Drive More Sales
with Google’s New Vehicle Inventory Feature
Google’s new vehicle Listing structured data can help dealers boost their local SEO and drive more sales. This new markup allows dealers to optimize their for-sale inventory on Google Search and other Google surfaces.
At the same time the rich results the structured data is supporting allows potentional car buyers quickly to understand the key decision-making car features such as availability, pricing and if there any offers applying. Right within the search results and without opening the car dealers sales page.
About Google’s New Vehicle Listing Markup:
- Available for all brands
- Feeds car on sale information and availability to Google Search/Maps
- Currently only available in the US and US territories (not in UAE)
- Car dealers need to have claimed and verified their Business Profile on Google
- Your claimed business profile must have Place type “vehicle_dealer”
- Only inventory from the dealership should be added
What is structured data?
In layman’s terms, structured data markup adds code the the website to help Search Engines understand the content better. And when structured data is used by the Search Engines it can make your content more engaging for users. You can learn more about structured data and how it works for Google here.
How to Add Car Inventory Structured Data
There are two ways to add inventory data to Google.
- Structured data markup
- Field file upload
In this guide, we will explain how to add inventory data using structured data markup.
Here is a step-by-step guide on implementing Google’s new vehicle inventory feature to create a seamless car shopping experience for your customers.
Step 1: Add Properties
Add the required properties of vehicles to your CMS in one of the following three formats.
- JSON-LD (recommended)
- Microdata
- RDFa
In this guide, we will add properties in JSON-LD format.
The vehicle listing markup code can be found in the official documentation for vehicle listing structured data from Google.
Here is an example of the vehicle listing markup code shown in two screenshots.
Note: If you are using WordPress or Shopify, you can use plugins to get structured data on your website. For instance, here are some WordPress plugins for structured data markup that you can use easily.
Step 2: Follow Guidelines
There are some prerequisite instructions to be followed for successfully displaying car information data on Google Surfaces. For instance, your claimed business profile must have Place type “vehicle_dealer”, and only inventory from the dealership should be added, not from private sellers or brokers.
Step 3: Validate Code
Once the markup code is added the Rich Result Test allows developers to validate the code by either submitting the URL of a page where the code is implemented, or entering by pasting the code in the ‘code review’ box. This can be done for smartphones and desktop.
Step 4: Deploy and Test
Now that your code is ready, add it to the relevant pages of your website.
A page is relevant when it:
- is not blocked by a robots.txt file
- doesn’t have ‘noindex’ tag
- doesn’t require login access
You can manually add it to the html code of the page (header, footer or body).
Once you have added the code to relevant pages, test those pages using the URL inspection tool. If you don’t see any crawl error, you have successfully added the vehicle listing structured data for Google.
Get a Free Consult!
Questions about Structured Data Markup? Do you need help setting up your Google My Business account? Contact us and ask us about our Local SEO Support specialist.
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image credits
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/vehicle-listing
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
