you the thumbs up. A verified GMB presence will put you on the map—literally—with your business having better odds of showing up in search results and map results, which is ideal for local customers.
We’ve gone over some of the things you can do with Google My Business, and we want to dig deeper into how you can see the positive results of your GMB listing as well as what DealerFire can do to make your listing remain relevant and vital to consumers’ car-buying experiences.
Dealers are able to have three Google My Business listings: Sales, Service, and Parts. Once these listings are claimed and verified, DealerFire can help your dealership set up, maintain, and update your Google My Business listing, keeping you in good SEO standing and helping to ensure shoppers in your area remain informed.
When your business hours change for whatever reason, even if just temporarily, we can get your listing updated to reflect the correct hours. This became especially important during the COVID-19 crisis as businesses closed or adjusted their hours. Customers rely on their Google search results to provide accurate and updated information. Alerting your customers to closures or adjusted business hours is vital.
If you have a new special going on in any given month, we’ll create a graphic and make a post about it, which can drive customers directly to your website as well as display that post like an advertisement on the search engine results page. DealerFire will upload new posts 3-5 times per month, whether it’s new sales, new models in stock, events at your dealership, or anything else to spotlight what’s current. Google’s categories for these posts include Add Update, Add Event, Add Offer, and Add Product. These GMB posts not only alert people of the goings-on at your dealership right from the search engine results page, but they can also increase traffic to your website and potentially increase leads.
Your Google My Business listing also includes the opportunity to share photos from your dealership. Some of these are generated by customers, but the listing owner and manager may add photos as well, which is another service DealerFire can provide.
Obviously, it is important to see results from all of this, and the GMB Insights page within the dashboard provides data that demonstrates just how often and for what reasons searchers are engaging with your listing, which we can use to guide our strategy. We can even look at the views and clicks of GMB posts, as well as track which posts led to which pages with UTM tracking in Google Analytics.
If you want to know what queries are bringing searchers to your GMB listing, the Insights page provides answers. Optimized GMB listings can make your dealership show up for a variety of search terms. We’re talking in the hundreds or potentially thousands of different unique queries, including the OEM brand name, the specific dealership name, “(make) (model) for sale,” “(brand name) near me,” “(dealership name) (city) (state),” and even your dealership name plugged in with a nearby city. The Insights page can provide specific numbers on which search terms were used, how many times, and listed in the order of most-common to least-common search terms. Three optimized listings—Sales, Service, and Parts—can make you appear for many related terms being searched for each aspect of your dealership.
The GMB Insights area can also provide information on how many viewers your listing is getting overall in Search and in Maps. Furthermore, you can see how many people visited your site from your listing which, like paid ads, you can consider another use to measure click-through rate (CTR). The first image below shows about 62,200 views of this dealership GMB listing between May 26, 2020, and June 20, 2020, with about 2,180 site visits. That’s a CTR of 3.50%, which is a solid rate considering that, according to Google, a good CTR on their search network is generally around 1% or higher for paid ads. It can get even higher sometimes, with the second image below demonstrating a CTR of 17.74% with its 32,300 total views and 5,730 site visits during the same time period.
It is important to have an up-to-date and accurate listing on Google My Business in order to inform your customers about basic operations as well as what’s currently happening at your dealership. DealerFire can assist you with this and deliver clear results which we can track thanks to Google’s Insights page and other tools. If you would like to learn more about how we can provide GMB services for your dealership, please contact us today.