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Inside the 2024 Google Business Profile Study for Car Dealers with Greg Gifford
16 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of More Than You Can Chew, host Dane Saville sits down with Greg Gifford, Google Platinum Product Expert and COO of SearchLab Digital, to unpack the findings from the 2024 Google Business Profile Study for Car Dealers.
Greg shares exclusive insights into how dealerships can leverage GBP to drive more local visibility, improve lead generation, and stay ahead of competitors in an increasingly competitive automotive market.
Whether you’re a dealer principal, marketing manager, or agency partner, you’ll learn what’s working (and what’s not) in local search — and how to apply the data from this groundbreaking study to your dealership’s digital marketing strategy.
Make sure to follow the show so you never miss what’s next.
- Check out more resources at https://searchlabdigital.com/
- Get PPC & Local SEO Help: https://searchlabdigital.com/seo-demo-request
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Speaker - Greg Gifford
00:00:00
Speaker
All right, we're back for another More Than You Can Chew, and I have our very own COO, Greg Gifford, international local SEO speaker here to talk about a GBP study, the biggest study in automotive.
00:00:17
Speaker
Greg, thanks for carving out some time for me. Hey, thanks for chatting with me. It's like we never talk to each other. I'm kidding. We talk lot. But yeah, it's fun to like get together for something official like this. yeah Absolutely. So you just finished up the big GBP study. How about set the context for us of what the study is about and then just jam. What are some things you found? Anything surprising? Anything you expected?
00:00:40
Speaker
what you What did you unearth when you looked into the data? Yeah, so basically the the kind of thought but process behind this was you see, what i don't know if people in automotive see, but in and internet marketing circles and SEO circles, we see all these studies that come out from people who are trying to prove that something is a ranking factor.
00:01:03
Speaker
And a lot of times you'll see somebody do it once or twice and it works. So they do it a couple more times and it works. And then they make the blanket statement, hey, this thing is a ranking factor, which is really scientifically hard to prove when you've only done it four times on four random clients.
00:01:20
Speaker
So we didn't want to go that route. We didn't want to try to... you know get a math statistician or data scientist and try to prove through ordinals and all the other kind of crazy math nerd things of this specifically is definitely a
Scope of the Study: Industries and Data Collection
00:01:37
Speaker
ranking factor. Plus, you know how SEO has hundreds of factors. Like how do you have an experiment where you can say, I'm only going to change this one thing and see if there's an outcome across a corpus of hundreds of sites or thousands of sites.
00:01:55
Speaker
You can't really do that. So instead, we took the direction of no one's ever really done an a extensive study on automotive SEO really ever. i mean, some people have said, well, yeah, this works or this doesn't, but nobody's really proven it with a large-scale study. So we wanted to do the biggest study ever in automotive.
00:02:16
Speaker
and We also did it in legal for personal insurance attorneys and cannabis dispensaries. And there's a really important reason we did all three. We've only released the auto dealer part so far. Auto dealers is our primary customer base. So clearly it's important for our own customers.
00:02:31
Speaker
Personal injury attorneys, we did that section because personal injury attorneys tend to be the most forward thinking and aggressive when it comes to local SEO.
00:02:43
Speaker
And then cannabis dispensaries, it's now legal for recreational use in like half of the country. but they can't do any paid social or paid search ads because it's illegal at the federal level.
00:02:54
Speaker
So really SEO is their only recourse for marketing. So we wanted to kind of look at those three scenarios so that within each vertical, we could get interesting information, but also we could compare between the verticals to see if there's any interesting stuff there. So we really took the approach of,
00:03:11
Speaker
Let's pull a lot of data and then see, does that data back up all of the currently assumed and agreed upon best practices?
00:03:23
Speaker
Okay. So we know what all the best practices are for local ah SEO because... I'm on the local search ranking factor study every I speak all over the world. We do tons of research internally.
00:03:37
Speaker
We have tons of clients. I've been doing local SEO for almost 20 years. So it's pretty easy to go online and see what those factors are. Like what are the things that you do if you want to show up better in search? So we partnered with Placescout.com.
00:03:52
Speaker
who is definitely the best local SEO tool out there, even though a lot of people still somehow don't know about them, but it does so many things and so many things amazingly. And so we pulled a ridiculous amount of data, ah was over, I think I want to say it was almost 2.3 million data points that we had across all of these Google business profiles.
00:04:15
Speaker
So for the auto dealer study, we took certain keyword phrases and we said, all right, how is this going to work?
Challenges in Study Execution
00:04:23
Speaker
If we pull these certain keywords from these certain cities, then we should be able to look at all of the Google business profiles that appear and then using this tool, pull all of this data.
00:04:38
Speaker
So we also partnered with Ahrefs, which is actually A-H-F-R-E-F-S, but it's called Ahrefs, so a lot of people get confused. They did the link analysis side.
00:04:50
Speaker
So we basically ran like car dealer or what we did used car dealer, Ford dealer, Toyota dealer, Chevy dealer, Jeep dealer in like 14 different medium to large metro markets.
00:05:07
Speaker
And then everybody's familiar with the map pack that shows, and you've got the map and the three results underneath. And then if you click more locations at the bottom of that, takes you to the local Finder page, which looks like Google Maps, but is kind of a filtered view of every business in the area that matches the intent of what your search query was. And we pulled data on positions one through 20.
00:05:30
Speaker
So if there were more than 20, we didn't go that far. So we pulled all that data, crunched all the numbers, and then put it all together into the study that we just released on the website. So it took just a little bit of work, just a couple minutes. It was what?
00:05:45
Speaker
How long have you been here now? A year and a half? Two years? A little over two years. Gosh, man, time flies. Sorry, I should know that. That was close. But we started working on this right before you started. So, I mean, it's ah it's over two years that we've been pulling this data and looking to see how are things changing over time and pulling the data, crunching the numbers, getting the stuff written up.
00:06:12
Speaker
And then obviously most people out there realize I speak a lot. So I'm on the road pretty often. So it's when I'm home, able to work on this. So that drug it out a bit too, you know, but yeah, I mean, a couple of years of research and number crunching. And then I don't even want to tell you how long it took me to actually write it up because I would write and then go back and start over and then write and then go back and start over because there's just so much data.
00:06:38
Speaker
I tried to figure out the best way to present it, where you can skim it and get value, or you can read through it if you want to get into the nitty gritty. So it took kind of a lot of back and forth to figure out a format that would work, that would make sense and make it easy for people to to see what's going on.
Key Findings: Importance of Google Business Profile Categories
00:06:57
Speaker
Awesome. What are some things then that really stuck out you from the data that you pulled?
00:07:04
Speaker
I think one of the interesting things is for me, the primary category thing. So, the For those of the people who are watching or listening who've never heard of the annual local search ranking factor study, it's a study that David Mims started years and years and years ago.
00:07:26
Speaker
And then his company got bought by Moz. And so then he still retained ownership of this study and did it while he was at Moz. Then when he left Moz, he passed the torch over to Darren Shaw at Whitespark. And Darren's been running it for the last years.
00:07:41
Speaker
And the thought process behind this study is that it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to really know what the ranking factors are in Google's algorithm. It's pretty likely nobody at Google knows this either now that they're using machine learning and doing all the constant updates. So if you were to take, say, the five best SEOs in the world and give them all the same homepage of a website and say, optimize this homepage.
00:08:11
Speaker
They'd all do it differently, but they would all touch the same things because they know that Google looks at the title tag and the H1 heading and the content and the alt text and things like that. So that's kind of the thought process. Everyone would do different things in the title tag, but everyone understands the title tag is important.
00:08:27
Speaker
So the process behind this study is they take the top five, 40-ish experts on the planet in local ah SEO and send out this very in-depth survey.
00:08:38
Speaker
Last year probably took me close to three hours to finish. So it's it's very long and in-depth. And then they basically just aggregate all of the answers from all of these different experts and you get a pretty good idea of which factors influence visibility. Because this isn't like a public survey where they just send it out and it's everyone's opinion. This is a highly curated list of people that are known to be local SEO experts that are in local SEO daily.
00:09:06
Speaker
And you're answering based on your own observations from things that you've done, not like, hey, I think Google cares about this, but I have no proof. Yeah. You aggregate everything together and you get a pretty solid list every year of these are the factors in order of importance that matter for local visibility. And in last year's study, the most influential factor by a long shot was your primary category in your Google business profile. So the first category that you choose within the 10 category slots.
00:09:38
Speaker
And you would think that that would be pretty straightforward, especially for car dealers, because there's a lot of categories that apply to selling cars, but there is a brand category, you know, Ford dealer, Toyota dealer, Chevy dealer for every brand. And you would think people would understand, Hey, if I'm a Ford dealer, I should probably pick Ford dealer as a category.
00:10:01
Speaker
Not really the case. real You see a lot of people selecting really generic stuff like just car dealer, which is the most generic thing you should choose. And if your primary category is the most influential factor, you would think people would have it right and a whole lot of people got it wrong. Let me see on here.
00:10:21
Speaker
I don't remember when I published it if I have, hold on, if I've got all of the individual categories. I may have to look that up separately here. I don't remember off the top of my head what that category count was.
00:10:40
Speaker
Okay, yeah. So you would think if the only keyword searches that we did were Toyota dealer, Jeep dealer, Kia dealer, Ford dealer, and used car dealer. So those five were the only ones that we searched.
00:11:01
Speaker
You'd think we would have at most put potentially six categories because you'd have the brands or the independent used car dealer or potentially p choose people would choose car dealer. Even though it's wrong, you'd think maybe we'd only see five or six total primary categories.
00:11:22
Speaker
And we saw 33 different primary categories, which was nuts. I mean, there was, you know what? I've got to pull it up. Give me just a second here. yeah I've cared better for this. the The things that we searched were
00:11:37
Speaker
we should see potentially eight categories is all we should have seen, which would be Chevy dealer, Ford dealer, Jeep dealer, Dodge dealer, Kia dealer, Toyota dealer, used car dealer, or car dealer.
00:11:53
Speaker
and Okay. We saw people that were, get this, they were franchise new car dealers, and their primary category was set to auto repair shop. Or auto parts store.
00:12:06
Speaker
Or car repair and maintenance service. So like really random. One guy had forklift dealer as his primary category, which was like. What guys like?
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, come on. um We saw some that had motor vehicle dealer selected, which doesn't make sense. We saw some that had GMC. So maybe it was a Chevy Buick GMC dealer and they care more about selling GMC. So that that may not necessarily be incorrect.
00:12:38
Speaker
Because if we searched Chevrolet dealer, you often see Chevy, Buick, GMC together. And for that particular dealer, maybe GMC is what matters the most. So that's not necessarily wrong. We saw oil change service, tire shop.
00:12:50
Speaker
One of them had clothing store as a primary category. One had warehouse as a primary category. I guess because you've got your cars all stored. We saw more than one that had just store.
00:13:06
Speaker
Like, the category was store. Talk about the most bland, generic, undefined potential category probably out there. Right, like, that applies to literally everyone. We saw several that had importer.
00:13:21
Speaker
I guess because you import your cars. Like, I don't know. Like, there were some really... Just wonky stuff that didn't make sense. And I think more than anything, this really uncovered the fact that the vast majority of dealerships out there do not understand what to do when it comes to SEO, whether that's.
00:13:44
Speaker
They're doing it in-house or they're using a vendor partner or they don't have anyone doing SEO. There is so much opportunity because there are so many things that are incorrect.
00:13:56
Speaker
And the thing that I always like to to tell people is that you always have to boil Google down to the simplest concept. And that's that Google is just a pattern detection program.
00:14:07
Speaker
And when you're doing ah SEO, you're just trying to improve the pattern of your business online so that you'll show up more often in searches. So if you know that Google is a pattern detection program, why would you pick importer for your primary category? You know?
00:14:23
Speaker
And, and in the study, uh, Oh, you know what? I have a short link for it. We can, I'm sure in like show notes, you can just link to the full thing, but just yeah say it out loud.
00:14:36
Speaker
I'm pretty sure I have a short link.
Detailed Insights on SEO Factors
00:14:38
Speaker
That was going to be the next. Yeah. Okay. So B I T dot L Y slash auto dash GBP dash study all in lowercase.
00:14:48
Speaker
We'll pull up the page. And so if you're interested to come read it, again, I've got it where you can skim it. I've got it where you can kind of read it, or I've got it where you can read the full thing. So if you just want to skim and look for the things you want, you're cool.
00:15:02
Speaker
Over to the right side in the sidebar, if you're doing this on desktop, it's much easier. It's really long. On the right side, there's like a thing that says content index. It's like a jump menu. So if you want to jump right to the...
00:15:13
Speaker
section about setting up departments for your dealership and click that and it'll just auto scroll down ah but right at the beginning i've just listed industry averages so if you just want to see hey what's the average number of reviews that a dealership has boom you can just see the number but then below that i list everything out and it's a little bit more intuitive Because I'm assuming the people that just want to glance at people that really know SEO, the people that want to read a little bit more, are probably curious why we're looking at things and what these things are. Okay. So like I've got a ah colored icon for each element and I color coded things. So if it is blue, that is a factor that is commonly assumed to affect ranking, affect where you're going to show up. Right.
00:16:03
Speaker
If it's green, it's not gonna affect your ranking, but it is a conversion-focused factor. So some of the things aren't gonna matter for SEO as far as getting you to rank better, but SEO isn't just about let's rank, it's about let's optimize conversions as well. So those are those green factors.
00:16:20
Speaker
So you can come through and see on each of these what the little icon color is, will give you insight into whether it's a ranking factor or conversion factor, and they'll just list them all out It explains what the assumption is of the best practice that we're checking with this data point.
00:16:36
Speaker
And it says if it's included in the local search ranking factor study, it tells you which numbers it's included in because it might apply to multiple categories in the study.
00:16:47
Speaker
And then there's just a little, you know, it could be just a few words. It might be several sentences. That's an explanation about what we found and why it matters. So, There's so much stuff in there.
00:16:58
Speaker
It's categories, it's photos, it's departments, it's the Q&A section, it's Google posts. We looked at Google reviews. We looked at Yelp reviews. We looked at signals on the site, like how long it takes for the page to load. is the site responsive?
00:17:14
Speaker
ah you know How many words are on the landing page, which is typically the homepage? ah We looked at links and the signals associated with those links. And we even looked at just how many keywords does does each dealership rank for? Does it rank for a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand? Okay. So there's a lot of stuff in there. So the the whole first section, it's massive.
00:17:36
Speaker
And it's here's the averages for each one of these. So like 11% of the profiles in the study. And the study was like 1600. And hold on, can tell you the exact number. 1,604 dealerships. So once we've pulled all these dealerships, you also are going to naturally pull in some of the department profiles. So it might be a service department profile or parts department or body department.
00:17:59
Speaker
our body shop department, those we pulled out. We only wanted to look at the primary sales focused main dealership profile. So there were 1,604 and like 11% of the profiles weren't claimed, which means they can't answer any reviews or edit any of the information in there.
00:18:15
Speaker
Um, You know, there are 10 category slots available. Most businesses out there won't use all 10 slots because there aren't 10 categories that apply to what they do.
00:18:26
Speaker
But in automotive, we have the unique ability to set up department profiles for service department, parts department, and body shop, which other businesses aren't allowed to do. They kind of bent the rules specifically for car dealers.
00:18:38
Speaker
But in each of those sections, there are more than 10 categories that apply to sales. There are more than 10 that apply to service. There are more than 10 that apply to parts. So each of your sales, service, and parts profiles should have at least nine or 10 categories listed.
00:18:53
Speaker
Only 66%.
00:18:56
Speaker
had a second category listed. So 34% of them only had a single category selected. And beyond the primary category being so important and so weighted, the additional categories you select have massive weighted influence on how you show up.
00:19:11
Speaker
So only 66% had a second category, only had five, and only fourteen percent had ten categories selected There were 143 unique categories selected, and man, there was some really, really wonky stuff in there. 138 of the profiles didn't have a website button, so like you couldn't... They didn't have a website listed on their profile, which...
00:19:41
Speaker
Seems crazy. Yeah. 42% of the profiles didn't have UTM tracking on their website link. And I've been talking about that for forever. George Nenny talks about it. Brian Pasch talks about it. Like everyone in automotive that does SEO will tell you, you should put UTM tracking on your website link. Everyone outside of automotive that does local SEO will tell you the same thing. The reason being, if referral information isn't passed to Google Analytics, that traffic gets classified as direct information.
00:20:09
Speaker
and Google Analytics. And thanks to privacy concerns, a lot of mobile traffic doesn't pass referral information to Google Analytics. A lot of traffic comes in on mobile. So if you're not using UTM tracking, that's all going to be classified as direct. And it looks like a lot of people are just coming right to your website that really truly aren't.
00:20:26
Speaker
And if you're investing in SEO, whether that's an internal resource or a vendor partner, you want to be able to judge the effectiveness of what they're doing. You want to know that you're getting ah ROI, right? So you want to make sure you've got this UTM tracking, which then forces Google analytics to attribute things correctly.
00:20:43
Speaker
ah We saw a bunch of people that had it set up that didn't have the medium. like So at an absolute minimum, if you're going to add UTM tracking to a website link, you have have source and medium.
00:20:57
Speaker
115 them had medium set incorrectly. Those were almost all Ford dealers that had social set as the medium instead of organic. um You know, 204 average photos in the GBP photo gallery for dealerships. But the...
00:21:17
Speaker
uh, average age of the most recent photo uploaded. So like dealers have an average of just over 200 photos uploaded to their business profile, but the average age of the most recent photo uploaded 283 days.
00:21:34
Speaker
Wow. So like two thirds of a year since they've uploaded a picture to their profile. Um, the average age of the most recent owner uploaded photo. So those also count customer photos. If it comes through like a review or a customer's just at the dealership and they upload a photo of the dealership.
00:21:55
Speaker
But if we're talking photos that the owner of the business uploaded, so it's tagged with the same account that owns the business, the most recent upload date was 778 days.
00:22:07
Speaker
Woo. So like two years since most dealers have uploaded photos. 600 of the dealers didn't have vehicles for sale, so people can't see their inventory. 61% didn't have any department profiles set up.
00:22:22
Speaker
And this is crazy to me because we all understand the importance of a Google business profile for showing up in search, right? And you would think if Google is going to change the rules for car dealers, like we talked about a minute ago,
00:22:33
Speaker
Most businesses can't set up separate department profiles, but car dealers can. Well, if Google is going to say, we have enough data to show that this is the right decision both for the business and for customers to allow this business type to do this certain thing that other businesses can't do.
00:22:50
Speaker
That's probably something your dealership should be doing, right? And 61% of the dealerships haven't done it. That's just shocking to me. I mean, I've been talking about this for freaking years, and nobody's doing it.
00:23:04
Speaker
Um... And then we check, you know, who's got questions in QA. The average number of questions is 10. Only 58% of the questions asked ever even get answered. Only 18% of the questions get answered by the business.
00:23:19
Speaker
ah So it's just shocking. um There was one, we we also pull random data points that are fun too, like the dealership that had the most questions uploaded. There was one dealership that had 206 questions asked in their Q&A section.
00:23:37
Speaker
um The average number of Google posts in the last 12 months, only 2.6. So most dealerships are not using Google posts. The average review count, so the total number of reviews, the average counts only 1,347, which is pretty low because, I mean, you know, we've got clients that have 6,000 or 7,000 reviews. So that means there's a lot of dealerships out there with not many reviews to offset those dealerships that have multiple thousands.
00:24:03
Speaker
The average review score on Google is only 3.9. oh So there's a ton of stuff like that that's really interesting that dealers can come in and look and see, hey, how do I stack up just against the industry average?
00:24:14
Speaker
Now, keep in mind, that doesn't necessarily mean if you do better than the average, you're going to rank better in your market. Because again, Google is pattern detection. And what really matters is how do you compare against the pattern in your market, not the national pattern.
00:24:29
Speaker
But this still gives you some insight. So if you're a dealer that's sitting there with 352 reviews and the average is 1,300, you probably realize I should probably work on getting more reviews. yeah got some work cut out for you. Right.
00:24:42
Speaker
So that's the whole, and it's a massive post just going through all of that. I mean, there's there's more stuff like... 77% of dealership reviews on Google are positive, meaning they're four or five star versus 22% being one to three star.
00:24:56
Speaker
so The average response time is two days. ah You know, we look at Yelp reviews because if anyone looks up directions using Apple maps, the stars that show on Apple maps come from Yelp and not Google. So it's important to check that.
00:25:09
Speaker
So it's response times and averages there. You know, the... Average load time for a dealership website is 4.5 seconds.
Comparative Analysis of Dealership Rankings
00:25:20
Speaker
The slowest load time was 219 seconds for the homepage of one dealership, one site to load.
00:25:27
Speaker
Someone dropped the ball there. You want to guess what platform it was?
00:25:34
Speaker
Dealer.com? How did you guess? Huh, I'm shocked that you got that right. ah The fastest load time that we saw for the homepage of a dealership website was 0.17 seconds.
00:25:46
Speaker
Okay. So that went super fast. 24% of the 1,600 websites in the study were not responsive websites. oh You want to guess what vendor that was?
00:26:00
Speaker
Dealer.com? How'd you guess? Shocking. 57% of the dealerships didn't have auto dealer schema markup.
00:26:12
Speaker
on the site, which is also shocking because most of the time that's put in automatically by your website vendor. So like silly. um another Another thing, this one I thought was really interesting.
00:26:25
Speaker
So everyone, if you know anything about websites and SEO, even to the smallest degree, you understand that If you want to show up as a search result when somebody types something into Google, you need a page about that topic on your website. That's general, like, everybody understands that.
00:26:45
Speaker
And most people understand you've got to optimize that page. So, like, your title tag, your H1 heading, your alt text, all the elements on the page, you've got to optimize around those keywords, right? So, you would expect, if you are looking at the homepage of a website,
00:27:01
Speaker
and we did a search for used car dealer, that the homepage of the website would have the phrase used car dealer on the website at least once, right?
00:27:12
Speaker
On the homepage. Or if we search for Ford dealer, that you would have the word Ford dealer or Ford dealership would work well. It would work just as well. But Ford dealer or Ford dealership or Chevy dealer or Chevrolet dealer and Chevrolet dealership.
00:27:28
Speaker
Only 42% of the sites in the study had the keyword that was searched on the homepage of the website. Like, how is that possible? Yeah. ah The average word count on the homepage I thought was interesting.
00:27:45
Speaker
ah I'm going to get to more in a second. I don't want it to seem like I'm just going to sit here and read numbers to you the whole time. ah So if you're watching this, stick with me. It's going to be awesome. But ah we didn't count stop words. So like A, N, of, V. We don't count those because that's just fluff.
00:28:01
Speaker
So for actual words, what we call what the actual grammatical term is, non-stop words. Because a and of salt stop words. The average number of non-stop words on the page, 737.
00:28:16
Speaker
So that's actually encouraging because a lot of the vendors are only going to throw a couple of sentences on the homepage. Yeah. And that's not enough. But there was a shocking 25% of the dealership websites. So what We had So text on the homepage.
00:28:32
Speaker
of the sites out of the sixteen hundred had zero text on the homeage Wow, that is surprising to me. Right? But keep in mind, too, that when we're pulling these results, we're going all the way through position number 20 in the local finder. So clearly none of the people were ranking number one if they had no text.
00:28:51
Speaker
Yeah. But then we're looking at the number of links, like the average number of websites linking to dealership websites, just 245. Yeah.
00:29:00
Speaker
Uh, we found some interesting stuff around the difference between a lot of people when they're talking about in inbound links are going to look at the number of links. How many links do I have pointed at my website?
00:29:12
Speaker
But there's diminishing return and getting multiple links from the same website. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it because if it's a website that gets traffic, you want as many links as you can get because it's more chances people will click that link and come to the site.
00:29:25
Speaker
But once I'd gotten a link from a website, from Google's algorithmic perspective, there's exponential diminishing return in getting multiple links from the same website. So we looked at the deficit between how many links you had and how many websites you had linking to you.
00:29:42
Speaker
And the biggest number was like 4 million something. Because there were there were a couple of sites that made it in that had...
00:29:54
Speaker
ah I forget what the group was, but it's a massive group. It's one of the like, it wasn't Hendrick, but it's like a Hendrick-like group. It's some auto nation or some, I think, actually think it might've been auto nation, but some massive dealer group with hundreds of stores that has their own internal marketing department.
00:30:10
Speaker
And there was a Toyota site in the study that 4,083,694 links pointed the dealership website. six hundred and ninety four links pointed to the dealership website
00:30:22
Speaker
from only 642 websites. Oh God. That is usually three of this group's stores that made it into the study. They always ranked very low because they're not doing good SEO.
00:30:36
Speaker
And they always had this 4 million plus link deficit because you know, the people on those link teams in that internal marketing department, they're not looking at the number of unique websites. They're just looking at the number of links So they're going off to all these crappy sites and just adding a link to like every car and every page on the website.
00:30:56
Speaker
And then they're going to their boss going, and hey guys, we're going to rank so well because we've got 6 million links and the next guy closest to us has 4,000.
00:31:04
Speaker
because they're just not paying attention to the right stuff. yeah So it goes through all that stuff, right? And then the really cool part is we start doing ranking comparisons. So now we say, all right, these are all the factors that we pulled and why we pulled them, and here's the averages so that you can see here's what the averages look like. yeah But then the really important bit is we wanted to compare the guys that ranked number one in the map pack to the guys that ranked number 10 in the local finder, which is technically number 10 in the map pack.
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah. If they existed, right? Because if it's a smaller market and there's only five, four dealers in the market, then there is no number 10. yeah So where number 10 did show up, We went all the way through.
00:31:44
Speaker
So now we compare position one to position 10, knowing that if we're talking about a certain factor, like primary category or number of words on the page or number of links pointed or reviews or whatever, doing something correctly should get you to rank higher than doing something incorrectly.
00:32:04
Speaker
So again, we kept the same color coding, green and blue. So blue, if it's a ranking factor, green, if it's a conversion factor, but we introduced red. So in that comparison section, there are a few that we colored red and the red color signifies the findings did not match up to best practices.
00:32:23
Speaker
So it was where we were surprised because we expected to see one outcome and we saw the opposite, but it was pretty easy to figure out why we didn't see them.
00:32:35
Speaker
So like, ah where's one that it was an obvious one here? Well, like inbound links, we're talking about the average number of inbound links pointed at the website, right? Not the number of unique websites, but the average number of links where we know there were several dealerships that got in the study that had 4 million plus, right?
00:33:00
Speaker
But most dealers don't have that many. So the average number of inbound links pointed to the dealership website at position one, the average was 3,654. At position 10, was 5,084. significantly that position ten it was five thousand and eighty four so significantly more But if I took out that Toyota dealer in Washington and a few of the multi-location independent chains like JD Byrider and think kind like that would show up in the used car searches.
00:33:30
Speaker
And JD Byrider has the unique and not intelligent strategy of having a single website for multiple stores in multiple states, which We've talked to them multiple times at conferences and told them you will show up so much better in search results and have much better sales if you split to separate websites, but they won't listen. So who knows?
00:33:53
Speaker
Anyway, you take out those few that have just an unnatural number of links that just, okay, like you have anybody in there, if most people are even in the 10 50,000 range and you've got somebody at the 4 million range and you do an average, the average number is going to be way off compared to what reality is. yep So if I remove those couple of people from position 10 that had millions of links, then it actually worked out.
00:34:22
Speaker
So the average, so if I took out ah I always had to take out three from the position tech. So if I remove the Toyota dealer and I remove a couple of multi-independent chains that had 35,000 links and 11,000 and some odd links, those are the ones that were clear outliers. yeah i take I didn't want to do a mean because that wouldn't give us the right number either. So I said, let's just take the outliers out for our own edification, redo the average. I take those three outliers out, and now the position 10 average is only 2401. Okay.
00:34:58
Speaker
okay So that does match expectations. But I didn't want to cheat the data and just remove those from the the calculations and go, oh, guess what? We're the smartest SEOs in the world because everything matched what we thought it would.
00:35:12
Speaker
That's not fair, and that's not cool. Yeah. So like on that one, ah I did put like, hey, here's a note. Here's why this didn't match. But it matches if you pull this thing out. And the same thing ah with the number of linking domains.
00:35:27
Speaker
There was ah the the the same two independent chains that were in a study screwed things up again. So I pulled those two out again. And then boom, it pulls right back into the order that you would expect it to be in.
00:35:41
Speaker
Now, the ones that didn't match that I thought were interesting was Q&A stuff. So looking at questions answered by the dealership. So whenever someone asks a question in the Q&A widget on the Google Business Profile, if you answer with a Google account that is either the owner account or a manager account of the Google Business Profile, that answer will say that it came from the business and then it will put owner in parentheses, even if it's a manager profile.
00:36:09
Speaker
If you answer just from your own random Google account that doesn't have access to that Google business profile, it just says that person's name. So it should be that dealerships are paying attention to the Q&A widget and they're making sure that they answer every single question that's asked.
00:36:26
Speaker
And then you want to upvote your answers because it's a community discussion widget. So it doesn't expect a single answer. It allows for multiple answers. to the question And whichever answer has the most thumbs up is the answer that's displayed as the primary answer, and you have to click a link to read everything else.
00:36:42
Speaker
So dealerships should be answering everything and ensuring that their answers are upvoted so that it's a nice FAQ look where the dealership answers every single question. And we already said a minute ago that like a ridiculous number of questions are going unanswered by the dealerships.
00:36:56
Speaker
But looking at questions answered by the dealership. Now, this doesn't this this is a question that would be green if it wasn't red, meaning this doesn't influence
Future Plans and Reflections on the Study
00:37:09
Speaker
visibility. It's not a ranking factor. It's a conversion factor.
00:37:12
Speaker
But we turned it red because at position one, 12.5% the questions were answered by the dealership. the dealership. Now, our assumption would seventeen point nine percent of the questions answered by the dealership now our assumption would be whoever's at the top would probably have more, not because it's affecting how they rank, but typically the people that rank at number one versus the people that rank at number 10, the people at number one are more aggressively optimizing their Google business profile.
00:37:48
Speaker
Whether they're doing it themselves at the dealership or whether they have a vendor partner doing it, typically if they're doing all the other things that would cause them to rank at number one, yeah they're probably going to be answering those questions as well.
00:38:02
Speaker
I don't really know why this didn't match. We don't have enough data from this. We would have to actually go probably physically talk to everyone in the study to find out what their strategy is and what's going on to kind of uncover this. yeah There weren't any real outliers. It really was that the average was much higher for people at position 10 and position one. Interesting.
00:38:23
Speaker
i I think my suspicion is that, dude, you've been in SEO for a long time. You know how it is. Everybody wants to find that silver bullet. You want to find that one little tricky thing that you can do that's going to at least bump you up a couple of spots or maybe bump you up to position number one.
00:38:42
Speaker
I think my suspicion here is that the dealers that are ranking lower are trying everything they can try to rank higher. Whether it's they're doing it themselves, not really knowing what they're doing or kind of knowing what they're doing or whether it's a vendor partner trying to help them rank better. yeah You know, if we had a dealership that wasn't ranking, we would do everything we could to get them to rank higher.
00:39:06
Speaker
And we would do everything we could with the conversion elements to squeeze more conversions out of the traffic that they're already getting. So it kind of makes sense to me in that scenario that the people that rank lower are trying harder than the people that rank higher.
00:39:20
Speaker
So maybe they're answering more questions. I don't really know. That one's one I couldn't really figure out. Yeah, that's interesting. That is pretty natural assumption, though, too, because like you said, you they're going to put in the extra work to try to get higher than that 10th position.
00:39:34
Speaker
And so trying every different tactic they can to to opt to fully optimize the profile. So that... Makes sense to me, but hey, like you said, we'd have to go in and really dig our heels in and talk to those folks there.
00:39:47
Speaker
Greg, this is just really cool. Just so many different data points. i mean, I didn't even read the whole thing yet. I can't imagine how long it took to write it. It's taken me long enough to read it. Well, yeah, and especially then trying to figure out how do I present this data?
00:40:01
Speaker
Because like in my head, it's all there, right? Like I understand the why and I understand the what and I understand on each element why that element is important. I can clearly sit here and talk about SEO stuff all day long, right?
00:40:15
Speaker
I don't want this to be some millions of word posts that takes five hours to read because I'm trying to explain every single thing there to someone that doesn't understand SEO.
00:40:27
Speaker
Because then the people that do understand SEO, the dealers that do have a better grasp on digital marketing, aren't going to read through a 5 million word piece of content to see what's there.
00:40:39
Speaker
So I had to figure out how to strike that delicate balance between this makes sense to people that don't know anything about SEO, but it's also not overly long and drawn out with a lot of extra explanation for the people that do know ah SEO. Yeah.
00:40:56
Speaker
I think I landed on something that kind of works, but I don't know. Everybody go to bit.ly slash auto dash GBP dash study and check it out and let us know what you think. And if there's anything in there too, if you're watching this and there's something in there where you're like, Hey, I would like to see,
00:41:12
Speaker
How this looks, if you were going to do this study again, let us know because we're actually going to do this as an annual study now.
Personal Anecdote: Dining in Rome
00:41:19
Speaker
So every single year, we're going to be doing this study for car dealerships and we're probably going to grow it. I'd like to do it on at least twice as many dealers this year. Okay.
00:41:29
Speaker
I'm about to actually talk to the guys at PlacesScout and kind of sort out how we're going to update the study this year. It's a couple of little things about how we pulled the data that I want to tweak. But yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting because then next year,
00:41:43
Speaker
A lot of the, a big part of the delay of getting this published was me figuring out how the heck to present this date where it made sense. Now that I've got it, cool. Next time I could just come in and slot in the new numbers and it's going to be a heck of a lot faster. So we're going to do this every year.
00:41:58
Speaker
And it's going to be fun when we do this year's because now not only do we have the, here's the 2025 averages and the 2025 comparison of one to 10, I'll add a third section at the bottom of these are the things that significantly changed from 2024 to 2025.
00:42:16
Speaker
So we can see how behavior is shifting in the effort that people are putting into SEO and potentially how factors that influence visibility or conversion might change Awesome. I love i love i love the year-over-year comparisons. I'm looking forward to that for sure. Well, it's written out well. It's it's nice little chunks, ah you know little blurbs that that lay everything out well, but it's just, man, it's a lot of data points that you pulled out. So definitely check it out. It's also, you can find it through ah Search Lab Digital's website as well, but use the bit.ly link. It'll be easier, and I'll throw that in the show notes. But Greg, before I let you escape, I got one question for you, and it's going to be probably the most difficult question you've ever been asked on a podcast.
00:42:56
Speaker
I want to know. Bring it on. Whether it's in your hometown or it's a place in your travels, where would you recommend your number one spot to get something to eat?
00:43:11
Speaker
See, you know this is a really tough question to ask me. And you are right. This is probably the hardest question I've ever been asked. This actually outranks on the difficulty scale.
00:43:23
Speaker
The question that I usually get is, what's my favorite movie? This is Atzin Parker. ah
00:43:33
Speaker
Man, there are so many on there. And... Honestly, I was talking last night with my wife. I think one of the top five meals, maybe the best meal I've ever had, I can't tell people where to go because I literally don't know the name of it.
00:43:50
Speaker
Because this, almost a year ago, we were in Rome and we did a tour of the Vatican and we walked out of the front, past the obelisk, down all the kind of that you know that that row of shops and stuff that are on that street that comes past the the the square and then the obelisk and then it's like a row of stuff.
00:44:11
Speaker
We took a right on the street by the river and we walked to the first bridge. So like, if you want to go to this place, You got to leave the Vatican, come out through the square, past the the obelisk, get to the road that's at the river, take a right, go to the very first bridge that you come to, go left across the bridge, and as you go across the bridge, it's going to kind of go uphill a little bit.
00:44:37
Speaker
And you kind of like, you know, it's like buildings and stuff and you kind of start to go uphill. And there's one of those weird European things where there's like the hill kind of goes down, but they built stuff up around. So it's like this little kind of 90 degree section that's cut out where it's actually lower than street level.
00:44:54
Speaker
And there was this little restaurant there and we were really hungry and it was the first place we found that wasn't like touristy Vatican and we're like, let's go here. And as we sit down, we look up and they had a Michelin star and it was like one of the most amazing meals I ever had. We were the only people there.
00:45:09
Speaker
It was so good. love it. That was one of the best meals I've ever had in my life. ah Gosh, besides that,
00:45:22
Speaker
ah We went to a couple of places in Austin for PubCon last year ah with my buddy Steve Hammer, who is a massive foodie, and he always picks the restaurants based on the chef.
00:45:33
Speaker
Okay. And both of those restaurants got a Michelin star. um I don't remember the names of them, though. um But yeah, like just insane, insane, insane food everywhere I go. Like,
00:45:48
Speaker
That's a tough question, man. I know. That's why I wanted ask that to come back later and be like, wait, we got to do one more little video to add on to the end and be like, no, this is the place. This is the place. Well, Greg, I know you're a busy man. And in fact, you got travel coming up and, you know, we had to try to squeeze this in. So I appreciate you lending me your time. And we took off a bite more than we can chew. And well, now going dive into the GBP study, everyone. So thanks for joining me, Greg. I really appreciate it.
00:46:13
Speaker
Thanks for having me, man. And everyone, we'll catch you on the next More Than You Can Chew.