Managing your dealership’s online citations is an important part of local SEO. If you’re new to SEO (search engine optimization), local SEO refers to improving your dealership’s search engine performance within your locality. Maintaining your dealership’s citation is an important part of making sure that you’re optimized.
Citations are references to your business that include your business name, address, and phone number – or NAP for short. Some of your main citations include your Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, etc. You can learn more about setting up your Google My Business here. Other common sites with citations for dealerships include:
- CarGurus
- Auto group sites
- AutoTrader
- Cars.com
- DealerRater
Why do citations matter?
Maintaining consistent citations for your dealership is important for a couple of reasons. First off, customers looking for your actual dealership address or contact information online should get accurate information. Second, consistent citations are important for local SEO – meaning that fixing any mistakes you find could give your business a boost in search engine performance.
How to get started?
One free tool that can help you get started is Moz’s Local Listing Score tool. Enter in your dealership name, street and number, and zip code to get started. What you’re looking for in all of your citations is perfect consistency. Look for the exact same address spelling and format. If you spell Road or shorten it to Rd, keep that in mind. Use consistent punctuation as well. Moz’s tool should then give you results of some generic listing sites where you’re listed correctly or incorrectly. Fix anything that’s incorrect and get started finding and fixing your other online citations.