In this episode of Local Search Tuesdays, I’m giving you a quick preview of something big we’re about to release: the 2025 Google Business Profile study for car dealers.
On September 25th, we’ll be publishing the largest automotive SEO study ever done. We looked at thousands of dealer profiles across 20 major cities and analyzed over 150 data points for each one. The goal was to see which factors really make a difference in local rankings and how top dealers compare to those further down the list.
The results cover everything from categories and reviews to photos, website setup, and technical details. If you work in automotive, these insights will help you understand what’s actually working in local search right now.
Check out this teaser, and keep an eye out for the full study release, it’s going to be a game changer for dealerships in 2025.
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. Today’s episode is a bit of a teaser… because in two weeks, we’re releasing the 2025 version of our massive Google Business Profile study for car dealers!
Thursday the 25th is going to be an exciting day - we’re releasing the updated version of the largest SEO study ever done in automotive. The focus of the study is the same as last year: we wanted to see if real-world data supports the commonly-agreed-upon SEO best practices.
For this round, we went even bigger than last year. To pull the data from the study, we partnered with the guys at Places Scout to pull a bunch of keywords in a bunch of cities. Specifically, we searched for Ford dealer, Chevrolet dealer, Toyota dealer, Jeep dealer, Kia dealer, and used car dealer in 20 cities: Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, New York, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle.
We pulled the data from the map pack and local finder page, effectively giving us the top 20 ranking Google Business Profiles for each query. That resulted in over 3,000 GBPs, and we pulled over 150 data points for each GBP.
On Thursday the 25th, we’re publishing the results of the study. The study includes two main sections. The first section lists the averages for each data point, so dealerships are able to see how they compare to the national averages. In the second section, I’ll be comparing the number one ranked GBPs to the dealerships that ranked at position 10. The goal for this section is to see if reality reflects best practices.
Basically, we wanted to see if the top-ranked dealers were more closely following best practices than the lower-ranked dealers.
We searched in more cities than last year, and we added a few new data points, so there’s more data and better insights than ever before. You’ll see data on category selection, reviews, photos, and even technical elements of the dealership websites. A few teaser stats should pique your interest: 39% of dealerships don’t have UTM tracking on their website link in their GBP. 29% of dealers don’t have Vehicles for Sale displayed on their Profiles. And 21% of dealerships don’t have auto dealer schema markup on their website.
Keep an eye on our site and our socials the week after next for the official release. If you’re a car dealer (or a marketer working with a dealership), you don’t want to miss this study. It’s literally the largest SEO study that’s ever been conducted in automotive, and it can potentially change your game in 2025 and beyond.
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.
