5 Tips for optimizing your Google My Business listing

In this week’s video, we share 5 tips to help you optimize your Google My Business listing… Since most of the time, customers will have their first interaction with your Knowledge Panel or your dealership in a local pack result, it’s important to optimize your listing and maximize visibility. Use these five tips to make sure you’re providing the best signal to Google!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn. I’m back from the UK, but I’m still a bit jet-lagged, so I’m turning the green screen over to Kelcey Piper, one of our SEO Team Leads. Kelcey, take it away…

So today I’m going to add a bit more to our recent videos about Google Posts and Q&A and talk about Google My Business as a whole.

The quality and accuracy of your Google My Business Listing has a huge impact on whether or not you rank in the map pack and the knowledge panel. Believe it or not, your listing is like its own webpage – and most dealers are horrified to hear that.

If users can get all the information they need from your listing, they may never visit your website. and if your competitors are optimizing their Google My Business listings but you’re not, you’re losing out on a ton of traffic.

There are five big things you should be paying attention to in your listing.

Of everything related to GMB, the most important signal is your NAP, or name, address, and phone number. Google’s algorithm compares the consistency of your NAP in Google My Business to the rest of your citations (that’s anywhere your name, address, and phone number are listed on other sites).

If your NAP is inconsistent, you may not rank as well. Plus, you need to be sure you’ve got the right number listed because phone calls make up 70% of traffic in Google My Business.

Another important aspect of Google My Business is your photos. Google typically chooses which photos are displayed in the Knowledge Panel, but you can have SOME influence over which photos may appear.

It would suck to only see blurry photos that a customer took with their smart phone; but if you upload your own high quality photos of your sales floor, service center, and lot, it’s likely that Google will display the higher quality images instead. Plus, they’ll be immensely helpful to potential customers who are trying to get acquainted with your business.

Also, back in March, Google added a business description field to the knowledge panel. Think of this as an About Us page. Let customers know what you’re about and why you’re awesome – if you tell them why they should come to you, rather than your competitors, you’ll get more phone calls!

We’ve already done a few videos about Q&Abut car dealers are getting more and more questions every month and most dealers still don’t know it’s there. Make sure you’re monitoring these questions so you can provide thoughtful answers to these questions before another user does. YOU want to be the authority for your business in the Q&A section.

Let’s finish up with reviews. Reviews can make or break your ability to rank in local searches. You have to monitor more than just your Google reviews, because the algorithm takes your review score from other places like Yelp, Facebook, DealerRater, and Edmunds into consideration when ranking your Google My Business page.

You want to make sure you’re providing a custom response to each and every review; whether it’s positive or negative. This is huge for providing a positive user experience current and potential customers who are looking at the Knowledge Panel. Reviews that contain specific keywords like, “Ford dealership” or “Toyota service” can help you rank better for those terms – and there is no harm in including these types of terms in your responses either!

So that’s all the time we have for today. As always, if you’ve got questions or comments, leave them down below and we’ll get back to you shortly. Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to come back next week for another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn.