Marketing Your Auto Repair Shop Online, part II
In our previous post, we discussed how everyone spends so much time online these days that you should focus at least some of your marketing efforts there as well. The first thing we covered was social media. In this post, we’ll focus on making sure your website is ideally set up to bring in new customers.
Making Sense of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Not everyone understands SEO, or even what SEO stands for, but it can play a big part in the success of a small business. What we all do understand is that people Google everything these days, whether they’re looking for a pizza place, a haircut, or an auto repair shop. Showing up at or near the top of a Google search gives your business a better chance of being selected.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, focuses on optimizing your auto repair shop website to show up on web searches. While Google isn’t the only search engine, it dominates the market so it’s where you should focus your efforts to start.
Disclaimer: we know you’re busy, and some of this will be a little technical, so you may prefer to hire an expert to help you. Or, if you had someone build your website for you, work with them. The goal of this piece, however, is to give you the basics to decide whether you want to take a shot at doing it yourself. Let’s get started:
Create a Google Business Profile
Your first step is building a Google Business Profile. They’re free, and maintaining one lets you make sure your business shows up on Google Maps and in local search results. Include contact information, business hours and a link to your website. It can even help you gain credibility with Google reviews.
Research Keywords
Optimizing your website for search engines begins with keywords. Keywords are not just words but phrases that you think people will use in search engines to find businesses like yours. Adding those keywords to your website’s content can help your site show up when someone searches for that phrase. But how do you choose the best keywords?
There are many tools for researching the best keywords to use for your business, with the most obvious being Google’s own Keyword Planner.
It’s easy to use, and it’s free, though you do have to create a Google Ads account and provide credit or debit card information. An additional advantage to Keyword Planner is that it also gives you an idea of how much you can expect to pay for your keywords if you decide to use Google Ads (more on that below). However, there are more robust keyword research tools out there, so don’t limit your efforts to Keyword Planner.
TIP: try to localize your keywords. “Auto repair” is way too broad, which makes it hard to compete with other similar businesses vying for top position in a web search. It could also put your business in front of an auto repair customer who is hundreds or thousands of miles from your shop. “Auto repair in [your town or city]” is more specific, which cuts down competition and has a better chance of reaching customers in your area. If your shop specializes in some way (specific repairs, certain brands, classic cars, etc.) targeting your keywords in that way will also maximize your chances of the right customer finding your business and contacting you.
Incorporate Your Keywords
Once you’ve established what your best keywords are, you need to build those keywords into your website content. An About Us section lets you get all those good descriptive keywords in there about what you do, and what people might be searching for on Google. It’s also a great idea to incorporate the content you’re creating to share via social media (and through R.O. Writer’s text and email functions). That kind of useful educational content will help your site rank higher on searches, also. The easy way to do that is add a Blog section to your site and repurpose those social media posts as blog posts.
TIP: If you have a lot of positive reviews from satisfied customers, add a Reviews section to your website to show them off.
Managing your Google reviews is one of the most important ways to market your shop! Watch this informative webinar by Jimmy Lea of the Institute, and you’ll set your shop up for five-star success.
You should also incorporate your keywords into your page URLs, as well as page titles, headings and descriptions. If you’re unsure how to do that, most of today’s popular website building platforms (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc.) have built-in tools and features that make optimizing your site for SEO easy.
SEM or Pay-per-Click
Search engine marketing or SEM, also known as pay-per-click, is a way to use paid advertisements to appear at the top of search engine results pages. Through Google Ads, you bid on your keywords – what you think people will use to search for businesses like yours – and your ad appears at the top of the search. Those ads can be small text-based ads, or fancier, more visual ads like product listings with a photo, price, and reviews.
On Google, these ads all have the word “Sponsored” above them, so they are clearly advertisements and not organic search results, but that doesn’t impact their effectiveness. The advantage of search engine marketing is that you can put an ad for your auto repair shop in front of a motivated customer who is specifically searching for auto repair shops in your area. The other major advantage of SEM or pay-per-click is that you literally pay per click. You only pay when a searcher clicks on your ad and visits your website, so it’s an efficient and effective use of your ad dollars.
TIP: like above, localizing your keyword phrases makes a big difference here.
[Note: Google also has Google Display Network ads, which give you the ability to put your ad on more than two million websites, videos, and apps. These ads are not search engine based, however, so they’re probably more useful for name recognition than for generating an immediate call or website visit.]
Google Ads does its best to make it easy to get started, with extensive guides and tutorials, as well as support via phone or chat. It’s worth trying to test Google Ads on your own before paying an expert to help you.
Whether you tackle SEO and SEM yourself or bring in an expert to help you, utilizing both will give your auto repair shop the best chance of attracting new customers in a busy, cluttered online world.
