Here are a few local marketing facts for you, courtesy of Google:
- 4/5 consumers use search engines to find local businesses.
- 69% of searches involve a specific location.
- 78% of these searches eventually transition into an offline buying process.
With these stats in mind, be honest with yourself – are you covering all of your bases to help your dealership dominate the local market?
At the VERY least, you need to claim your business on search engines like Google. A Google My Business (GMB) profile is an important part of your SEO foundation. It includes, at the most basic level, your dealership’s name, address, and phone number. This is what allows your dealership to earn an organic ranking in search results, and it also allows future customers to easily find you, contact you, visit your website, leave a review, and more. Your GMB profile is the strongest indicator to Google that your dealership has a physical location, and accurate information in your profile improves the chances that your dealership will be offered as a Google map result.
It isn’t enough to simply have a profile in order to outrank your competition. To do this, you should populate your GMB profile as completely as possible. It can include store hours, pricing information, ratings, reviews, images – provide as much as you can in order to best utilize this crucial platform. That information gets picked up by other search engines as well as third party channels like Yelp, helping to bring you more traffic.
Also very important – creating business listings on public reputation sites like Yelp, Facebook, FourSquare, and more. These will help to boost your ranking in local searches and boost your website’s domain authority. Keep information up-to-date in order to build trust with users – search engines will also credit you for providing consistently updated information about your business.
Now, some reasons why your location claim is so crucial. Search engines know where users are located. If your dealership location is not accurately indexed, search engines won’t be able to match ideal customers with your business. This is why it’s important to lock down the EXACT address of your dealership location, and keep that consistent on all of the platforms in which it appears – the difference between “street†and “st.†can lose results for your dealership. The better and more clearly your location is marked, the more traffic and visibility search engines can give you.
If your dealership has more than one location, it is best practice that each location has its own website with a unique URL and local-specific keywords on the site – the name of that city or community, specific events or product offerings that are exclusive to that dealership, and more. This will increase your business’ search engine visibility AND drive traffic that is accurately targeted to the right places.
A last major point to consider – positive customer reviews can do wonders not only for the success of your business but also for your dealership’s search engine optimization. It is in your best interest to encourage positive customer reviews – try out a review request program at your dealership. The easier you make it for your customers, the more likely they will be to follow through. When customers use keywords that relate to your dealership, it increases your online visibility AND encourages new customers to buy from you.
Local advertising is nothing to brush aside. Don’t give customers away to your local competitors – utilize all of the resources that you can to capture your audience.