SearchLab Digital
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Show up where your customers search. Local automotive SEO and PPC for multi-location brands. We love to teach people about search marketing and paid media.
SearchLab is an agency built by passionate and curious marketing professionals. We love our work, the clients we get the opportunity to work with, and our network of industry friends and partners. SearchLab’s mission is to cultivate long-term mutually beneficial relationships. That’s the way we approach relationships with our clients, employees, vendors, partners, and friends. We frequently share videos, post on our company blog, and provide workshops about SEO, Paid Media and Analytics. If you’d like to collaborate with SearchLab, or if you’re just curious to learn more, let’s connect. How this whole thing got started…
SearchLab started as a moonlighting gig. Our founder, Mark Bealin, was looking for ways to make a little extra money to support his growing family. It wasn’t long before the “nights and weekends” job became more than he could handle alone. By March 2017, SearchLab was off and running – working out of a tiny shoebox of an office in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. In the first year, the business grew quickly. Really quickly. SearchLab developed a reputation locally throughout Chicagoland. Our Local SEO and paid search services were in high demand and our success generated attention. By September 2017, SearchLab moved into our current Chicago headquarters on the north side of Chicago. Before long, SearchLab began receiving awards and recognition from industry sites like BrightLocal, Clutch, Manifest and Built in Chicago. In 2019, SEO expert Greg Gifford joined SearchLab as Vice President of Search. You can see Greg speak at industry conferences all over the world. Greg’s deep industry knowledge and connections within the SEO community are a huge benefit to SearchLab’s team members and clients. In 2020, paid media expert Mark Irvine joined SearchLab as Director of Paid Media. Mark’s depth of experience has earned him the attention and recognition of the world-side search industry. PPCHero has recognized him as one of the top PPC Influencers every year since 2015. In 2019, Mark was recognized as the most influential PPC Expert by both PPCHero and Microsoft. Today, SearchLab offers Local SEO and Paid Media services to small and medium sized businesses all over the country. We are laser-focused on helping local businesses – in fact, that’s all we do. We’re proud to have built an agency that offers large agency capabilities but with the enhanced attention of a boutique agency.
09/24/2026
Every agency told you reviews matter. Google just changed how they work in 2026, and most of those agencies have not said anything about it yet.
On this episode of Local Search Tuesdays, Greg breaks down exactly what changed, why it matters, and what you actually need to do about it. This is the episode that keeps pulling views because the update is still catching businesses off guard.
Watch it on YouTube, or catch it wherever you listen to podcasts. 🎙
https://zurl.co/YdaLF
09/20/2026
The "fire your agency and replace it with AI" posts have been circulating for a while. Someone tries a few AI tools, saves money in month one, and announces they've let go of their marketing team after one month with AI.
The part those posts leave out is where (and how quickly) it stopped working.
We took an honest look at what AI tools actually do well in a marketing workflow, where they fall apart for local businesses specifically, and how to tell whether what you're currently paying for is worth it.
https://zurl.co/vDWYY
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09/13/2026
Join SearchLab's very own PPC expert, Susan Yen, at Hero Conf for "Stop Scaling Broken Campaigns," where she'll break down how to identify the issues holding campaigns back before you throw more budget at them.
If you're responsible for paid media performance, this is a session worth adding to your schedule.
📍 Hero Conf 2026
📅 September 16 at 9:20 AM
See you there!
09/07/2026
More ad spend doesn't always mean more revenue.
In fact, sometimes it can even be the opposite.
That's exactly what Susan Yen will be diving into at Hero Conf with her session: 🎤 Stop Scaling Broken Campaigns
Instead of chasing bigger budgets or the latest platform hacks, Susan will share how to diagnose why campaigns break at scale and what to fix before investing another dollar.
If you've ever wondered why performance falls apart as budgets increase, this session is for you.
📍 Hero Conf 2026
📅 September 16
⏰ 9:20 AM
Hope to see you there!
08/21/2026
We found 121 different Google Business Profile categories in use across dealer sales profiles. A lot of them shouldn't be there.
Your primary category should reflect what the location actually is, a car dealer, not everything it offers. Mixing in service, parts, or financing categories on a sales profile muddies the signal Google uses to rank you.
Read the full breakdown: https://zurl.co/Km7kB
08/20/2026
Less than three weeks out, Dane Saville and the team will be in Kansas City for NCM and Friends, talking Local SEO and PPC with dealer groups who are done guessing and ready for a real strategy.
If you'll be there, find our booth. We'd love to talk shop.
📍 Kansas City Marriott Country Club Plaza
📅 September 8–11
08/18/2026
Our 2025 GBP Auto Study is the most expansive look at local automotive SEO ever put together: 2,260 dealerships, 150+ data points each, across 20 U.S. cities.
We built it to answer a simple question: Do the SEO best practices everyone preaches actually show up in real-world rankings?
https://zurl.co/HZiMm
08/18/2026
Back in April, Greg covered something we keep coming back to: search isn't just about where you rank anymore. It's about whether you get recommended.
That shift only got more relevant this summer with AI Overviews, AI Mode, and tools like ChatGPT acting as a discovery layer on top of traditional search.
Worth a rewatch: https://zurl.co/gmjI9
08/17/2026
We compared dealers sitting at rank 1 in the map pack to dealers sitting at rank 10. Review volume and review recency were two of the clearest gaps.
It's not about chasing a number. It's about consistency over time, something most dealer groups still don't have a real process for.
Full breakdown: https://zurl.co/5If6I
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720 W Randolph Street LL
Chicago, IL
60661
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| Wednesday | 8am - 5pm |
| Thursday | 8am - 5pm |
| Friday | 8am - 5pm |