Recently, our COO and Google Business Profile (GBP) Platinum Product Expert, Greg Gifford, hosted a live webinar session where he audited real dealership listings and websites in real time. The goal was to uncover common mistakes, share quick wins, and highlight best practices that local businesses, especially car dealers, can apply to their own digital presence.

Scroll on to see the most important takeaways and the transcript of the session:

Key Takeaways

Here are the most important takeaways from the session:

1. UTM Tracking is Non-Negotiable

Many dealers still don’t use UTM parameters correctly on their Google Business Profile links. Without UTMs, Google Analytics often mislabels traffic as “direct,” leaving you with incomplete data.

Best practices:

• Always include at least source and medium.
• Use organic (lowercase) as the medium—not “referral.”
• Stay consistent with capitalization across campaigns.

2. Use Local Call Tracking Numbers Correctly

Call tracking only works when implemented properly. Avoid toll-free numbers on your GBP.

What to do:

• Use a local tracking number.
• Add your real local number as an alternate in GBP to keep NAP consistency.

3. Take Advantage of Department Profiles

Car dealers have a unique opportunity: separate GBP profiles for sales, service, and parts.

Benefits include:

• Accurate department hours.
• Review separation (service frustrations won’t affect sales ratings).
• Direct contact numbers that reduce call transfers.

4. Reviews Are PR, Not Customer Service

Your review responses influence future buyers, not just the reviewer.

Tips for review management:

• Keep replies short and professional.
• Avoid long explanations—customers won’t read them.
• Never shift blame or request a callback (you already have their info).

5. Optimize Your “Leave a Review” Process

The easier you make it, the more reviews you’ll get.

Best practices:

• Add a “Leave Us a Review” page to your site navigation.
• Use direct links that open the review pop-up.
• Route customers to the right department (sales or service).

6. Don’t Waste Google Posts

Google Posts are underused by most dealerships.

How to get it right:

• Use clear, properly sized images.
• Write attention-grabbing first lines (only the preview shows).
• Post offers, events, and updates—not single vehicles.
• Use holiday hours instead of posts for schedule changes.

7. Website Experience Still Matters for Local SEO

Your GBP drives traffic to your site—so a weak website hurts performance.

Key fixes:

• Remove pop-ups and autoplay video backgrounds.
• Add 1,300+ words of homepage content.
• Optimize title tags with brand, location, and relevant keywords.

8. Select Categories Strategically

Categories control where you show up in search.

Dealer setup guide:

• Main profile = sales categories.
• Service profile = service categories only.
• Parts profile = parts categories only.

Final Word: Don’t Leave Easy Wins on the Table

Google gives car dealers unique tools—like department profiles, category optimization, and review management strategies—that most industries don’t have.

The bottom line: small details add up. Correct tracking, stronger review strategies, optimized posts, and better websites all work together to improve your dealership’s visibility and customer experience.

👉 Want help auditing your dealership’s Google Business Profile? Contact Us and we’ll show you where the biggest opportunities are hiding.

Transcript

Alright. I had to make a quick adjustment. I had my my lighting was misplaced, so I was getting glared at, and I didn't wanna, be messing with that live on the stage. So without further ado, let's bring up our COO, Greg Gifford. Again, GBP platinum product expert. Greg, how's it going today?

I am excellent. How are you? I'm excited for this. This should be fun.

Yeah. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Well, let's you know, without further ado, let's kinda dive into it. I know we have a number of presubmitted Google business profiles. And, again, if you're watching and you didn't submit already just in that q and a, drop in your business name and your, city, and we're gonna try to get to it in addition to the ones that have already been, submitted to us previous to this.

So, Greg, I believe you have screen sharing capabilities, and I know you've got screen sharing capabilities.

And I know you've got the capabilities to audit some GBP. So, let's go ahead and and get into it.

You know what? I'm gonna do it on this screen over here so everyone doesn't see all of the extra junk on my desktop because that's not pretty to look at.

So okay. So to kick this off, just so everyone understands what we're doing here, we're gonna be doing live audits. Basically, I'm going to look through the Google Business Profile and potentially the homepage of the site that the profile links to and just point out things that are either really, really wrong or things that could just be better.

He mentioned that I'm a platinum product expert with Google Business Profile. So what that means is, for anyone that doesn't understand that, Google has a public support forum for every product that it has. And once someone volunteers enough time answering questions because the forums aren't staffed by Google. They're staffed by volunteers that just know the products.

So once you've answered enough questions consistently, you get invited into the product expert program. And, really, all it does is it gives you a little badge on your signature so that the people that are getting their answer see that you have been endorsed by Google. Basically, the badge lets people know Google said this person knows their stuff. So I'm the only Google business profile product expert in automotive.

I'm also a platinum level product expert. So once you're in the program, you can escalate in level if you continue to do things well and often enough. And anything above the gold level, you have an NDA signed with Google and a weekly call with the Google Business Profile team. So every Friday morning, I have a half hour call with the Google Business Profile team so we can talk about current issues and get some behind the scenes info.

And I'm a platinum level, and I think there's only fifteen or sixteen platinum level product experts for Google Business Profile on the planet. So I kinda know a lot about Google Business Profile stuff. So we're starting with this one. You know what?

Let me blow this up a bit just so people can see it a bit better since this is gonna be all screen share. So, typically, I like to go top down. So let's look. First thing, you don't wanna have any keywords stuffed into the name, so we're good here on the name.

We'll come back to reviews because I wanna look at profile information first.

Greg, real quick. Keyword stuffing.

Is that, like, adding in just, like, their car like, Bulldog Kia car dealership or Bulldog Kia, and they put in the location Yeah.

So that you're not allowed to put anything in the business name that's not your actual business name. Car dealers typically don't do this like a lot of other verticals do. Personal injury attorneys and garage door repair and locksmiths are really bad. Like, I saw a personal injury attorney the other day that was like, you know, Gifford and Seville, personal injury attorneys, car crash lawyer, dog bite lawyer, malpractice lawyer, like, all this stuff, and you you just can't do that with the business name.

Every once in a while, car dealerships will do it. The most common thing I've seen is people will put sales department because you can also have your department profiles, but you're not supposed to do that. So, you know, this one's fine. It's the name of the dealership.

This little bit here is not something you can optimize. That's something that Google just pulls automatically. So first thing we wanna check here is, does the website have UTM tracking? This is something that everyone has been talking about for a very long time.

Google Analytics attribution is actually kinda broken. And if there is no referral data passed into Analytics, Google Analytics will attribute that traffic as direct. Most of us have been taught that direct means someone typed in your URL or used the bookmark. That's not actually true.

That just means Google Analytics doesn't have any information, so it drops it in the black hole bucket. So you wanna use UTM tracking because especially on mobile, a lot of that referral information is intentionally not passed to Google Analytics for privacy concerns. So you wanna have the UTM tracking so that you get proper attribution in Google Analytics so you can make better marketing decisions. It's gonna be really hard to see because it's gonna show up down in the bottom left corner.

But if you just hover over that website button, you can see there. It's really small, but it has UTM source equals Google, UTM medium equals referral, and UTM campaign equals Bulldog Kia. Whenever you have UTMs inserted, that's gonna force that traffic to be attributed with those parameters when it goes into Google Analytics. And if you have UTMs, which everyone should, at an absolute minimum, you have to have source and medium.

If you don't have both of those, it's not gonna fire. It's not gonna work correctly. The one big problem here is this dealership or their marketing partner, whoever that might be, has the medium set to referral. That is incredibly very, very wrong.

The medium should always be set to organic with a lowercase o. If you do it with an upper case o, it's not horribly bad. It's just when you go to the default channel report, it's not gonna fall in with the other organic traffic sources because it is case sensitive. So you always wanna have organic with a lowercase o as the medium because it is all organic searches.

It's impossible to find a Google business profile for a dealership without doing an organic search. So it's really important that you don't have referral in that section.

And then we've got address, phone number, products, and services. I'll come back to the phone number. Let's check the products and services link because you should have UTM tracking on every link, and they don't. It's tough to see down there, but you see it's just service slash schedule service.

Other big problem here is the eight hundred tracking number. Now I'm not saying that tracking numbers are bad. Years ago, if any of you had seen me speak at digital dealer way back in the day, I've been doing digital dealer for, like, a decade and a half at this point, I would have told you the phone number has to be a perfect match between your website and your business profile. Now Google has gotten smarter and realized that really best practice is to use a specific unique tracking number on your business profile so it won't match your website.

Now I'm not able to see this here, but if whoever submitted this is present and watching and for everyone else watching or anyone watching the replay later, if you do have a tracking number inserted in your profile, you have the option to add two additional phone numbers that aren't displayed to the public. You need to make sure that your actual real local phone number is in one of those alternate phone number slots. That way Google sees consistency among everywhere that that phone number is listed and doesn't see just a totally different phone number on your Google listing than it sees everywhere else.

The other big problem with this is it's an eight hundred number. And let's face it, nobody needs toll free calling anymore. Everyone can call for free on a cell phone. So a local area code number is a better signal to Google.

I mean, it's minuscule. It's not like that's gonna make you rank better, but still, why not do everything right that you can? But more importantly, it's a better trust signal for local customers. So you always wanna get a local area code tracking number if you're gonna put a call tracking number in there. The next big problem that I see is something that is not present right here, which is separate department and service profiles.

Google actually changed the rules for car dealers.

There are certain rules that dictate whether or not a business is allowed to have a Google business profile for that business. The most important being you have to do face to face business with customers, either at a brick and mortar location or as a service business like a plumber or an electrician where you go to the customer's location. Dealerships are always gonna be a brick and mortar storefront location, so the address is visible.

The requirements for having a Google Business Profile is you have to have permanent signage, a separate entrance, and separate staff at that location that are on your payroll.

Google allows car dealers to set up a separate Google business profile for the service department and a separate Google business profile for the parts department because those are different customer journeys within the dealership model. You can have someone that is a repeat customer for twenty five years that never bought a car from you and just comes in for service. So it doesn't make sense to only have this sales focus profile.

So you should have a separate service department profile and parts department profile that are nested and listed here as departments, and I think we'll see that in some of the other ones or, actually, I know that we'll see that in some of the other ones as we're going through this. So you wanna have the separate parts and service. You can also do, like, a a body shop type of thing. You can't set up a separate department for financing.

That's not allowed. It's not allowed to set up a separate department for used cars. Now a lot of dealers are like, well, I don't know if I should do this. And there are a lot of vendors in automotive that will say, oh, it's a lot of extra work.

Don't do it.

But this is something that Google has specifically changed the rules just for car dealers to allow you to do something that literally ninety nine percent of other businesses in the world are not allowed to do.

Google probably has enough information to know that this is important for the customer to do it. Otherwise, they wouldn't let dealers do it. So you're crazy not to take advantage of a unique rule change that Google made for dealerships.

So you should always have that in there.

And to be great, when I think about things from, you know, take off the marketing hat and think as a consumer, if I'm looking for service for my vehicle, well, the service listing is gonna have a link to a service related page, a phone number that's service related. So I'm not calling the main sales number getting transferred over to service. Exactly. Have the hours of operations. It's gonna remove that friction.

Right? Yeah. The other really good benefit. There's two other main benefits. Benefit number one. Right now, we see that the hours right here are listed, and that's all you see.

If you have a separate service department profile nested as a department on the main profile, you would see two different sets of hours. Because let's face it, pretty much every dealership has different hours for the service department than they do for the sales department, and that can cause a lot of customer confusion because, you know, this says that they're open until seven PM. What if the service department closes at five and someone shows up at six o'clock for an oil change, and then you could potentially get a bad review. So having the additional hours displayed is incredibly helpful, and the review thing is actually great too.

Because if you think about it, especially for franchise dealers, the reviews that you get from customers that just bought a car are almost universally positive. They are very, very, very happy. Now, sure, if you're an independent guy with a buy here, pay here dealership, you might have some people that write a bad review because they buy a clunker with a hundred and fifty thousand miles. But franchise guys, people are stoked.

They just bought a brand new car. They're gonna leave you a great review. If you go through and look at your reviews, the bad reviews that you get typically come from your service customers. So now if you have different profiles, you can send those people to leave reviews in different places, which means your overall review score for the main dealership profile will actually trend higher over time because you're just not gonna get bad reviews anymore.

All the reviews are gonna be positive, and all your bad reviews get isolated onto the service profile. So now you don't have a bunch of people thinking about coming to buy a car from you that get turned off because you have a significant number of service reviews. So let's check the reviews out. Now I always like to immediately sort to the newest reviews to see which reviews have come in most recently.

So, you know, it's okay that they've got something that was a couple of days ago and doesn't have a reply, but the next newest review was edited, came in three days ago. It's a bad review, and they don't have a response. That's not great. Because think about what you do when you go shop.

You go shopping on Amazon or any other, you know, Best Buy, any Target and Walmart, wherever it is that you're shopping.

You look at products that you're gonna order online. Do you care about the good reviews? Typically not. You're gonna look at the bad reviews and see the problems that people have with that product.

Same thing happens with the dealerships. People click in and they're gonna immediately instead of clicking this filter, they're gonna click the lowest rating filter and look through the low reviews. And if we do that, we look. Okay.

The one from a month ago has a response to it. That's a really wordy response. But there's another one from a month ago. No response.

Two months ago, response, but really long response.

Yeah.

That one you so Bulldog, if you're watching this, your responses are way too long. No one is like, this this review right here, oh, yeah. That's pretty long review, but you don't need that long of response for that review.

A really important thing to remember is when you respond to a review, your response isn't actually for the person that left the bad review. You should be dealing with that person offline because you've got their info in your CRM. Your response is to let the rest of the world know how you handled an upset customer. No one's gonna read through something that's that stinking long as a re we reply, and all of your responses look like they're really, really long. But you do have responses to pretty much all your abuse, so that's pretty good.

Right. To your point, Greg, it's kinda like a public relations play. You wanna show people that you care about. Like, a bad experience has happened whether merited or not. People wanna see that the business cares about the experience people are gonna have.

Exactly. Exactly. It's very true. It's very much a PR play. Also, I noticed in the chat that Adam asked or or mentioned that the challenge is to get reviews on those pages, though.

Right? I'm gonna hope that Bulldog Kia is following best practice. If we go look at their web site, they should have a submenu link under about us that points to a page that says something like reviews or leave us a review.

Let's see if they do.

About us. Okay. They have a leave us a review page, which every dealer should have because you wanna make it easy for people to leave reviews. And just asking for the review, you're assuming they know where to go and what to do. So when you have this page, you instead point them to this page.

Slow site here. You know, this page, the URL could be a little better, but it's about us slash reviews. It'd be easier to just have it be slash reviews. But notice, hey.

Leave us a review, and here's a direct link to any of these platforms that they collect reviews on. Now a customer just clicks Google, and it goes right there. Now this could have been better. You can actually put in code that when you click to the reviews, it'll actually link directly to this where it already has the box popped up where the customer can fill out the review.

That's even better. Now the one thing that they should do though is instead of having this, this works if you have a single profile. But because they have multiple profiles, they'd be better off asking a question and saying, hey.

Oh, pop ups are so bad. Get rid of your pop ups, people. Pop ups are awful for everyone. Yeah.

You should ask a question. Did you buy a car or did you get service? If you bought a car, here's the review sites to leave or or or here's the sites to leave a review on. If you got service, here's the sites to leave a review on.

It could be the same five sites. The only difference is your Google link is gonna be different between those two, and that way the customer's gonna go to the right space. So that would that would be helpful, Adam, if you're wondering how to get reviews. So moving on.

I don't wanna take too long on this one so that we can look at all of the other ones. K. The appointments link, let's see here. They do have UTMs on this, but once again, their referral is set to medium.

Or, I mean, the medium is set to referral, which is bad. Medium should be organic, so they need to fix that.

If we continue down, I don't really pay attention to what's in here because customers tend to only kinda glance over what's there. For sure, Bulldog Kia, you shouldn't have a hashtag there. Hashtags are for social media. This is not social media. There's zero reason to have a hashtag there.

Then you've got profiles.

I like to check every once in a while with dealerships. Are they even using these?

So, like, if I go to Twitter, they haven't posted anything yet. So Bulldog, why are you linking to Twitter on your Google business profile if you're not even using it?

You know, let's look at Pinterest. I would guess they're not doing Pinterest.

Yeah. They haven't posted anything on Pinterest in a year, so that's not being used either. If we go to Facebook okay. They posted something three days ago, so that's okay.

And then we can't do TikTok on desktop. Then we've got some Google posts. Okay. Google posts.

The key to a Google post is making sure that this thumbnail is enticing and that people will click on it. Because the full post is what you're looking at when you enter it in the system, but Google automatically crops to a smaller image and only shows the first few lines of text. And if that's not compelling, nobody's gonna click on it. And I can tell there's some text in there.

If I click on it, it says happy Labor Day. But because they weren't paying attention, they loaded in the wrong size image because Square is not the right size image for this, or it could have been their their marketing partner. Who knows? But then it's happening weekend.

We'll be open for the following hours this weekend. Okay. That's not the right place to do that. There's actually a setting in the back end where you enter hours.

You can use what's called holiday hours because right now, if we look at this, they say that, that was the wrong button. I am so sorry.

They say that they are open normal business hours, Saturday closed Sunday, Monday sales at eight thirty and five PM. If you do that, on those days, it will temporarily overwrite your hours here just for that day and for the week leading up to it so people can see it. But no one's gonna look at your Google post to see what your hours are, especially when it's not compelling like that. And, also, if this is a post about, hey. We're gonna be closed on Labor Day or have different hours. Why does the learn more button go to your vehicle's page? That doesn't make sense for any customers.

And then this one, not a compelling thumbnail because the text is too hard to read, part of the car is cut off, and all we see is help your hard earned money go further this Labor Day weekend with zero percent APR, and it has nothing. And then you have a call now that does a call thing, but this graphic is not the right size graphic, and they've done a carousel graphic. So Google post, definitely not great. They do have vehicles for sale, which is good. Everyone should have that.

Let's go over and just check home page really quick. Okay. For sure.

As of the page experience update, which Google rolled out two years ago, if you have automatic pop ups like this, Google demotes you in search results. You should never have automatic pop ups. They're awful as a customer experience, and they're awful for your SEO because Google's gonna devote you for having it. So that's not great.

Right here, you can't even read the welcome to Bulldog Kia on a lot of this video because the background changes colors, and it's hard to read. No customer is gonna buy a car from you and say, I bought a car because you had a video on the background of your home page. Dealers like it because it's a shiny object, but you're much better off, like, take that picture right there, a solid picture of the front of the building. I don't need a drone shot that goes by and shows the logo.

Like, none of this helps me. That would be a solid shot too. But the important part is and another pop up. Jesus, guys.

Kill me with the pop ups. But don't get distracted or don't get customers distracted with videos when what you wanted to do is click on this and browse. And then you've got some stuff, like, that's a lot of white space right there.

You know, hey. Let's check alt text on images. Do we have an alt text on this?

You should have alt text on every image. If you inspect and look, it'll say like this one. The alt text says bull ducky is a proud sponsor of ESP, etcetera. So they've got alt text there. So pretty decent. There's not enough text on the page. There should be more text on the page for sure.

We're about to release a big GBP study. Actually, the biggest automotive SEO study that's ever been done is coming out at the end of this month, and the average number of words on a dealership home page is over thirteen hundred words. You've got to provide a good answer to people that are looking for a dealership. What's unique about you?

Why are you awesome? Why should they buy from you? What do you offer? You can't do that with probably a hundred and fifty words that are on this page.

So let's go to the next one in the list.

This is an interesting one.

Before before you dive into this one, we did have a couple of questions real quick. Yep. Jackie, should most local businesses have a leave us a review on the website in addition to their other systems for review collection?

Yes, Jackie. You should always have the leave us a review link on your menu so that anyone can find it on their own and so that it's an easy place for all employees to direct people to go to to leave that review.

And then Aaron asked, where do you take the social media profiles off of GBP?

So in the, Google Business profile settings where, you know, normally, you're looking at the GBP like this, and you'll have the icons, you know, across here in this top area, it would be bumped down and you'd have the editing icons for for posts and reviews and q and a and everything else. You can go in there into your info settings that you put in all the information for the dealership and remove those.

Great. Thank you, Greg. Thanks for your questions, everyone. So let's move on. Anderson Ford of Lincoln North.

So if you notice, this one looks different. This is a new brand display profile that Google has been testing with restaurants.

And of all the profiles we're looking at today, this is the only car dealer profile that shows this. Oh, we missed something. I just thought of something else we didn't look at. You always wanna look at category selection because the most important thing is the category that you select on your business profile.

Now the primary category should always be the brand that you sell unless you're in a smaller market. If you're in a smaller market, maybe you're the only brand. Like, if you're the only Ford dealer for two hundred miles in any direction, you should put used car dealer instead of Ford dealer because that's really where you're fighting for business. You're automatically gonna rank for Ford.

But in most cities, there's more than one dealer of that brand, so you should have brand dealers as your primary category. Now using George Nenny's kick ass little program, we can click on the map, and then you click the GMB Spy, and we can see that Bulldog Kia only has a single category selected, and that's Kia dealer.

There are nine additional category slots allowing you to pick a total of ten categories, and there are more than ten categories that apply to vehicle sales as a dealership, and your main profile should be sales related. Your service profile should only have service categories. Your parts profile should only have parts categories. But there is never a situation that a dealership should have fewer than nine categories selected, and, realistically, you should almost always have ten categories selected.

They are drastically hurting their chances of showing up in search by not having more categories selected on their profile. Sorry. I forgot about that one. Alright.

So same thing here. Since we were just talking about it, let's check them. We'll come over here. We'll check this.

So they have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So the count is good.

The problem is they have woah. That just switched because I rolled over. Let's see if they have department set up. Okay.

They do have department set up. So you have Ford service and Ford parts. We'll talk about the other stuff in a second, but you do have a service department profile, which means you shouldn't have service department or parts department categories selected here. And if we're looking among all of their categories, auto body shop, auto dent removal service, auto glass repair service, oil change service, and tire repair shop, five of their nine categories are actually incorrect because they overlap with what their service profile should be having.

So that's definitely not good.

Greg, I have a quick question about the categories just to clarify. Let's say, you know, Anderson Ford of Lincoln North. Let's say they're the only Ford dealer in their market.

Should their private category still be Ford dealer?

Because I would think that they would probably get the visibility for Ford searches, or or am I incorrect in that situation?

Market. Let's see that this wasn't Lincoln, Nebraska, and it was some random town in Iowa, and there was not another Ford dealer for a hundred miles in any direction, they absolutely shouldn't have Ford dealer as their primary category because, you know, usually, if you search Ford dealer like, right now, I'm in Dallas. If I search Ford dealer I'm actually in Plano, Texas. Notice I'm taking Dallas off at auto completed because I use that for screen captures when I do presentations. But if I just search Ford dealer, I'm gonna get a map pack.

Once we skip past all the ads, I get a map pack that shows you the three that are pretty much the three closest to me because my office is right about there where I'm moving the the mouse. If you're the only Ford dealer in town, instead of showing you a map pack, it's just gonna show the business profile for the dealership, which is why you don't need to select Ford. Because Google knows you're a Ford dealer even if you don't have Ford selected as a category. In that situation, you should select used car dealer.

But for this guy, he actually should say Ford because there is Anderson Ford of Lincoln North and Anderson Ford of Lincoln South. That's also a problem because if I search Anderson Ford of Lincoln like that, I should see a map pack that displays both of them, but it just shows me the North Store, which means the South Store is a very distant second place far enough so that Google just assumes there are no other Ford dealers of Anderson Ford. If I search Ford dealer Lincoln, now that's what I see. I see those two Ford stores.

I should see that when I search Anderson Ford of Lincoln. So something is wonky there. Anderson Ford team, if you're here, I would definitely check, to see what's going on with your marketing partner if you're doing SEO with someone, or check with your website vendor if they're doing it for you.

But this is a good situation where there are only four deal two Ford dealerships in town. I am not familiar enough with the Nebraska landscape to know, but, like, it doesn't look like Omaha is that far away, and there's some other closer towns there. So if there's another Ford dealership within a an hour drive, it's probably still smart for them to have Ford as their primary category because they're gonna compete with the stuff in between. But if they don't really compete with the Omaha market, maybe you could just put used car dealer, but you also have this like, looking at the map right there where the mouse is and it has the the interstate eighty, anybody in the middle there is gonna have the choice to drive to Omaha or down to Lincoln.

That's where it's important you show up as a Ford dealer and you wanna be as high as possible, so you probably want Ford there. But okay. So they are allowed to say North because that's the name of the dealership. They got twenty four hundred reviews and a four point five, so that's pretty good. Let's switch to newest and scroll through.

This review is just a day old, and it already has a response. So nice work there. It looks like everything has responses, so that's amazing. Let's look at their bad reviews.

Okay. This is a great example.

Hopefully, Anderson Ford people are watching.

Again, the response is not for the person that left the review. It's for everyone else. And everyone else knows if this guy was a customer, the dealership has this guy's information. So you never wanna have a response that says, hey.

I'm Greg. I'm the service manager. Call me and give me more information because you can call that person. You should be proactive.

They left a bad review for you. Don't put the ball back in their court and make them call you again. People that leave you a bad review very rarely are trying to hurt the dealership. They're just trying to let you know, hey.

My experience did not match what my expectations were, and, hopefully, you'll make that right. So your response needs to reflect that. So part of the problem with this response is, hey. We've tried to reach out to you to learn more and to apologize.

Please call our store and ask for Paul.

That's not good. That makes it look like you don't really care. Here's another one.

You know, it it's it's good right here that they admitted. Hey. We screwed up. You know?

We discussed it. We did mess up. We had poor communication. We apologize. We hope to serve you better in the future.

They could probably do a little bit better of offering a better solution there, but they are getting everything here.

Yep. Everything matches. So, like, you're you're getting responses in there pretty good, but, like, here's another one. I just spoke to you on the phone.

You're misrepresenting the conversation. I called again in an attempt to get a resolution. When you're ready to have a civil conversation, I'd be willing to assist you. My direct phone is this.

That's not great because, you know, even if Carl was unhappy, you don't wanna sit there and be, like, when you're ready to have a civil conversation because it looks like you're talking down to customers. That might turn people off and make them not wanna come by from you. So you can point out that there are inaccuracies in the facts without saying you're misrepresenting things and you're not being civil. So I would pay some more attention to that.

Okay.

You've got Anderson Ford parts, Anderson Ford service.

You also have Lincoln nested under here, which technically you could because Lincoln operates out of the same building. I typically don't like to do that. I would keep the Lincoln sales profile as a separate profile with Lincoln service nested under that as a department instead of having everything nested under the main Ford profile. The other thing too is you don't have to have the dealership name.

Especially in a market like this where you're the only Lincoln dealer, you could just put Lincoln service as your service department. Because when you have Anderson Lincoln of Lincoln, like, we've got Lincoln, so many parts right here. It's Lincoln of Lincoln, Lincoln of Lincoln. Like, it's just too much Lincoln.

So think about what the names look like when you're setting those up. We have a local area code number, so that's great. We did not check the website link. Website link has medium of organic and source of Google, so that's great.

One thing to point out, if this team is watching, Google is capitalized in the UTM, and it shouldn't be because everything is case sensitive. You wanna match what's in analytics.

Greg, question about you with you, Tim Cody. You can have a campaign parameter.

Should you do that just to indicate, like, where people are clicking clearly, or is there a different strategy you'd recommend?

You can. You don't have to. If you care about the granularity of I wanna know if someone clicked the website button at the top or the appointment button here or if you have the products and service button, you could put different things in. But I don't typically think that's necessary because here, the website is landing on the home page. Here, the appointments is landing on the service scheduling form. So all that matters is you know where people came from, and they've got organic and Google there, so that's what really matters.

Again, we can kinda skip the description. Okay. That's a better image. We've got Ford pickup and delivery from September third to September tenth. Complimentary when you let your dealer pick up Is this, I mean, maybe they're in here already watching, but that's not really a great thing to put. If it's really only available for a week, okay.

I wouldn't necessarily put that there, though, because that's not really pickup and delivery for service. It doesn't even say service until you click the thing. Like, notice here, you can't see anywhere that says service. And then you've got this.

So all of these that have the date, this is a different type of post from the standard update post. It's an event post. This means this post will only be visible until the tenth, and then this post goes away. This other one will only be visible through the weekend, and then it goes away.

But the problem is you notice you can't see great details. Also, that's not cropped well because part of the truck is cut off.

But you've got a lot of posts here that are like, you should never do a Google post for a specific vehicle because once that sells, that's not great. And if you wanna post this for this specific CPO twenty twenty one Ford, you're assuming that everyone that hits your profile is looking for a four year old f one fifty, which they're probably not. So be more relevant to more of your people. You don't know if they're coming for sales or service, so don't be so specific.

And in this case, you would have been better with the standard post template where you could have more displayed there because you can't really see much there.

And that clicks directly to the vehicle. It'd be really funny if this vehicle's sold, and it's not. Okay. But anyway, they've got LinkedIn and Facebook listed for profiles. They're probably fine there. And they've got vehicles for sale, so they're good. Let's check out their home page.

Alright. As a Ford dealer, I'll just come out and say it. I'm not gonna play nice. Don't be on dealer dot com.

You have so many other options. Dealer dot com is the worst site platform out there. It is the only site platform in automotive that is not a responsive website. Their team will give you all kinds of gobbledygook saying it's responsive, adaptive, whatever, but it's actually not responsive.

And as of that page experience update two years ago, Google demotes you in search results if you're not responsive.

So just don't be on dealer dot com. There's a whole lot of other programming problems with the things that dealer dot com does. So I would fix that.

Also, Anderson Ford or Anderson Auto Group here, your title tag here is just Anderson Ford Lincoln. That is completely unoptimized.

And you don't you literally don't have an h one heading on the page because your h one is your logo right there because that's another bone headed thing that dealer dot com does. And then you've probably you know, slides slides suck for customers. Customers don't look at your slides, and people will have let's just see.

Yeah.

I was part of see how many slides are in this slideshow.

I was part of a study on homepage sliders for car dealerships. And of all homepage clicks that happen on car dealers websites, we found out only six percent went to a banner and half went to banner number one. Yeah. By the time you got to the third banner, it's zero point eight six percent. Yeah.

Nobody's gonna see them. Yeah. Some of the OEMs require that you have them and are do the bare minimum of what the OEM requires. But if you're not required to have one by the OEM, nobody's gonna sit there. Like, we've sat here to look at however many of these are because we're talking about it, but customers aren't gonna do that.

Also, automatic chat pop ups suck. You have the chat icon there. People know they can click on it. Don't force yourself on people. It's a bad customer experience.

That's not enough text either. So alright. That's it for that one. Let's move on to the next one.

And, Greg, as you're bringing up the next one, there's another question. Do you when you consult, when you talk to dealers or any business owner, really, are there any core tenets, any principles of of giving a response to an unhappy customer that you would recommend or have recommended?

Yeah. I mean, basically, if you screwed up, be honest and admit that you screwed up. But let's say I mean, the one that always sticks in my head is we were working with the dealership. This was, like, fifteen years ago. And they had a car wash at the dealership, like a drive through car wash kind of a thing that they would do free car washes if you came in for service, but you could also just, as a customer, just come get your car wash. You come do, you know, your your lock on the track. It pulls you through.

Well, they were doing the free car wash for a customer, and the guy was in the car. And for whatever reason, he got out of the car and reversed because he didn't think he was lined up correctly, but he was already in the car wash. So the door was open. And when he backed up, the door caught on something and it folded the door completely forward against the the front fender.

Obviously, it really screwed up this guy's car, so he left this really bad review. They were like, look. Our guy screwed up. He actually got fired over this.

We're really sorry, but, also, we fixed all your damage for free. Gave you a free rental car. Like, what matters is letting the public know what you did in that situation. Had another dealership, like, ten years ago.

Dude had a really expensive pair of sunglasses that he just left on his dashboard when he took his car in for his oil change or some sort of service. I don't remember what service it was. And when he came back to pick his car up, glasses were gone. He left a bad review accusing them of stealing the glasses.

They actually went back and watched the camera from the shop, and they had been clearing out because a guy had a bunch of trash in his car. And there was some papers and trash up on the dash, and they swept it out, and it accidentally got thrown away. So they didn't get stolen. You can see them just go into the trash can.

Nobody even noticed. So in their response, they were like, you know what? We're really sorry. We watched the shot cams.

Like we told you on the call, We found out they weren't stolen. They were accidentally thrown away. And as we told you on the call, your replacement sunglasses are gonna arrive from Amazon tomorrow. So if you screw up, admit it and and say what you did to fix the situation.

If you didn't screw up, don't say, oh my gosh. We're sorry you had a bad experience because they're not telling the truth about their experience. You can point out the inaccuracies without being a jerk and saying that you're not being civil like the other guy was. So Thank you.

Alright. Looking at this one.

Name looks okay.

Let's check website has UTMs and it is Google and organic, so that is good. Let's just check UTMs on other links while we're at it. Prox and service link has Google and organic there, so that's good.

And do they have the other link too?

And you are missing your UTMs on your contact appointment link there, so I would fix that.

Back up to the top, looking at reviews.

Looks like you've got answers to pretty much everything positive.

And if we go to lowest see, like, this one right here. Hey. Thanks for sharing this. We understand your concerns.

We appreciate your feedback and would like to discuss this to understand the situation better. Reach out to us directly at this so we can address your concerns. Sincerely, our team. Like, a, put the service manager's team on there or the salesperson's name on there, and, b, don't put the ball in his court and expect him to reach out.

The guy let you know he wasn't happy. Freaking call the guy. It's not that hard.

And, again, please feel free to contact contact us directly so we can address your concerns.

Reach out to us directly so we can discuss your concerns.

Reach out to us directly so we can discuss your experience.

Like, these are not good. The the the review was the direct outreach.

Yeah. Like, these are not good responses, Hardin. So you guys need to do better there.

Let's check categories.

Alright. GMC dealer, good because it's Buick GMC. Now when you have GM brands or Stellantis brands where you have multiple brands, you can only pick one as your primary, so you wanna be strategic about which one. In this market, you're probably selling more GMCs than you are Buicks, so it makes sense to put that first.

But if you're watching this and you actually sell more Buicks than GMCs, you should put Buick up top because that's your most important brand. But you've got Buick in there. Now if we come back, I don't think they have department set up. They do not have department set up.

So you should get department set up because it is a problem here that you have auto parts store, oil change service, and tire shop. You should only have sales related categories there.

Then local number, so that's good.

And, again, you know, if you've got a lease special on a twenty six Sierra EV, don't cut off the text that shows this. Like, that image, that's you're just whoever did this, let's be honest, you're not putting in maximum effort like Deadpool would say. You gotta use the right size image. We actually have an image template.

So if anybody's watching and you wanna get the image template, I'm happy to send you the link to download it. It's a Photoshop template that will give you more of an idea of what's gonna show in that thumbnail once it's cropped. This is way too narrow of an image. It it should be more of a a standard, like, sixteen by nine image.

But this would be better as an image if you could read the text that's in the image. You can't read the text. You see a picture, and it says there's a lease special, but I don't see anything of the four forty nine lease special for thirty six months, which is the important part of that offer.

And then schedule service. You can only schedule service for a month. Like, you'd be better off not using these event posts every time.

And vehicle specials, trade in, like, you don't have enough of a description here because you're using an event post for every single thing.

Just do the normal Google post, not the event post, and you'll be much more successful with that.

Greg, what?

And they don't have cars for sale. They don't have vehicles for sales listed. So Hardin Buick, actually so, again, part of the data coming out of this study that's coming out at the end of the month, I think something like twenty nine to thirty percent of dealerships don't have vehicles for sale listed on their Google Business profile. Wow. This is, again, a specific thing that Google allows car dealers to do that a lot of other businesses can't, so you should definitely do it.

These guys don't have it, so they should because typically businesses either have the products or or or services that you can build out, but you're you're they're allowing creditors to put actual inventory up on the GBP, which is like a showroom.

It's very important to surface that inventory wherever you can. Greg, real quick, we're gonna have time for probably one more, but I did wanna ask this. And I know that you recently did a local search Tuesday on this. Everyone, if you're watching, you don't watch local search Tuesdays. Greg does a video series where he shares little tidbits of information for you, and you do a high five right at the end with them. But, Greg, I know you did this recently for everyone watching since we have folks here live. I'm sure there's a lot of concern around suspensions.

And for when we're talking about, hey. Here's all these different things you need to make sure you have right, that you're doing, etcetera. What are some of the main reasons that someone might have their GBP suspended?

They briefed on their keyboard.

Like, literally, Google will suspend you for just about anything nowadays and check to make sure you're legit. If you're watching this, I don't even wanna get into the suspension thing. If you get suspended, do not click the button to ask for reinstatement.

Just email me. My email is greg at search lab digital dot com. I'm working with two different dealerships right now that I found on the forum that are having problems with this.

It's a nightmare of a situation, and you will get suspended. You'll get some vague reason why that won't help you. And if you don't know exactly what to do when you ask for reinstatement, you're gonna fail, and you only get sixty minutes to get all your evidence together. So if you're not at the dealership and you don't have those documents handy and nobody can get them to you and the sixty minutes expires, boom.

There goes your one chance. You only get one more. And, also, you have to make sure you send the right things in, which a lot of people don't send the right things in. You automatically fail for not sending the right things in.

So if you get suspended, just pop me an email. I'll walk you through what to do to get out of it.

Perfect. We do have one other question from Mike. How much importance would you place on images posted to a GBP?

Image is very important. You wanna make sure that they reflect the reality of doing business at your dealership. So if we look at this, we can click into this. Let's look at the photos by owner.

Great photo of the front of the dealership. We have multiple photos of inside and outside. I would not put that in there, but that could very likely be from six years ago from something that they did as a Google post. Who knows?

Stock photos don't perform well. So stock photos aren't gonna help you. Just put in the photos of the actual dealership. But something if you notice, all of these photos are really old.

The most recent thing was this three sixty thing. Nope. That's seven years ago too. Yeah. All their pictures are five to seven years old, so they haven't looked at their photos. It's a good idea to keep them updated and make sure that they're high resolution.

Great. Alright. We got a few minutes to do a last one. So let's do sort of a a a expedited review for you.

Lightning round.

Alright. Raceway Ford Riverside.

Four point o on the review score with a thousand reviews. That's not good. The ideal range is four point four to four point seven. Lots of research on that. Go look it up if you don't believe me. You get more conversions if you're four point four to four point seven. But with a thousand reviews and a four point o score to get up to a four point four takes a ton more awesome reviews than it would take if you only had five hundred.

So let's see here. They do have responses to some.

Let's look at the bad reviews and see what's going on there.

Yep. Here's email us directly and we'll talk to you.

Not great.

Yeah. These are not good responses either.

You only have a separate service department set up and not a separate parts department, so that's not great. But for everyone that was watching, here's what it looks like. See, you get two sets of hours. You get race, base, Ford, and the that's the fleet service department.

I didn't notice that. It Raceway, if you're watching this, fleet service department is probably different from the normal service department. I would make sure that that is clear. If we look at categories, what do we see here?

You shouldn't have auto parts store, repair shop, car and maintenance service, or tire shop selected.

Let's see what else we can see real quick. UTMs.

Oops. That's too far down.

You have source as GMB and medium is organic. Source should really honestly be GMB or GBP and not Google, so you don't have to use secondary dimensions. So I like this one better than the other that just said Google, but they have medium as organic, so that is good. Eight hundred number there, so make sure you have your real local phone number listed also as an alternate, but really, you should have a local area code tracking number. Your appointments link doesn't have UTM, so that's not good.

Quick in, quick service, quick out at Raceway Ford Quick Lane Tire and Auto Center. We call now. Why would I call? Like, there's nothing there that's compelling. This one, too much of it's cut off because you used the wrong size image.

That one's not great. Nobody's gonna see the recalls wiper stuff. You're just gonna see that card that says we come to you like, yeah. Pay attention to your Google posts.

Let's see. Are they posting to Pinterest?

I always like seeing nobody ever posts to Pinterest anymore. I don't know why dealerships still link to it. Oh, they had stuff from a week a couple of weeks ago. So, hey, nice to have Raceway Ford. You're actually using it.

While you're on Raceway Ford, there's a a question. It's that race way forward parts and service department pages show as inside race way forward. However, they can't get them to show on the main Google business profile.

Oh.

Yeah. So we've got this Raceway Ford parts department. So let's Riverside parts department.

There we go. Located in Raceway Ford. Yep. Okay. So, Michael, what you need to do is connect with GBP support.

If you go through the, the editing interface at the top of your GBP, you can connect with support and let support know that this is currently nested as being inside of Raceway Ford, but it's not listed as a department because service or the the support department is the only person that can set those department listings up. So you just need to connect with Google support. Let them know that it's already nested correctly. It's just not being displayed as a department, and you need them to do that.

Great question.

Alright. You wanna do one last one for a quick lightning round?

Why not? Let's do one last lightning round.

The the the the Runby auto group, if that's how you say it, if you guys are watching this, before I even get to your GBP, it says homepage right there. So I'm guessing if I open this yeah. Your title tag says homepage.

That's bad. No. Like, no. You don't need to optimize for the homepage. So, like, I would guess they're probably not doing SEO on this site.

So that's bad. Also, I searched Chevrolet.

This is the auto group site, not the actual Chevrolet site.

Oh, that's why. This is odd too.

Woah.

You guys need to call us and have us help you with SEO.

Okay. If I come up in it wow. This is the auto group, which has let's see which locations.

You've got okay. So you have Ford, Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram, Chevy Buick GMC, and Chevy, and then a used car. So when I search Chevy, this should be for sorry. The the GBP should be for Runde Chevrolet.

But notice the GBP says Runde Chevrolet. The website links to this website, which is why the auto group site is showing up as number one. That's very wrong and very bad. Google is confused there. The Rendy Chevrolet should link to this Rendy Chevy website because that's the actual Chevrolet website.

Let's look at categories real quick.

Alright. No service category, so that's good, but you could pick a few more categories and be better off. You only have a service department listed, so you should have a parts department listed as well.

UTM is correct there. Did we check UTM up here?

UTM is correct there.

You've got vehicles for sale, so that's great. And, yeah, you could tell these are not the correctly sized images because you get the black bars on the side like that. But act before September thirtieth, get the seventy five hundred federal EV tax credit on most Chevy EVs before and then click buy.

That's not a great user experience. Like this, least special for that. Like, the images are not great.

Part of text or logo is cut off there.

You know, we're closed on Memorial Day, but that's, like, way back in May, so you're not posting these very often. I would pay attention to that. Let's go see if you're really posting on Twitter or not. And you haven't posted a Twitter, so you might be using the same digital marketing provider that the other guy was using.

So, yeah, hopefully, that was all really helpful for everyone.

Let me stop sharing, and I can get the link.

Oh, hold on. This is the link.

For those of you that are doing Google Posts internally yourself in the chat, I am sharing the Bitly link that lets you download that Photoshop document that you can use to have a better little bit more control over what is gonna show in that thumbnail so you don't have, you know, half the car cropped out or all your text cropped out.

Incredibly helpful. Yes.

And that's all we were able to get to. So looks like we had some stuff.

Aaron, we didn't get to stop Interstate Toyota, but we'll run a matrix on it, and Dane will call you and walk you through that. Other ways we can develop from Jackie. Other ways we can develop more nuanced expertise in auditing and improving GBPs other than taking basic courses, knowing Google policy, actually doing it, and reading the forums and Reddit. Don't read Reddit. The SEO advice on Reddit is absolute garbage.

It's one of my favorite pastimes is to just go in and troll the local SEO forum stuff in Reddit because it's just Be be be discerning on LinkedIn too.

Just don't don't take Yeah. Don't take everything at face value.

Jackie, I would assume you're asking this as a practitioner, not as a person working at a particular business. So, yeah, if you want more nuance nuanced expertise in improving GBPs, just go start following the GBP forum, the Google Business Profile Community Forum where I'm a product expert. You could subscribe to any questions. So if you see something that's interesting, you wanna see how it's answered, you can just click subscribe. And then anytime one of the product experts answers, you get an email that will tell you what that answer was. And that's really a great way to level up your knowledge.

Yeah. And then everyone, if you want to scan this QR code, that will give us direct information for you to get a full, matrix audit. So if you would like us to or like me to dive in and and, you know, look at, your site, look at your GDP, in the parameters of everything we talked about today. So this matrix audit is in in adherence to a lot of these best practices that we talked about today. So I'll have this up on the screen as we close out the the webinar here today, but scan it, submit your information. We'll be sure that way to get back to you.

Greg, thanks so much for joining us.

Keep in mind, if you do wanna scan this and get us to do this audit, this isn't like a HubSpot site grader. It's not some generic thing. This matrix that we use is a hand created, like, hand done Google Sheet that I created probably ten years ago for when I speak at twenty groups. And so it's not a sales focused thing because it's meant to be.

I'm at a twenty group. I score everyone at the twenty group. I give them the info to take back to the dealership or to the current marketing partner to see where the deficits are and the things that they can improve with their SEO tactics. So it's incredibly helpful, and it's specific to car dealers.

Now we do have versions for other verticals. So if you do scan this, just make sure when you have there's a a field in there that says give us other URLs. Just put a little note. Hey.

I'm not a car dealer so that we're sure to use the right version of the matrix for you.

Great. Thanks for clarifying that, Greg. Greg, thanks so much. I know you're you're a busy guy. Lots lots of traveling, lots of things you're doing, plus your COO for Search website. I really appreciate that you took an hour of your time today to really dive in and provide a lot of help for everyone that watched.

That was fun.

Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. Well, Greg, I'm gonna I'm gonna let you get going and, take you off the stage here. Everyone, thank you for joining us today. Again, we we do these with these webinars, monthly, so make sure that, you're following along.

We always like to share lots of different great information like what was shared today and, of course, bring in guests like Greg Gifford, to people who do what they do best to share their insights with you. So I'm gonna take myself off the stage as well. I'm gonna leave that QR code up here for just a few more minutes in case you you need to get out your phone and scan it. And, thanks for joining us today.

Really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day.