Car dealers must take advantage of the benefits provided by their Google Business Profile by leveraging local SEO to drive customers to their doorstep.
It’s expensive and inconvenient to ship a vehicle long distance. Unlike most small packages, cars, trucks, and SUVs aren’t easy to move around the world. This means most car dealers must focus on their local community to find their customers, and that means stronger visibility through local SEO, which can utilize the functions and information found in a Google Business Profile. Let’s explore.
Improves local search visibility
If your profile is complete, online users can find you much more easily than if it’s not. Once completed, the benefits start rolling in. Many searches include the term “near me” or the name of the city to help users find what they’re looking for in their local area. This means a fully optimized profile will help increase the chances your dealership will appear at the top of search results.
It’s also important to ensure your Google Maps presence is accurate. You want customers to easily find your dealership on their map. This presence makes it easy for your new customers to see where your dealership is located and how they can reach you to shop the vehicles that you’ve got for sale.
Leads are much better with local SEO
Your Google Business Profile has a strong influence over whether or not your dealership team will receive qualified or empty leads. Qualified leads are those that could actually turn into sales in your local area, but empty leads are those that the customer was unaware they connected to a dealership that isn’t in their local area. When you have more qualified leads, you’ll have the benefits of Click-to-Call Appointment Features and Promoting Inventory and Special Offers through the features available in your profile.
Stay on top of your reviews and ratings
Your profile has features that allow you to collect, respond to, and highlight some of your customer reviews. This means you can boost some of the most positive reviews for potential customers to see as soon as they begin connecting with your dealership. Most consumers check out the reviews for any business they are considering, and this goes double for car dealers.
Why are reviews so important? Many customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Before the use of online reviews, word-of-mouth was considered one of the best forms of advertising. Consider these reviews as the new form of this communication. Customers are seeing reviews from their neighbors, friends, and relatives and will take these recommendations more seriously than professional reviews.
Customer engagement is improved
An important function of your Google Business Profile is the ability of customers to ask questions directly to your dealership team through this profile. Your team can respond publicly, which could help other customers in the future. This feature can be extremely helpful to your customer, and your team.
Its also possible to chat with customers using Google’s messaging feature, ensuring communication and real-time answers to important questions. The sooner you can answer a question for a potential customer, the more likely they are to stay engaged with your dealership and avoid going to another location.
Data-driven analytics to improve marketing
Marketing and advertising can be extremely expensive. If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you need to understand your customers and their behavior. Your profile makes this possible with valuable data and reports, including the number of calls made, directions requested, and visits to your website. This can help shape your marketing strategies.
The data gained from your profile reports also allows your marketing team to understand which search terms are the most effective. This means revising the local SEO strategy to bring your pages to the top of search results to better optimize them. These strategies can be optimized for local searches, which improves their effectiveness.
It’s an affordable marketing tool
Your Google Business Profile has many benefits, including free inventory listing, making it one of the most affordable marketing tools available to you. This profile also helps you improve your return on investment with detailed analytics that shows which services drive the most engagement with your customers.
Your Google Business Profile is extremely important to your car dealership’s success. It’s one of the most impactful aspects of your local SEO and offers the tools to ensure your business is visible to your local audience. Does your profile need to be updated or improved? What are you waiting for?
