Tag: Organic Search

What You Need to Know About Google My Business and Store Visit Tracking

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Google My Business (GMB) has long been one of Google’s key tools for business listings. A verified and well-managed GMB listing makes your dealership easier to find online, lets you engage with customers through messages and Q&A, helps support your advertising performance and can improve your search visibility.

Google My business

But in addition to these benefits, recently Google took a pretty big step forward in making GMB significantly more valuable. That’s because Google My Business can also enable  dealers to receive store visits reporting, which helps tie Google advertising directly to in-store visits. This combination represents a powerful marketing attribution tool to improve your presence online and measure the marketing impact to your dealerships.

But taking advantage of this opportunity requires a few steps, and comes with a few caveats. Here are the key things to know:

1. Store Visits is highly impactful, but you need a Verified GMB Account to be eligible for it.

Store Visits insights represents very powerful advertising attribution. It will help you make smarter advertising decisions, in addition to helping you continue to bridge the online to in-store consumer experience. That said, activating Store Visits depends entirely on your dealership actually having a verified GMB account. It’s well worth the effort to ensure your GMB account is set up properly. After verifying your GMB account, you’ll also need to let us know the account email that it’s verified under. We’ll link your GMB account to a Google advertising account.

2. Verifying your GMB account isn’t always simple, but there’s a lot of help available to guide you through it.

GMB account verification involves a few steps. For instance, as part of the process you’ll need to request that Google send you an old-fashioned post card as part containing a code that needs to be entered into an online portal. It can also be tricky to gain control of a GMB account even if your dealership already has one set up.But the process is worth it. For help, Dealer.com Managed Services teams are well versed in GMB and can walk you through each step, while also helping ensure you have an effective strategy around your GMB listing. This includes Managed Social to help you monitor and respond to Google Reviews and post content as well as Managed SEO which helps you create business descriptions within GMB, upload images and adjust business hours, and Managed Content & Creative to help ensure your current offers are updated. Even if you don’t work with Dealer.com Managed Services, Google also offers some convenient downloadable resources to help you. Here are our favorites:

3. Not every dealer will be immediately eligible for store visits.
Although you’ll become eligible for Store Visits with a verified GMB account, the verification process doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get this new functionality right away. Google is rolling it out currently, and is promising that most dealerships will be eligible for Store Visits “soon.”

As a Google SMB Premier Partner, Dealer.com works with Google to ensure you can take full advantage of the advertising, search and social opportunities Google offers. New Store Visits offers the potential to see the value of these opportunities in a powerful new way. It’s well worth the effort to verify your GMB account.

For more, connect with us directly or download our best practices guide to Google My Business.

3 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Dealership Increase Search Ranking

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Dealer.com SEO

It’s not news that social media and SEO are invaluable to every dealership’s marketing strategy today. SEO has long been a critical element of search engine visibility, while social media, newer to the marketing scene, has become essential to a holistic digital strategy.

Perhaps what gets lost or continues to go unrecognized, however, is the increasingly important relationship between car dealer SEO and social media, how good content reaches far beyond social platforms, and that dealers need to think about an SEO and social strategy as one and the same.

While display and paid search advertising are designed to grab attention, SEO and social media, at least in this context, support brand visibility across traditional search engines and the social media platforms consumers are increasingly using to search for vehicles and dealerships.

Since it’s becoming more and more clear that one practice cannot succeed without the other, here are three ways a strong social media presence comprising high quality and frequently updated content that is informed by analytics can help your dealership’s search engine rankings improve.

1. Target a specific audience.

Social media has become more than just general community interaction.  Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, even YouTube allow dealers to target potential car buyers based on demographics, keywords and geographical location. Just like local SEO strategy, social posts should target a highly specific set of qualified, in-market shoppers in your region.

It’s not enough to create content, hit the post or tweet button, and hope the right people will see the message. If you want to reach the right shoppers and continue to build a following, make sure you’re poring over your social data to determine the appropriate targeting strategy.

2. Create relevant content.

Here’s an exercise: do a Google search for one of your favorite major brands and chances are its Facebook page, for example, ranks somewhere not too far from the top organic listing. That’s because high-quality, relevant content has tremendous SEO value.

What’s high-quality, relevant content? It’s engaging, informative posts, tweets, articles, captioned photos, and videos that target a specific audience.

But don’t stop there. Great social media content also means linking to supporting webpages and writing using keywords and geographic terms that relate to your business. When that content also links to your dealership’s website, it may, for example, reinforce your onsite advertising efforts and integrate with your SEO strategy to help improve search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

And one more thing. Use #hashtags when relevant. While they don’t directly affect SEO ranking, timely hashtags tactically increase awareness and engagement of your social content. They’re both content filtering tools and, sometimes, a chance to expand your brand reach by joining onto something trending on the internet that might be useful to your marketing efforts.

3. Integrate your advertising efforts.

Create content that promotes your dealership’s advertising strategy such as new vehicle launches, dealership events, comparison pages, and sales promotions. This content should always link shoppers to the website where the marketing initiatives are well detailed.

Speaking of links, while those from social posts are considered “no follow,” meaning they don’t directly influence SEO, they can still influence relevancy on SERPs. Search engines like active websites, those that are being clicked on and engaged with. The volume of increased links shared through social content boosts social signals, which positively impacts long-term search visibility and ranking. Links to your website in social content won’t push SEO value directly, but Google will notice this social-originated traffic. Exponential impact can come from outside user engagement and can lead to authoritative backlinks.

The search and social platforms we once thought as islands are now clearly part of one big digital ecosystem. The trick is to use each one effectively and with strategy interconnection so as to ensure you’re reaching as much of your target audience as possible without burning out on too much content generation. Stick to relevant content creation, one with applicable keywords, hashtags, and links, post frequently, and your dealership will be “buying” up more and more of that first SERP page real estate.

Bobby Bailey is the manager, Managed Social and Chris Nichols is the manager, SEO at Dealer.com