I’m back again and still unpacking the massive 2025 GBP Study for Car Dealers. This week, I’m focusing on the industry averages we uncovered across profiles, websites, and reviews. The data shows where most dealerships stand and what they could be doing better. Check out the episode for the highlights, then dive into the full study at searchlabdigital.com/gbp-auto-study.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, we’re talking more about the 2025 GBP Study for Car Dealers that was released last week. Stay tuned for insight on industry averages!

Last week, we released the 2025 edition of the largest automotive SEO study ever conducted. We searched for these six phrases in the 20 largest cities in the United States. We used Places Scout to pull over 150 data points on the top 20 results in the map pack and local finder in each city. Once we removed the department profiles, we were left with 2,260 GBPs.

Head over to searchlabdigital.com/gbp-auto-study to check out the amazing and insightful data. We calculated industry averages and also compared dealers that rank number one in the map pack to dealers who rank number 10. Today, I want to share some of the industry averages with you.

Let’s talk categories first. 26% of dealerships only had a single category listed on their GBP. There are 10 category slots available, and there are more than 10 categories related to car sales, so every dealership should have 9 to 10 categories selected. Only 58% of dealers had 5 categories selected and only 17% had all 10 categories selected.

Google has changed GBP rules specifically for car dealers. One of those rule changes is the ability to add separate department GBPs for the Service and Parts departments. 47% of dealerships don’t have separate departments set up. Another auto-specific rule is the ability to add an inventory feed to the GBP. 29% of dealerships still don’t have the Vehicles for Sale widget displayed on their profile.

Including UTM tags on website links from GBP is a commonly preached best practice. Pretty much everyone who talks about automotive SEO has talked about this for years. 39% of dealerships don’t have UTM on their website link. Dealers also missed adding UTMs to the products and services link and the appointment link.

Dealerships averaged 2,195 reviews with an average rating of 4.3. Dealers averaged 29 new reviews monthly in the last year, so it wasn’t a huge number. The average response time to reviews is 7 days, and 21% of reviews had no response at all.

Dealership websites have an average load time of 2.5 seconds, and 15% of sites still aren’t responsive. 21% of dealerships don’t have AutoDealer schema on their sites, which is pretty shocking.

We pulled some interesting data on inbound links using the ahrefs toolset. Dealerships averaged only 184 unique websites linking to them. The tool also tracks the keyword phrases that websites rank for, and while it’s not infallible, it provides a decent high-level view of organic visibility. The tool can calculate “organic cost” by taking the list of keywords, using average clickthrough rates by position, and cross-referencing PPC ad costs. Basically, “organic cost” tells you how much a website would need to spend in PPC to get the equivalent amount of traffic it’s getting from organic search.

The average “organic cost” for dealerships is $281,398. That means on average, dealerships would need to spend over $280,000 monthly in PPC to get the same amount of traffic they get from organic searches. This clearly shows the massive importance of SEO for dealerships, since a few thousand a month in SEO services can equate to hundreds of thousands spent on PPC.

Head over to the study and check out all the data - there’s a ton more over there. It’s basically your SEO playbook for the next year.

That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.