Auto dealership SEO trends for 2026
Five SEO trends for car dealerships, from AI summaries to local listings.
Also in Industry SEO
Local SEO
Local search is where intent meets geography.
Writing on how proximity, search behavior, Google Business Profile signals, and data consistency across surfaces determine which businesses get found when users are ready to act.
2 posts
A local site of my own, built for the fan deciding whether to go
Why local SEO is underrated
What local SEO is, why businesses underrate it, the tools I use, and the three pillars a local plan needs.
Read the articleKeep reading
More on local SEO, newest first.
More to read nearby
Local SEO has 2 posts so far. Technical SEO sits in the same stage, Get found, and has 7 posts.
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Why a page isn't showing up in search
When a page doesn't show up in Google, I find out how far it got, from known to shown, and change what that step needs, with my own site's relaunch as the example.
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My audit: where I trusted AI too soon
Nine things that broke on three reference sites I built in early 2026, ranked by severity, and the checks I wrote so they stay fixed.
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SEO strategy vs SEO systems
Strategy decides what to build; systems decide whether it holds together as the site grows, and a table puts the two side by side.
The bag question the team sites skip
A fan heading to a Thorns game needs to know what bag gets through the gate. The team sites answer the schedule. Title Town PDX, my Portland women's sports site, built a game-day guide for each venue that answers the gate.
At Providence Park (Thorns), 73% of the searches Search Console names for the guide are about bags.
| Guide | Bag searches | Wordings |
|---|---|---|
| Providence Park (Thorns) | 73% about bags | 21 wordings |
| Moda Center (Fire) | 35% about bags | 13 wordings |
| Hillsboro Ballpark (Cascade) | 26% about bags | 10 wordings |
| Game-day guide | Most-shown bag search | Bag wordings | Their impressions | Share of named searches |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Providence Park (Thorns) | providence park bag policy1,877 impressions | 21 | 2,888 | 73% |
| Moda Center (Fire) | portland fire bag policy367 impressions | 13 | 559 | 35% |
| Hillsboro Ballpark (Cascade) | hillsboro hops bag policy619 impressions | 10 | 1,456 | 26% |
The result: the guides were clicked 1.50% of the times they were shown, the schedule pages 0.46%.
Google Search Console, Jun 12 to Oct 7, 2026 (828 clicks on 55,294 guide impressions; 79 on 17,093 for the schedule and calendar pages), data through . Search Console names the search behind only part of a page's impressions, so each share is of the named searches. A search counts as a bag search when it contains the word "bag".
Local SEO changes the moment you add a second location
On a single-location site, it works as a checklist: claim the profile, add the address, collect reviews, done. But the moment you add a second location, the dynamics change completely.
Google doesn't evaluate your website in isolation. It compares your location page against your Google Business Profile, against third-party directories, against review platforms, against the structured data in your markup.
From the Local SEO page on the old version of this site, first published January 2026.