Day 19 SEO Tip of the Day for Car Dealers — Add UTM Code to Your GBP URL

Today's tip: add UTM tags to the website link on your Google Business Profile so you can tell map clicks apart from search clicks.

Your Search Console is blending two completely different traffic sources into one line, and it's hiding what your SEO actually needs.

Where this came from

I pulled Search Console data from about 35 dealers and ran it through Claude to find what was working - that turned into 25 Best SEO Keywords for Car Dealerships. What jumped out was that none of these dealers could tell which homepage clicks came from their Google Business Profile and which came from the classic blue links.

Fix it in five minutes

Go to your Google Business Profile, edit the website URL, and add UTM parameters on the end - source as google, medium as organic, campaign as gbp. Ask ChatGPT to build the string if you don't want to mess with it. It ends up looking like this:

yourdealership.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp

What you'll see

Now your homepage shows up as two separate entries in Search Console. Click the GBP one and you'll see the map-pack and near-me style queries. The other one shows the searches winning on your actual pages.

That split tells you where to work. Weak map queries means your profile needs attention (Day 12, Day 15). Weak organic queries means it's on-page work (Day 14, Day 17). Most of us need both, but now you know which one is costing you more.

Want to go deeper on building dealer pages that actually rank? See Automotive SEO for car dealers.

New tip every day I walk the dog. Want to find me later? Search "KGI SEO" on Google.