How car retailer Pendragon accelerated Google search clicks by 17%

The challenge

Buying a car is not an everyday occurrence. Such a big decision means customers will take their time to research online and visit dealerships in-person, or a combination of the two.

With household dealerships like Stratstone, CarStore, and Evans Halshaw, no matter how customers embark on their car buying journey, Pendragon needed a clear and consistent digital footprint for potential buyers to land on the right web pages and locate the relevant dealership.

However, with 160 brick-and-mortar sites across the UK alone, each dealership is unique, with varying information and opening times that real-time updates are crucial to provide clarity and a standout experience, across every touchpoint, especially during periods of disruption.

The solution

Pendragon chose Yext to revitalise its listings, building a comprehensive Knowledge Graph to provide the automotive retailer with a next-generation CMS that would store important information.

Once populated, Pendragon’s Knowledge Graph was able to work alongside Yext Listings to ensure accuracy and boost discoverability across 200 networks, including Google, Bing, Facebook, and Yelp.

The results

Pendragon’s automotive retail brands and their respective branches are now able to make location-specific updates to criteria such as business hours to address data. The business optimises listings and drives brand awareness, while customers are provided with information in near real-time.

“Before Yext, updating our listings was a huge challenge. We had to manually manage Google Business Profiles and Facebook listings, which was impossible to keep up with when changes were required daily during the pandemic” says Kim Costello, Chief Marketing Officer at Pendragon. “Yext was a critical partner for us in that challenging time, but we’re still continuing to see uplifts in brand awareness and traffic that we didn’t realise was possible through listings”.

In addition to Listings, Pendragon was also able to gain new insights through Yext’s Competitive Intelligence, to see how they compared with competitors in local search and uncover keywords to optimise for.

Through this, they were able to focus on securing more ‘real estate’ on search engine results pages (SERPs) for competitive terms that included major auto brands, dealerships or servicing for said brands (such as ‘Aston Martin dealership’ or ‘Mercedes service’).

The implementation of both Listings and Competitive Intelligence has led to 32% growth in Google Search views and 66% growth in Google Maps views.

This surge in visibility has led to a 17% increase in clicks to website from Pendragon Google listings. “Previously, we never really looked into the finer details of where our audience was coming from and how they were behaving. Now, we have granular insights on one centralised dashboard, which helps us to personalise our messaging and inform our decision making,” added Costello.