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Google Local – Is your dealer listed?

Posted by Jeff Kershner | Friday, March 30, 2007 | Posted in Search Engine Marketing

Last week, Google added a few new features to its Local Business Center. This is the place where any business with a physical location can go to essentially plant themselves on Google Maps. If you have not already done so, get your dealer listed in Google Local. This has clear SEO benefits for local search.

Sign up for a Google account www.google.com
Go to Google maps http://maps.google.com/maps
To the left of the map you will see link for Add/Edit Your Business. This will take your to the admin portion of google local. Use the link for “Add a new business”.
Enter your dealers name and continue.
You should then see your dealer name from a list of possibilities, if
not, use the option “ My business doesn’t appear here”.
From here you can fill out or edit your dealer information.

After you have edited your information, you now need to confirm your dealer for Google to authenticate. Google provides 2 ways of doing this (I recommend the phone call – it’s faster).

Receive a phone call at the number provided
Receive a postcard at the address provided

Once you have authenticated your dealer, it usually takes about 3 weeks or more for Google to go live with your new or edited local business listing. Google even allows you to add coupons to your listing; I usually rotate a service department special coupon.

If you’re paying big bucks to a vendor for your dealership website SEO and they have not already done this or informed you about this, ask them why.

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3 Comments

umer farooq

April 2nd, 2007

The website vendors can’t really do this for the dealership as it requires authentication… but if they did not inform you then you should defiantly be asking why not.

Also when filling out the profile make sure to choose the right category mix…. for your dealership… you can use the overture keyword tool link at the bottom right of this form… to help you..

Also while you are doing Google spend extra 30 minutes and set your self up on … MSN, Yahoo, SmartPages, SuppperPages and DMOZ… DMOZ powers Google directory… and is worth it.

To cover your self for any future yellow pages like site launches… update your data on InfoUSA and Acxiom… InfoUSA update URL is http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm

While we are on topic… add Google alerts for your dealership and keep a tap on your dealership reviews… CitySearch.com, Yahoo Local Reviews, LemonFree.com and etc… take control and shape your own local search reputation.

–Farooq.
Jeff Kershner

April 2nd, 2007

Farooq,

Thanks for mentioning the other directories. I totally forgot about infoUSA.

I’ll take a second here to also reference to a few key

paid directories that I posted about a few months ago.

DMOZ is a pain to get listed on anymore unless things have changed over the last
several months.

You so right about keeping tabs on your dealer reviews. This is something I
do often but never thought about posting about it, hummm!! I’ll take that as an
idea. You might also want to keep an eye on
Yahoo Answers. People often ask about cars and I have seen a few that are
dealer specific.
Umer Farooq

April 3rd, 2007

Jeff,

As a DMOZ editor, I can definitely say things have changed. The site inclusion requests are down since the outage and it is perfect time to get your site added for review. It normally takes a while as we have to go through so much spam and users submitting to wrong categories. If you submit to the right category and follow the guidelines your site will get listed.

Ya… post on the review topic will be perfect. Thanks for the Yahoo Answers heads up… I was actually thinking about building a tool that a you could add yourself too and it would alert you whenever a review comes up. I wonder if Angie’s list will give me access to their backend to plug in.