Pendragon sees 32% Growth in Google Search Views and +17% Clicks from listings with Yext
With Yext, automotive retail giant Pendragon saw 32% growth in organic search views and a 17% increase in clicks from Google listings.
Increase in Search Result for Service-Related Keywords
Increase in Search Result ‘Real Estate’ for All Keywords
Growth in Google Maps Views
Pendragon is one of the world's leading automotive retailers. For more than 30 years, Pendragon has kept countless happy customers on the road through household dealerships like Stratstone, CarStore, and Evans Halshaw, which are all powered by Pendragon. Part and parcel of its success has been driven by its commitment to digital innovation, operational excellence, and going above and beyond for customers, whether they're buying a Fiesta or a Ferrari.
Buying a car is not an everyday occurrence. It's a big decision, so customers will take their time to research online, visit dealerships in-person – or a combination of the two. Either way, this requires 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, this was no easy feat for Pendragon. Every dealership is unique, with different opening times and varying information for customers that needs to be updated in near real-time. Updating the opening hours of the business manually only became more pressing in the wake of recent disruption. It was critical for Pendragon to be able to provide clarity and a standout experience across every touchpoint.
Following competitor analysis, Pendragon ultimately chose Yext to revitalise its listings. Building a comprehensive CMS was the first step on this journey. Once populated with unique dealership data, Pendragon's CMS was able to work alongside Yext Listings to ensure accuracy and boost discoverability across 200 networks, including Google, Bing, Facebook, and Yelp. Every one of Pendragon's automotive retail brands and their respective branches are now able to make location-specific updates to everything from business hours to address data and any other important information. In turn, customers are provided with everything they need in near real-time, to optimise listings and drive brand awareness, all while supporting customer experience.
Before Yext, updating our listings was a huge challenge. We had to manually manage Google My Business and Facebook, which was impossible to keep up with when changes were required daily during the pandemic. 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 to competitors in local search and uncover keywords to optimise for. Through this, the automotive retail giant was 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').
Driven in large part by a combination of Listings and Competitive Intelligence, Pendragon has seen 32% growth in Google search views and 66% growth in Google Maps views to existing listings alone, accounting for a 17% increase in clicks to its website from those existing Google listings. Including new listings created by Yext for Pendragon's service centres, website clicks from all listings increased more than 20x. But beyond simply increasing brand visibility and traffic, Pendragon has also become much more data driven to fuel future growth.
"Previously, we never really looked into the finer details of where our audience was coming from and how they were behaving. Now, Yext provides us with granular insights on one centralised dashboard, which helps us to personalise our messaging and inform our decision making" says Costello.
From onboarding up until the present day, our experience with Yext has been excellent. The team is always on-hand to answer our questions, but it's usually them getting in touch with us first to provide proactive insights on ways to elevate our operations. I can't recommend Yext enough.
Since partnering with Yext in 2019, Pendragon has seen 32% growth in Google search visibility and a 66% growth in Google Maps visibility, which has translated to a 17% increase in website clicks – in a very competitive automotive space.
This growth was largely achieved through a focus on securing more 'real estate' on SERPs for competitive terms that included major auto brands. Share of Intelligent Search — a measure of this real estate on SERPs — increased 53% over two years, for keywords that have been tracked for a sufficient period of time (Feb 2022 vs Feb 2020).
A specific focus on service-related keywords in June 2020 saw a 145% increase in Share of Intelligent Search for these keywords when compared to the most recent data (Feb 2022 vs Jun 2020).
"The automotive industry has historically played catch-up with others.in the retailer sector. But with more online-only retailers recently appearing in the sector, we needed to find a way to evolve our own operations in order to keep up with changes in search and customer behaviour. Yext is a shining star in our team and I know they'll continue to be an important partner to help us keep delighting our customers, long into the future."
