Listing sites send your leads
Most inquiries come through third-party sites that sell the same lead to other dealers.
SEO for Automotive
Sell more cars and fill more service bays.
A buyer searches the model, the price and the dealer before they ever walk the lot. A driver with a warning light searches for a shop nearby. We put your store in front of both.
What we measureSEO for Automotive3/3
- Model and service searches you appear in
- Calls, form leads and test-drive requests
- Service appointments booked from search
Get your free SEO audit
No cost and no commitment.
The search problem
The lot visit is the last step. Search is the first.
By the time a buyer walks in, they have picked the model, checked prices and chosen two dealers to visit. All of that happened in a search bar. If your inventory did not show, your price sat behind a form, or your reviews looked thin beside the store across town, you were out before you knew they were shopping. The service drive works the same way, one brake job at a time.
Your cars show on Google with the price in view, your service department comes up when someone nearby searches for a repair, and every call, lead and booking is counted.
In plain terms
How does SEO work for car dealers?
A buyer searches for a model you have on the lot, and a driver searches for a shop that can fix a warning light. Automotive SEO makes sure both find your store. For a dealer that means three fronts: model and inventory pages that rank, a Google Business Profile that wins the map, and service pages that bring in repair and maintenance work.
Google gives dealers tools most stores never switch on. Vehicles can appear on Google with a price and photos for free, through an inventory feed tied to a verified dealer profile. A dealership’s service department can also hold its own profile under the auto repair category, with its own hours and reviews. Service is steady income and it is local work at heart, so the methods on our local SEO page apply in full.
Signs the store is missing its searches
Service lives in the shadow of sales
The service department has no profile, no pages and no reviews of its own.
Sold cars still show
Old listings linger in Google and send buyers to a dead page.
One page for every service
Brakes, tires, oil changes and diagnostics share a single page that ranks for none of them.
What we do in automotive SEO
We build lasting pages for each model you sell, new and used, that stay put while individual cars come and go. Vehicle pages get clean titles, real photos and the price in view, and your inventory feed is set up for free listings on Google.
A sold vehicle page should point the buyer to similar stock, then drop out of Google. We set the rules so that happens on its own, and old listings stop wasting the visits you earned.
Each service you want more of gets a page: what it includes, which makes you work on, how long it takes and how to book. The service department gets its own Google profile, its own hours and its own review routine.
Calls, form leads, chats, test-drive requests and service bookings are traced to the search and the page they came from, and reported by department.
Check it yourself
Shop your own store from the driver’s seat.
Search for a used model you have in stock right now, together with the name of your city, and then search “brake repair near me” from your own parking lot. Those two screens tell you most of what you need to know about where the store stands.
Check the review count and the dates while you are there, because reviews are the first thing a buyer compares between dealerships. The rules on getting them tightened in October 2024, when a federal rule banned fake reviews and any reward tied to a good rating. Asking every customer at delivery, with no reward attached, stays inside the rule.
- 01Search a model you stock plus your city. Note whether your listing shows, and whether it shows a price.
- 02Search your dealership name. Check the hours, the photos and the star rating.
- 03Search a service you offer plus “near me.” See whether your service department is on the map.
- 04Open a vehicle page on a phone. Count the taps it takes to see the price and call the store.
- 05Search for a car you sold last month. If its page still ranks, note where it sends people.
What you get
Work you can hold.
- Model and inventory pages built to last through stock turns
- A vehicle feed connected for free listings on Google
- Service pages, and a separate profile for the service department
- A review routine for sales and for service
- Lead reporting by department
The readout
How we know it worked.
We record a baseline before we change anything, then read search visibility beside the actions that pay the bills.
- Model and service searches you appear in
- Calls, form leads and test-drive requests
- Service appointments booked from search
Pricing
Your investment in being found
Three ways to invest in your business showing up when buyers search. Each package is billed monthly, month to month, and each one includes everything in the one before it.
Foundation
The work every site needs, done properly and kept up every month.
$1,000a month
Month to month
We recommend
Growth
Foundation, plus the pages, articles and links that reach more of your buyers.
$2,500a month
Month to month
Leadership
Growth, plus press outreach, more markets and reporting that follows each lead to revenue.
$5,000a month
Month to month
The price changes only when the scope does, such as a very large catalog, many locations or a move to a new platform, and we agree any change in writing before the work starts.
Questions
Before we start.
How do you measure success for a dealership?
By leads and appointments, split by department: calls, form leads, test-drive requests and service bookings that began with a search. Rankings and traffic are on the report too, as the reasons behind those numbers.
Can you rank us in a metro full of competing dealers?
For broad searches such as “car dealer,” the map favors whoever is closest to the searcher. The room to win is in specific searches: a model, a trim, used stock under a price, a service on a certain make. Those are also the searches made by people ready to act.
Should sold vehicle pages stay live?
Not for long. A sold page should offer similar vehicles for a short while, then come out of Google, so buyers stop landing on a car that is gone.
Should the service department have its own Google profile?
In most cases, yes. Google allows a separate profile for a service department that runs as its own unit, under a repair category. It lets service rank for repair searches, keep its own hours and collect its own reviews.
How much does SEO cost for a dealership or a repair shop?
It depends on how much ground you want to win and how strong the competition is there. We look at your site and your market for free, and you see the scope and the price before any work starts. There are no long-term contracts.
Keep exploring
Find the next useful page.
All SEO servicesExplore the full search program and its specialized services.Local SEOThe map, your profiles and reviews for sales and service.Google Business Profile managementProfiles for the store and the service drive, kept current.Review managementA steady flow of real reviews, asked for the right way.Technical SEOInventory that changes daily without breaking search.SEO for RetailStores, stock and product listings on Google.
Tell us what you sell and service, and where. We will show you what a buyer in your market sees today.
- How your buyers search for what you sell
- Who shows up above you today, and why
- Your website, as Google reads it
Prefer email? Write to hello@wearemachina.com
Prefer to talk? Call (831) 230-7787
What we measureSEO for Automotive3/3
- Model and service searches you appear in
- Calls, form leads and test-drive requests
- Service appointments booked from search
Get your free SEO audit
No cost and no commitment.