Is your car dealership visible on Apple Maps?

A large percentage of the population uses smart phones to search for local services and products. While the most-used maps application is Google Maps, if you ignore the following Apple statistics you could be missing out on a big piece of the APPLE maps PIE. There will be an estimated One BILLION Apple devices active in the year 2015. Over 35% of Apple users use the default map application called Apple Maps. That’s 35% of a billion! Even without doing the math, we all know that that’s a lot of users.

Car dealerships are local businesses, and this is why a dealership must focus on Local SEO. What is Local SEO?

A specialized kind of online marketing that increases visibility for businesses interested in ranking for geographically-related searches. –Wikipedia

There are many aspects to Local SEO, and many steps to Local SEO one must perform to be successful. One important step is optimizing, claiming, managing and having accounts on map services online like Google Places and Apple Maps.

These steps will ensure your car dealership shows up in Apple Maps:

1. Have a business Yelp Account. Since Yelp and Apple Maps are so closely correlated, just having a Yelp Account usually guarantees you will show up in Apple Maps. If your business has been verified on Yelp, there’s a good chance that it will show up on the maps.
2. Open the Apple Maps app on an apple device.
3. Search for your business name

Make sure you search using the location. Apple Maps can get easily confused if the query isn’t precise. As we all know, Apple Maps isn’t quite up-to-snuff compared to Google Maps and the app suffers from quirky data consistency issues. It is recommended to do the following searches, just to make sure your dealership shows up for all of them:

• dealership name + city
• dealership name + city + province
• dealership name + street address
• dealership name + street address + city
• dealership name + street address + city + province
• dealership  phone number

If your dealership doesn’t show up:

It means that Apple Maps does not have your business in its database or it’s confusing you with another dealership with a similar name in a different location. 

Here are some ways you can try to correct the situation:

1. Select the page fold in the bottom right.
2. Select “Report a Problem”
3. Select “Location is missing,” then “Next”
4. Position the pin to the correct location, then select “Next”
5. Enter your business details; don’t forget to enter your dealership name
6. Make sure you select a category (Automotive, car dealership, etc)
7. Select send
8. Submit your dealerhips to Localeze
9. Localeze is the core U.S. business listing data provider for Apple Maps. If you didn’t find your dealership in Apple Maps, you can check to see if your dealership is listed on Localeze.com. If not, you can submit your information to Localeze for free. That said, the free submissions can take a while to make it into the database.