The Junk Car Lady | Strategy Session

The opportunity to take a look at this junk car removal company popped up with some weird timing shortly after I published the first stage of operations on our follow along for #ProjectBills.

The Category section, which carries a lot of signal weight, is interesting when we compare it to#ProjectBills. It should be noted that Google does not really offer a category that reasonably explains what businesses in this niche actually do.

Junk Car haulers tow cars but usually do not offer towing services, which is one of the categories we can choose from. Junk or scrap car buyers also work closely with junkyards and autowreckers for the disassembly, recycling and salvage of wrecked cars but they generally don’t provide these services themselves, so the categories  Google offers aren’t a great fit.

With Google it usually doesn’t work out to be an outlier, so matching up with the top 3 competitors in the area would be my recommendation. For Junk Car Lady, she sticks out with a different primary category of Junkyard, compared to the top 3 who all use Auto Wrecker as the primary category with a variety of related secondary categories.

When looking at the secondary categories, don’t get caught into throwing all you can find into your listing. Contradictory categories sends mixed signals, in this case I would remove ‘Recycling Drop-Off Location’ as this does not really fit with the business. 

Service Area Business vs. Physical Location

Google offers two different types of location usage for local businesses.

Physical location which is a brick and mortar business location that customers can visit, an office, storefront, etc. The address is displayed and generally the business marketing objective is. toget customers to walk through the front door. 

Service Area Businesses (SAB) are mobile businesses that go to the clients location to deliver their services. People in the marketing space always seem to get confusedwhith trying to create some new angle on a marketig campaign with the actual objective of the business. Don’t do that!

Google is smart enough to understand what a mobile business is. They earn millions of dollars every month selling ads to plumbers, lock smiths and towing services who provide a service of going to the customer’s home or business location to deliver their service. Google knows these customers are not coming to your home address, so just stop pretending or trying to game the system…

GMB Insights For Scrap Car Removal

The Google Business Profile provides all the information we need to understand what Google is looking at to determine which businesses are the most relevant and have proximity to the person searching. Understanding this gives business owners the ability to make their listing more prominent.

Reviews & Photos

If you are an old timer like me and have been around to see the development of the internet, you probably remember that directories and maps made up a lot of the backbone of local internet search. Google has become a little better at hiding their secondary signals, but many of them can be seen in the performace tabs when checking your insights. Website clicks (CTR) directions (engagement) phone call clicks, etc… tell Google when they deliver a relevant listing that matched what the searcher was trying to find.

Back to being old, number of photos and photo clicks are also something that Google used to put in the performance measurement – it’s a secondary signal.

While any one signal such as  the total number of reviews or number of years in business is never the determining factor on how prominent, relevant and proximate your listing is for a particular search. The aggregate or accumulation of how well you provide all of this information is, being well rounded is just good advice for life and Google is teaching their ai driven algorithms to think like humans, so just be human and do a good job by giving Google what it wants to see…

Website or Sitelink Authority

The website is having a large impact on the overall performace of how this business ranks in search. I break down the impact on map pack vs organic rank in the video with more detail so take the time to give that alook to learn more about ranking for scrap car removal in Raleigh.