Google gives every website owner a free tool called Search Console. It shows which searches your website came up for, how often, and which of your pages Google has. It’s the only place to see this straight from Google, and most dealers have never opened theirs.
Getting in
Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with a Google account. If your website provider set it up for you, they own it. Ask them to add you as a user. It takes them about a minute under Settings, Users and permissions, Add user. “Restricted” access is plenty for looking around.
If nobody’s set it up, your provider can do that too. It’s free.
1. Which searches you show up for
Open Performance, then Search results. Set the date range to the last three months and click all four boxes at the top: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position.
Now scroll down to Queries. That’s the list of what people searched when your website came up.
Read the top twenty. How many are your dealership’s name? How many are things like “tractor dealer near” a town, or a model you sell? Folks searching your name already know you. Everybody else is still deciding where to go.
2. Which towns
Still in Queries, click + Add filter, pick Query, and type the name of a town twenty or thirty miles from your closest store.
If hardly anything comes back, buyers searching from that town aren’t finding you on Google. They’re finding somebody. More on why in the towns around you matter more than your own.
3. Which pages Google has
Open Indexing, then Pages. You’ll see how many of your pages are on Google, and a list of reasons the rest aren’t.
On a dealer website, “Not found (404)” is usually a long one. Those are mostly machine pages that went away when the machine sold. That’s normal for an inventory site, and it’s the reason inventory pages have a hard time bringing in buyers. More in what happens to your Google traffic when a machine sells.
Three things to know
- Impressions are appearances, not visits. Here’s what each number means.
- The data runs two or three days behind, and Google leaves out some rare searches to protect people’s privacy, so the real numbers are higher.
- Don’t change anything in there unless you know what it does. Looking won’t hurt anything.
Rather we took a look? Send us your website address. We’ll tell you what we find, whether you hire us or not.