What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup is a structured data language that helps search engines better understand the content on your website. It is added into a site’s HTML code and allows search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo to better contextualize content on your website. While schema markup does not directly increase search rankings, it does a fantastic job of improving your site’s visibility by enhancing results for key features. These key features include:

• Star ratings
• FAQs
• Price tags 
• Other rich snippets

These rich snippets will often appear towards the top of search results and can increase your site’s click-through rate. 

Why Schema Markup Benefits Car Dealerships

There are a number of benefits to utilizing schema markup for car dealerships. One of the top advantages of schema for dealerships is that it allows shoppers searching for a specific vehicle to see your inventory details, hours, and reviews before ever clicking your link.  Paired with review schema to showcase great star ratings, this approach helps lead to higher click-through rates, more qualified traffic, and better visibility against competing dealerships.

Another benefit that has become increasingly important is schema’s ability to help power voice search and AI-driven results due to it translating web content into machine-readable data. As the number of people using voice and AI tools to find local businesses continues to increase, this is a way to maximize your potential audience reach while also preparing for the future. A dealership site utilizing schema markup is far more likely to show up in results when a user asks their phone to “find a new Toyota dealer near me open this weekend.”

What Schema is Best for Car Dealerships?

Now that we have an understanding of why schema markup is beneficial to car dealerships, let’s get into what forms of schema markup are the most effective to add to a car dealership website:

AutoDealer Schema: AutoDealer Schema is going to be the core schema you utilize throughout the website. It tells search engines that you are a car dealership and aids in showcasing properties like your name, address, phone number (NAP), hours of operation, and the brands you sell. This allows search engines to more accurately depict your website. Providing all the accurate information on your business in your site’s schema leads to increased relevance for both local and dealership-specific searches. For car dealerships, AutoDealer Schema works best as a foundational schema that you can build upon with other schema. 

Vehicle Schema: Next to your AutoDealer Schema, Vehicle Schema is arguably the 2nd most important schema for car dealers as it is the most powerful schema for driving inventory traffic. Vehicle Schema grants you the ability to add schema markups to individual vehicle listings with properties such as make, model, year, mileage, VIN, fuel type, color, drivetrain, and condition (new vs. used). This approach offers search engines a version of your inventory that can be read by machines. Allowing search engine crawlers to read these specifics can help rich results appear directly for users shopping for specific vehicles.

LocalBusiness / Organization Schema: LocalBusiness and Organization Schema functions similarly to AutoDealer Schema in that they both inform search engines about information related to a physical, local business. However, it is still beneficial to your dealership as it reinforces your brand identity, logo, contact info, and social profiles. These add to your Knowledge Panel in Google and help search engines better understand your website and brand.

Review / AggregateRating Schema: Reviews and reputation are of utmost importance for car dealerships. AggregateRating Schema allows you to showcase your star ratings directly in search results. By displaying high average ratings under your search listing, you can improve click-through rates, pulling more people into your website and building early trust with new shoppers who are accessing your site for the first time.

FAQPage Schema: People have many questions for car dealerships, whether it’s about service, finance, or trade-ins. It’s important for dealers to have answers to these questions on their site. Utilizing FAQ Schema to mark up this content can help you earn rich snippets in the form of expanded accordion-style results in Google. These rich snippets are helpful because they take up more space on the page and answer buyer questions before they visit your site.Service Schema:  Service and parts departments are core to many dealerships. Service Schema allows you to mark up those offerings for key services, such as oil changes, tire rotations, and brake services. Adding schema to these service pages helps capture service-related searches and expands the website’s service reach.

Schema Implementation Tips

If you’re looking to start implementing schema onto your car dealership website, the most impactful place to start is combining AutoDealer + AggregateRating + Vehicle Schema. Those three schemas together cover the bases of your local presence, reputation, and inventory. After you’ve implemented these core schemas, adding both FAQ and Service Schema will help extend your reach into more informational and service-based searches. Using Google’s Rich Results Test tool to validate your markup before pushing it live is essential to ensuring that it is implemented correctly. Errors within your schema can prevent your site from showing up in rich snippets so double-checking their effectiveness is important.

When done well, schema markup provides Google more information about your dealership and, in turn, increases your chances of showing up in rich results. This is beneficial as it not only helps Google understand your site better but it also delivers users the information they need faster, quickly builds trust, and makes core pages easier to access through rich snippets, potentially leading to higher click-through rates and more users.