Google search is an amazingly powerful search engine, data research and collection tool and herald of the apocalypse. As automotive dealers, we often compete for positions on search with our local competitors, well-intentioned but terribly “misguided” tier two advertising bodies, OEMs, third party inventory providers, and whatever other johnny-come-lately has decided to dump dollars into search with reckless abandon.
This can make google feel like an unfriendly, and difficult to see what is happening on your own properties, or you may want to find your dealer info on other websites. Here are some tricks we use on google search:
Note: For all examples that follow, I will be using ThinkBetter ford as the dealership, with a url of thinkbetterford.com
The site operator is super useful in finding how many pages google has indexed (has available for search in it’s database) for our dealer site as follows:
site:thinkbetterford.com
In this example, we can see 0 pages indexed. This would be a huge problem, meaning google doesn’t know or our dealer page.
If we wanted to find all the google knew about F-150s on our site, we may want to try:
Site:thinkbetter.com F-150
This would return all the pages google understands for your website, surrounding F-150s.
This technique can also be used to find your dealership on other websites, like a third party provider.
site:autotrader.com “Thinkbetter Ford”
Doing this can easily allow you to find your dealership sites around the web on any 3rd party inventory providers, allowing us to make sure they are optimized, have a properly configured feed and are sending leads appropriately.
Don’t forget to include them all in a 3rd party Inventory Master Spreadsheet, allowing easy recall and tracking of status.