• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.
Dominion DMS

Google Places for your Dealership

Jump to latest Follow Reply
Eley Duke

Eley Duke

Boss
Nov 30, 2009
477
273
Awards
8
First Name
Eley
#1
There is a lot of talk and discussion about Google Places these days. Brian Pasche of PCG is talking about it and been astonished how many dealers are clueless to Google Places!

We have had our Google Places page for some time now, and I continue to update it. However I always have questions about what is the right way to go about our Google Places page, what are best practices.
Here are a few questions I have and hope everyone will add to this.

1. “Provided by the Business Ownerâ€
- Details - Can you have too much in “detailsâ€
- Geo Locations - should I just concentrate on my city and maybe the surrounding 3 or have it with as many locations as you want. Does it matter?
- How many “Specialties†should you have?
- Should you geo target in the description and treat the content in the description like SEO content?

-Pictures and Video - are you adding pictures of your facility, video's?

2. Categories – Google Places allows 5 categories , what’s the best mix for categories?
- We have 4 franchises; listing Chevrolet Dealer, Buick Dealer, GMC Dealer, Cadillac Dealer, and Used Car Dealer.

3. 3rd Party Info
- Of course the best way to maintain 3rd party info is directly through those third parties such as yellowpages, superpages, dealer rater, etc.
- Is there a way to control how much info is displayed in Google Places from 3rd parties like superpages.com
- SuperPages has me listed as “bad credit†“consignments†and “American Sign†and a ton of other descriptions.

4. Additional Details
- Google allows you to add additional details.
- Should you take an SEO approach to these details?
- Can you have too many additional details.
- Is it scored by relevancy
- What are the best details to ad

5. Reviews of course are a must
- I have 21 Dealer Rater reviews and scored a 5, how long does it take for all those to dump into the places page and show up in search, right now it shows only 3 reviews in search page, and 14 Dealer Rater reviews inside the place page with no stars?

If you can take a minute to respond please do so. I believe everyone would like to see what best practices you’re using and what is working for you with managing you Google Places page!

Also, who is using their Places page Top Search Queries data to help with their SEM campaign?

FYI - our Google Places page is the 3rd largest ad source for phone calls, are you tracking your Google Places page phone traffic?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
#2
Eley,

Great Post. There are enough questions here to build a terrific resource for those that have yet to tread these waters. I agree with Brian. I am really surprised how many dealers have not claimed their page. I'll be anxious to see what kind of feedback you get from the community.

To make things a little easier, click here to visit the page in question.

Here are a couple things I can share.

3rd Party Data:

NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) are the three-legged stool to review content from a 3rd party. If you have a mismatch on any of these data points it generally will not display correctly. Google scrapes for this content, it is not fed. The best practice we suggest is to match all of your listings to the same NAP 100% character for character. I imagine that this is why your DealerRater reviews are not represented in your aggregate star rating. Currently the name of your dealership does not match the name we have for you. PM me and let me know if it is ok to match our listing to your Places page and I will make that happen for you.

Pictures and Video:

This is really essential too. Others here are better suited to talk about the optimization component, but I'll offer this anecdotal experience. Google looks to "fill in" the holes where it can. I talked with a dealer today that had a 3 yr old picture of a building they no longer occupy as their main photo because that is what Google chose to "fill in." Not impressive, but here is one that is worse than that:

ScreenHunter_01 Jun. 03 00.05.jpg

If you don't upload the pictures you have no control over what is displayed, and you might not want to rely on a scrape from insiderpages because you have some reviews there.

Hope this helps get the ball rollin'

Ryan
 
#3
Eley, I'll do my best to share my thoughts...


Can you have too much in “details” - Make maximum use of the areas that Google Allows you to.

Should I just concentrate on my city and maybe the surrounding 3 or have it with as many locations as you want. Does it matter? - I open mine up just a bit more without going overboard. It can really depends on where you're located.

How many “Specialties” should you have? - Just be honest without being spammy. You know when you too much is too much. I have 6, don't forget about your service department!


Should you geo target in the description and treat the content in the description like SEO content? Again, don't get spammy but make use of all the fields that Google provides. You want a complete listings.

I find if you provide your own information, the 3rd Party information gets overwritten.

Reviews from DealerRater - be sure your phone numbers and addresses are matching 100%


Also, who is using their Places page Top Search Queries data to help with their SEM campaign? Once you have your Google places page dialed into - I would recommend getting on Google Boost.

Once you re ready to get on Booth - give my friend Dennis Stuart over at Google a call and he'll get you set up. 800-838-7969 x 23847

Incase you have not already searched or for others..

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f21/dealerrater-not-syncing-google-places-1800.html

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/google-places-accounts-under-review-1373.html

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/news-google-boost-launched-1523.html

Some articles on the Blog that might help (isnt DR full of awesome knowledge?) :)

How Dealership Compete with Local Competition on Google Places - Video | DealerRefresh

Google Maps Drives Traffic To Car Dealer Websites | DealerRefresh
 
#4
Hey Eley,

You should have your stars showing in the next week or two when Google's update runs. Your reviews are definitely indexing now as you have a new one up on Places from yesterday. It typically takes 4-6 weeks for reviews to count towards your star rating, so you shouldn't be waiting too much longer.

Chip-
 
#5
Ryan Leslie said:
NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) are the three-legged stool to review content from a 3rd party. If you have a mismatch on any of these data points it generally will not display correctly. Google scrapes for this content, it is not fed. The best practice we suggest is to match all of your listings to the same NAP 100% character for character.
Ryan
Click to expand...

Ryan, are you suggesting I use the same phone numbers for all 3rd party listing sites, yellowpages, superpages, insider, yahoo, etc so Google can scrape the info. I currently use different tracking numbers for most of these to track my phone traffic, should I change to 1 number to track all web phone traffic from 3rd parties?

Also, our phone numbers on our web sites are different than Google Places for tracking purposes (we are using the same number for Google and Dealer Rater so it matches up). In the forum SEO 101 For Dealers Alex was talking about how his main number was giving him trouble because it wasnt linking up with Google, now that was 3 years ago, so things may have changed. We also have a number we have had for 40 years, but I use 800 tracking numbers on everything now that dump into that main 757.539.8777 number.

One other thing, we have 2 Google Places page that mirror each other in all content except for the name. One is Duke Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, the other is our corp name, Duke Automotive. It seems they link together when looking at the search data since its all the same. Is there any downside to this. Is there any upside to creating a Google Places page for each franchise if possible?

Jeff Kershner said:
I find if you provide your own information, the 3rd Party information gets overwritten.

Reviews from DealerRater - be sure your phone numbers and addresses are matching 100%

(isnt DR full of awesome knowledge?)
Click to expand...

DealerRater - got that matching 100%, the team at DealerRater was quick to help me!

I agree on wirting your own content, I never want anyone else writing ours such as 3rd parties.

I found something interesting yesterday, I contacted YellowPages.com to let them know my listing was wrong and how could I change the info. We were paying $400 a month to YP.com for a premium listing and advertising, I cut that out in Feb, even though YP.com showed they were driving 100 people a month with click thrus to our site (yes I know I should probably turn that back on). Now I am not paying and all of a sudden all my info is crazy. There are 4 listings click here for search results, for us on YP.com, 2 I had control of at some time and listed info, 2 others are controled by a company called Ingenio and the numbers are dead end numbers. A lot of that info on all those pages is transferring to Google. So yesterday the YP rep says they have nothing to do with Ingenio, and that if i want control of my content I have to start paying again. Anyone else run up against this?

And Jeff, yep, DR is an awesome resource, its my go to place over anything else!
 
#6
Eley Duke said:
Ryan, are you suggesting I use the same phone numbers for all 3rd party listing sites, yellowpages, superpages, insider, yahoo, etc so Google can scrape the info. I currently use different tracking numbers for most of these to track my phone traffic, should I change to 1 number to track all web phone traffic from 3rd parties?
Click to expand...

Eley,

Yes, I would suggest going to one number over multiple tracking numbers. I'm not the only one suggesting that though. There seems to be consensus from a lot of smart people, Dev Basu and Joe Pistell to name a few, that the pros of tracking don't outweigh the cons of inconsistency.

The OP is thought provoking, but I'm linking to this because of the number of folks that disagreed. Read through the comments on this thread:

Call Tracking FAQ for Car Dealerships - What you Need to Know! | DealerRefresh
 
#7
Eley,

We all know that Google provides no manual or formal guide to get it just right... so, we're all left to guess what's the best way to do it.

Imagine if you found 30 of the TOP LOCAL SEO's in the USA you had all of your questions and more presented to them. They'd all vote and rank each question and discuss their findings --AND-- because all of this changes so fast, the survey is done once every year.

Here you go Eley... close your doors, get out your highlighter, you're gonna be lovin' this:

June 3rd, 2011! Local Search Ranking Factors | Local SEO Best Practices for Ranking in Google Places

DR forum regulars, look to the top of this survey, you'll notice our member Dev Basu at the top.

note to self: I need to interview him for the DR blog.
 
Last edited:
#9
Ryan Leslie said:
Eley,

Yes, I would suggest going to one number over multiple tracking numbers. I'm not the only one suggesting that though. There seems to be consensus from a lot of smart people, Dev Basu and Joe Pistell to name a few, that the pros of tracking don't outweigh the cons of inconsistency.

Call Tracking FAQ for Car Dealerships - What you Need to Know! | DealerRefresh
Click to expand...

Ok Ryan, this helps, or maybe just confuses me more; as Joe pointed out and we all know, ask 10 people and you get 20 opinions. We actaully just switched to Century Interactive and we have placed a dynamic tracking number on our web site. I posted a comment on that thread to ask Stephen his advice since we are his client.

I guess I want my cake and eat it to, because I want Google Places grabbing all the right info, want to be able to track and see my phone traffic and where it's coming from, and record calls for training and monitoring. So far I "think" our Places page is doing ok, we havent seen any issues, and as mentioned, it is our #3 ad source for phone traffic.

Joe, thats some really interesting data, I scanned over it and will dive into it more, thanks, that top 10 is really helpful.

As Ryan said, "the pros of tracking don't outweigh the cons of inconsistency". One thing in the equation is that we record and train on our calls with Phone Ninja's, that has been a valuable resource we are not willing to give up.

I am sure once I get this figured out something will change and screw it all up!
 
Top Bottom
Back
Jump to latest Follow Reply
Jump to latest Follow Reply
Menu