I’m back with another episode of Local Search Tuesdays, and this week we’re diving even deeper into the 2025 GBP Study for automotive. I'm breaking down the differences between dealerships ranking number one and those sitting at number ten, and the results are seriously eye-opening. Watch now to see what top-performing dealers are doing differently so you can learn what you need to do to show up better in search results.
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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. Stay tuned for insight on comparisons between dealers who ranked number one and dealers who ranked number ten!
At the end of September, 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 kickass data. In last week’s episode, I talked about the industry averages for car dealers. This week, I want to walk through some of the comparisons between dealers that ranked number one and dealers that ranked number ten.
In nearly every comparison, the real-world data backed up our expectations: Dealers that ranked at position one in the map pack were following best practices better than dealers at position ten.
Looking at category selection, it’s common knowledge that the primary category is one of the most weighted ranking elements in Google’s local algorithm. The keyword phrases we searched for also happen to be GBP categories, so we expected to see those categories selected as primary for the dealerships in the study. Dealers at number one had nine unique categories and dealers at position ten had fifteen unique categories.
There are a few automotive-specific GBP elements that every dealer should be taking advantage of. The first dealer-specific element is the ability to set up separate department GBPs for Service and Parts departments. At position one, 38% of dealers didn’t have separate departments, versus 48% of dealers at position ten that didn’t have departments.
Another dealer-specific element is the Vehicles for Sale feed that displays a live look at inventory on the GBP. At position one, only 13% of dealers didn’t have Vehicles for Sale. At position ten, 31% of dealers didn’t have Vehicles for Sale.
Pretty much everyone who talks about automotive SEO has talked about adding UTM tracking to GBP website links for years. At position one, 38% of dealers still don’t have UTMs on their website link. At position ten, 41% of dealers don’t have UTMs on their website links. Dealers also missed adding UTMs to their appointment link. At position one, only 3% of dealers didn’t have UTMs on the appointment link, compared to 37% of dealers not having UTMs on the appointment link at position ten.
Dealerships at number one averaged 3,386 reviews while dealers at number ten averaged only 1,885 reviews. Dealers at number one have an average rating of 4.4 versus dealers at number ten averaging 4.3
Dealers at position one had an average of 220 unique websites linking to them, while dealers at position ten had only 186 sites linking to them.
One of the coolest comparison points was “organic cost”. Basically, the ahrefs toolset looks at all the keywords a site ranks for, then assumes a certain amount of traffic for each phrase based on the estimated clickthrough rate at that position multiplied by the monthly search volume for each term. It cross-references PPC data to multiply that number by the estimated cost per click for each phrase, which results in an “organic cost” number that’s an estimate of how much PPC traffic a site would have to buy to equal the amount of traffic it’s getting from organic search.
When you compare the “organic cost” numbers from position one dealers to position ten dealers, the data shows that dealers at position ten would need to spend $245,203 dollars a month in PPC to get the same amount of traffic the dealers ranking at position one are getting from organic searches. That’s powerful proof that good SEO makes a massive difference.
Head over to the study and check out your SEO playbook for next year. Make sure you download the PDF version, there’s additional data included in the PDF that isn’t on the study page on the site.
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.
