AutoScout24 is searched 2,740,000 times a month in Italy, Subito Auto 246,000. The domain subito.it ranks for 421,600 Italian keywords, 45,308 of them in first position. No dealership will ever compete on “auto usate”, the Italian for used cars, which takes 135,000 searches a month (DataForSEO, Google Italy, September 2026).
In the car sector, selling online belongs to the portals, but servicing has stayed a local market where a garage or a tyre shop can still win. “Gommista vicino a me”, tyre shop near me, takes 60,500 searches a month, and the answer is a map rather than a marketplace.
What follows: how the two markets split, the seasonality that decides when to push, and what it takes to get into the local pack.
Two markets, two rulebooks
On one side, buying and selling, where the portals have volumes no single website reaches. AutoScout24 ranks for 139,613 keywords with 22,498 first positions and an estimated 9.9 million organic visits a month; Subito gets to 13.4 million. A click on these searches costs almost nothing, €0.05 on autoscout24 and €0.25 on “auto usate”, precisely because the traffic is huge and poorly qualified.
On the other, servicing, where the search is by proximity: “gommista vicino a me” (tyre shop near me) 60,500 searches a month, “officina vicino a me” (garage near me) 5,400, “carrozzeria milano” (body shop in Milan) 1,900 at €1.97 a click, “concessionaria auto milano” (car dealership in Milan) 590 at €1.44 with high competition.
Page one for “officina meccanica milano” makes the point. The first three items are a local pack with Autofficina Malvestiti (4.8 and 140 reviews), Autofficina Milano (4.7 and 77) and Autofficina Meccanica DMC (4.7 and 132). Then a box with seven directories, and right after it the websites of actual garages: omem.it, autofficinagarageressi.it, scofficinemeccaniche.it, officina125.com, autofficinascuri.it. The garages are there, on their own page.
Which signals actually move local rankings, in forty-five seconds: Whitespark’s 2026 survey of 187 factors.
The tyre calendar
Seasonality in this sector is the most predictable there is, and almost nobody builds the year around it.
“Gommista vicino a me” goes from 60,500 average searches to 90,500 in August 2025. “Officina vicino a me” makes the same jump in August, from 5,400 to 8,100: breakdowns and checks before people set off. “Cambio gomme prezzo” (tyre change price) peaks in November 2025 instead, 590 searches against an average of 260, which is when winter tyres go on. “Tagliando auto prezzi” (car service prices) hits 1,300 in January.
Four distinct moments, four different services, four pages that need to be ranking a month earlier. A tyre-change campaign switched on in December arrives after half the customers have already been to a competitor.
Price searches are the ones that bring work
“Tagliando auto prezzi” 880 searches a month, “cambio gomme prezzo” 260. Someone searching this way already owns the car, knows exactly what they need and is comparing two or three garages nearby.
They are also the searches garage websites almost never answer, for fear of being ruled out on price before they get to explain. A page that states what a service costs for the most common engine sizes, what is included and how long the car will be off the road, with a date on it, picks up demand that the rest of the page leaves to the chains.
One peculiarity of this SERP: “officina meccanica milano” shows no People Also Ask block. Google has no ready-made questions here, which means informational content is less well covered than elsewhere.
How to set up keyword research and page structure for a garage, step by step (in English, with chapters).
For a garage, the Google profile is the website
The six garages in the two local packs in Milan have between 26 and 140 reviews, with ratings between 4.6 and 4.8. None goes past 150: the bar for getting into that block is among the lowest of any sector we have measured.
For a business that sees dozens of customers a week, reaching a hundred reviews is a matter of months and of one question asked when the keys go back. It is the highest return per euro spent in the sector, and it needs no website at all.
A concrete way to get customers to leave reviews, in two and a half minutes (in English).
The rest of the profile counts as much as the reviews: services listed one by one, real opening hours including Saturday, photographs of the actual workshop rather than stock pictures of engines.
Frequently asked questions
Can a dealership do without the portals?
Not if it sells used cars: that is where the demand sits, and the portals’ numbers leave no room. It can work on what the portal does not cover, which is after-sales, servicing and local trust, and those happen to be the higher-margin lines.
Is Google Ads worth it?
On local searches, yes: with clicks between €0.45 and €1.97 and a job worth a few hundred euros, the maths works easily. On buying and selling searches, no: you would be competing with portals that have deeper budgets and better conversion rates than yours.
Does a garage need a website?
It needs one for service and price searches, where the Google profile on its own is not enough. For “near me” searches the profile is enough, and that is where the largest volume sits.
No, stuffing keywords into the profile description does not lift rankings: Darren Shaw explains why in a minute.
How much does listing the makes you work on matter?
It matters, because many searches pair the service with the make and are barely contested. One page for the makes you actually service, stating which scheduled services you can carry out without voiding the warranty, picks up the person who owns exactly that car.
When is it worth pushing?
July and August for tyres and pre-holiday checks, October and November for the winter changeover, January for scheduled services. The rest of the year demand is flat and the budget returns less.
Where to start
Search “gommista vicino a me” or “officina vicino a me” from a phone, standing outside your own premises. If you are not in the top three, look at how many reviews the ones who are have: almost certainly fewer than a hundred and fifty, which is a number you can reach by the next tyre season. If you want a view on how to set up your service pages, get in touch.
For anyone who wants to go deeper: proximity, relevance and prominence applied to garages and body shops (in English).
