Dealer service pages: booking, warranty, recalls and the makes you service

The service customer asks about a car already in the driveway

The sales side of a dealership site is built around inventory, and the overview for car dealerships covers what those pages need. Service questions are about a car the driver already owns: "[make] dealer service open saturday near me", "does the dealer do recall work without an appointment", "can the [make] dealer fix a car i bought somewhere else", "is [dealer] service any good". An answer to any of them needs facts no sales page carries.

The service department also competes with other businesses. A driver weighing it against an independent specialist or a chain asks about price, time and trust, and the department's pages are where its side of that gets made: the work an authorized department does, the maker's parts and training where those apply, the hours and the way work is priced. The repair shop overview covers the independent side of the same comparison.

Pages the service department needs that the sales site does not have

Each of these is a page, or at least a section, of its own, linked from the service department's main page.

The booking page answers the most of these questions, so give it the most care. State which jobs need an appointment and which the express lane takes without one, how far ahead the calendar is usually booked, the earliest drop-off and how the key drop works the night before, and where the driver waits. If the booking runs through a scheduler loaded by a script, write those terms beside it in text; a fetcher that runs no scripts usually receives the scheduler as an empty frame. The crawler access check shows whether the answer-side crawlers can reach the page at all.

Reviews belong on these pages too, as text. Quote service customers' reviews with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform, and keep the platform's rating out of the markup. A review of a car purchase tells a driver nothing about the service drive.

Warranty and recall pages that answer without promising

Say what the department does and for which makes, and let the maker's own documents say what is covered. A warranty page states that the department performs warranty repairs for [makes], that the maker's warranty terms decide what is covered, what a driver should bring (the VIN, and service records if asked), and how long approval usually takes at your department. It never restates the maker's warranty in the dealer's words, as if the terms were the dealer's promise.

A recall page works the same way. It says the department carries out the maker's recall repairs for its makes, links the maker's recall lookup, and states the department's side: whether to book, whether the parts are in stock or on order, whether a loaner is offered during the repair, and how long the car is in. Rules about recalls, including who pays for the repair, are the maker's and the regulator's to state; link their pages rather than restating them.

If the maker authorizes the department to do this work, that is a fact an unaffiliated shop cannot state about itself, so write it as a sentence: "We are authorized by [maker] to carry out its warranty and recall repairs." Where only some of your makes are franchised, list which. A sentence like that, on an answer page about recalls, is what a driver's recall question can be answered from.

The service department as a business of its own: name, hours, number, profile

Google treats a public-facing department that operates as its own entity as a business with a profile of its own. Its guidelines ask for a department name distinct from the main business, a category of its own, and each department's hours on that department's profile, and one of their examples is a dealership's service and parts department listed as a repair shop beside the dealer. For the main dealership profile, the same guidelines say to use the sales hours. They also note that auto dealers have specific guidelines of their own, worth reading before you create or change a profile.

The site should match that structure: a service page under the department's own name as the business uses it, with its own phone number and its hours by day, kept apart from the sales hours in the footer. In structured data, schema.org's department property links an organization to a department that is itself described as an organization, with its own hours. For a dealership that is an AutoDealer node, one of the LocalBusiness subtypes, with an AutoRepair department, as in this JSON-LD.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "AutoDealer",
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/#dealer",
  "name": "[Dealership name]",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "telephone": "[sales number]",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "[Street and number]",
    "addressLocality": "[Town]",
    "addressRegion": "[State or province]",
    "postalCode": "[Postal code]",
    "addressCountry": "[Country code]"
  },
  "department": {
    "@type": "AutoRepair",
    "@id": "https://www.example.com/service#department",
    "name": "[Dealership name] Service",
    "url": "https://www.example.com/service",
    "telephone": "[service number]",
    "openingHoursSpecification": [{
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
      "opens": "[service opens]",
      "closes": "[service closes]"
    }]
  }
}

Every value in it has to be on the service page a visitor sees, as Google's structured data introduction asks, and its general structured data guidelines add that markup enables a feature without guaranteeing it will appear. What it does is state, in a form a parser can read, that the two sets of hours and the two phone numbers belong to two parts of one business.

Makes serviced, and the car the dealer did not sell

State which makes the department services, and on what terms. Whether it takes other makes, and which jobs on them, is a question drivers ask in those words, and only your page can answer it. If you take other makes for maintenance but not for diagnosis, say that.

Say too that a car bought elsewhere is welcome, if it is. A driver who bought used from another dealer, or who moved, asks whether they can bring the car to you; one sentence on the service page answers that, and a link to the maker's warranty terms answers whether it matters where the car was bought.

Where the department services a make well enough to be sought out for it, give that make a page of its own. Specialty pages covers what goes on one, and the test is the same for a department as for a shop: a page only for work it can staff and back with facts. For the service department's own Google listing, the repair shop's Business Profile article goes field by field.