This week on Local Search Tuesdays, I’m breaking down the right way for car dealers to choose Google Business Profile categories. Your primary category is the top local ranking factor, but too many dealerships are getting it wrong.

Our latest research found 121 different categories in use, and a lot of them don’t belong on a sales profile. In this episode, I share the correct categories dealers should select so you can boost visibility and avoid costly mistakes.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing some vital information for car dealers. I’m going to share the list of what car dealerships should select as their Google Business Profile categories.

The categories you select on your Google Business Profile have absolutely massive influence on your business’s visibility in local search results. According to the most recent version of the Local Search Ranking Factors study from Whitespark, the most influential ranking factor is your primary GBP category. Additional GBP categories came in as the seventh most influential factor.

Category selection is a bit more complicated for car dealerships. Google allows the selection of up to ten relevant categories, but you can only use pre-set categories. Most businesses only have a few categories that apply, but dealerships have far more than ten categories that apply.

Because of the unique rule that allows dealerships to set up separate Google Business Profiles for the service and parts departments, dealers have even more categories to choose from. It’s vital that categories don’t overlap between departments, which means your primary GBP should only have sales related categories, your service GBP should only have service categories, and your parts GBP should only have parts categories.

Your categories should reflect what you are, not what you do. Selecting unrelated categories that you’re trying to make work will only cause problems. Research has shown that adding unrelated categories actually causes less visibility in search results.

We’re finishing up our annual Google Business Profile research project, and the data we have on dealership categories is pretty shocking. We’ll be publishing the results soon, but this was too juicy to sit on for a few more weeks.

Like last year, we searched for each of the keywords Ford dealer, Chevrolet dealer, Jeep dealer, Kia dealer, Toyota dealer, and used car dealer in the 20 largest cities in the US. We then looked at the top 20 ranking dealerships in the map pack.

At most, we should have seen those 6 categories on all of the business profiles in the study. Instead, we saw 19 different categories. 

Even more shocking, there were 121 unique categories between all of the profiles in the study.

The most common mistake we saw was dealers selecting service or parts categories on their primary sales profile. Dealers also often selected categories that are dealership adjacent, yet still incorrect, like “auto parts manufacturer” or “car manufacturer” or “car factory”. We also found a significant number of dealerships selecting categories that are completely unrelated to automotive, like “chauffeur service”, “boutique”, “distribution service”, and “manufacturer”.

I’ll be writing up a blog post that really dives into the category mess once the full study is released next month, but for now, I wanted to share a list of the correct categories that dealerships SHOULD be selecting on their GBPs.

In nearly every situation, your primary category should be “[brand] dealer” (for whichever brand you sell. In certain markets, dealers may need to select something different like “used car dealer” - check out the video I did a few years ago at bit.ly/gmb-primary-category for more details if you’re the only brand dealership in a market to see what your options are. You can also laugh at how weird I look with no tattoos on my hands and fingers… 

Dealers should never, in any situation, select “car dealer” as their primary category. That’s the most generic category you can select.

Once you’ve locked in your primary category, you should select the remaining nine. Selecting all ten categories makes it more likely that you’ll show as a search result for phrases related to those categories. In no particular order, these are all categories that you could select. I’m not listing the “[brand] dealer” categories, since those are all obvious and you likely already chose your brand as your primary category.

Don’t select other brands unless you actually sell those brands (selling them as used cars doesn’t count). GM stores and Stellantis stores are allowed to select all of the brands they sell. If you’re one of the random dealerships in a small town that’s something like a Ford and Toyota dealership under one roof, you can also select both.

So besides the brands, these are the categories you could select for your primary sales GBP: (I’m skipping the air quotes to save my fingers from getting tired and my editor from going crazy)

Auto broker

Auto market

Car dealer

Car finance and loan company

Car leasing service

Electric motor vehicle dealer

Motor vehicle dealer

Truck dealer

Used car dealer

Used truck dealer

That’s ten categories not counting your primary “[brand] dealer” category. If you’re a dealership that also rents cars, it’s also OK to select “car rental agency”. Other than that, you shouldn’t select any other categories for your primary dealership Google Business Profile.

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.