Drive Service Revenue: Why Your Dealership Needs an SEO Strategy for Fixed-Ops

Automotive dealers have a massive opportunity right now to grab onto an underutilized strategy: search engine optimization (SEO) specifically for your dealership’s service department. 

Many dealerships focus SEO and other digital marketing efforts solely on vehicle sales. But the aims and outcomes of search-based approaches also align perfectly with fixed-ops strategies: both help retain customers, provide a steady source of revenue, and drive long-term profitability.  

Beat competitors who focus all their SEO efforts on vehicle sales, stop losing customers to independent service shops, and secure steady revenue streams that won’t dry up when market factors change with an effective and low-cost SEO strategy you can start using immediately. 

Why should you use SEO for fixed-ops marketing? 

Dealerships rely on service departments to help maintain long-term relationships with their customers. SEO strategies complement this approach by emphasizing consistency, accuracy and helpfulness as cornerstones of your digital presence. Here are some of SEO’s key benefits: 

• Build trust with service customers. Users tend to perceive organic search results as more trustworthy partly because they have earned top positions and high ratings over time. Providing these results — and the high-quality, helpful content they contain — is SEO’s main goal. 

• Capture high-intent leads. Service-based searches are more likely to be mobile, voice-based, and performed with high intent. Think of the customer who searches “Where’s the closest oil change shop?” This customer is in-market, on the go, and ready to buy now. SEO strategies can help your service department seal the deal. 

• Reduce increased advertising costs. Pay-per-click and other digital advertising placements are effective. But for ongoing operations like maintenance and car service, it makes sense to employ lower-cost, long-range strategies with enduring impact alongside your paid efforts.  

Two ways to start winning service customers with SEO  

When service centers call on us to strengthen their digital presence, we start with the action items below. 

1. Optimize your service department’s Google Business Profile (GBP)
Google offers free listings that allow dealerships to personalize how they appear in search results pages and Google Maps. You can create a business profile within your main listing to spotlight your service department and its unique offerings in relevant searches. Best of all? Most dealerships aren’t yet taking full advantage of this resource, and you can. Here are some quick tips and best practices for repair and maintenance GBPs: 

• Include unique business information for your service department. A distinct phone number is the only requirement for a separate profile, but you should optimize your service profile in additional ways. Add department-specific business hours and closures, descriptions and updates, services you provide, and more. 

• Be intentional about GBP categories. You can select one primary category and up to nine additional categories for every GBP you own. Make sure you select service-specific categories such as “car service” for your service center, and don’t reuse categories from other department profiles. These tips will help you show up in the right searches and keep your own profiles from competing with each other for rankings. (On the rare occasion Google displays the wrong department in a search, incorrect categorization is usually the culprit.) 

• Add a “menu” to your listing. In the same way that restaurants can add menu items, auto repair shops can use Google’s services editor tool to display specific products and services — such as oil changes, tire rotations or transmission repair — along with a photo, description and price. Google can even smartly display the correct service when someone searches for a matching (and correctly attributed) subcategory, such as “tire rotation near me.”

2. Ensure landing pages have a cohesive content hierarchy
Landing pages are an effective SEO content creation strategy for your website. These pages are created around keywords and markets we want to target, and they’re categorized based on the main services and products you offer. 

In the past, SEO focused more heavily on keywords alone, regardless of website structure. But as Google improves its “helpful content” recommendations, it’s also rewarding content that’s well organized and easy to navigate. The Adpearance team uses the holistic SEO strategies below to help dealerships capture search queries related to vehicle maintenance and repair. 

• Optimize content for key markets. Our experts use data from our real-time data platform MarketAI to select key markets based on proximity, population size and competitor location. Use this data to localize landing pages and identify keywords locals might be searching. But always keep this content helpful and high-quality — and that means no local keyword-stuffing. (For example, you don’t need a list of every town name within 100 miles!) 

• Create landing pages for different service department categories. To start, keep your pages simple and use broad categories, such as vehicle make (“Jeep service near Portland”). Once those are established, narrow in on more specific subcategories and longer keywords. One option is to create landing pages for certain models you want to target (“Jeep Compass service near Portland”), then add a specific maintenance offering you want to rank for (“Jeep Compass transmission repair near Portland”). 

• Develop unique meta data for service and repair. Your HTML meta tags, Schema markup and other meta data should indicate service-related page content. They should also include your service department’s own business hours, location and contact details — not general dealership or vehicle sales information. 

• Add an FAQ section. Your customers may be wondering how often they need to rotate their tires, or they might need information about their vehicle’s maintenance schedule or warranty. FAQs mimic the words people are searching and provide helpful answers to those questions all in one go. 
  
  FAQs also have two more major benefits: First, they are more likely to get pulled into AI search summaries — those auto-generated blurbs at the top of the results page. Second, FAQs help assure Google your page content is helpful and high-quality, even if it also contains a conversion tool (such as a contact form). 

Get noticed — for the right reasons 

Customers choose dealership service departments over independent shops because they want expertise and consistency. You’re the certified service center; the maintenance schedule expert; the trusted supplier of OEM parts. All of these benefits can easily get lost if you’re only marketing your dealership to increase vehicle sales.  

Treating your service department as a separate business for SEO purposes can set you apart from competing dealerships and local service shops alike. Let our automotive marketing experts show you how! Schedule your free marketing assessment and SEO audit today.