You want to attract new customers to your auto service business day-after-day, all looking for a local auto repair shop to provide them with fast and reliable service. With so many auto service marketing options available how do you know what ones are worth investing your time and energy on?
It can be quite overwhelming and there isn’t a single answer that is correct for each business. There are a lot of available auto service marketing options, from SEO and PPC to social media and email marketing. Not having a well mapped out plan can be disastrous, leading to wasted budget and little to no return on that marketing investment.
Many of the auto service clients we work with never fully experienced the full potential of online marketing and how Google can provide an unlimited amount of local customers. The trick is to build auto service marketing campaigns that deliver results. Without experience and know-how, it can be quite difficult and discouraging.
Your auto repair shop needs to have an online presence, and more so you need to be found online when local customers need car repair services. If not, you are simply handing over customers to your competition.
There are several factors we evaluate when we take on a new auto service marketing client, but there are some general tips we can share with you that are beginner-friendly tips to help marketing your auto repair company. These are considered foundational strategies, and things that we address at the early stages of an auto service marketing campaign.
1. Auto Service Website Design Focused on Conversions and User Experience
Many business owners get so excited about the thought of increased leads and customers, they forget to address what typically stands between the customer and their auto repair shop – their auto service website.
Some customers might find your business on the Google Maps results or connect via a click-to-call PPC ad, but there are going to be many local customers that land on your website through an organic Google search. When this happens it’s important that your website provides a pleasant user experience, answers any common questions the customer might have, and makes it very convenient to contact your business to schedule an appointment or ask additional questions that require a phone call.
Before we spend a dime on SEO and PPC Google Ads, we suggest a thorough website audit, where we make sure it’s technically sound, loads quickly, and is optimized to convert visitors into customers for your auto repair shop.
An SEO campaign that attracts daily organic traffic and a Google Ads campaign that pushes interested prospects to your website around the clock is worthless unless that traffic converts into auto service customers.
Your website traffic isn’t going to convert unless certain elements are optimized, and in some instances, completely redesigned. Slow-loading websites give your PPC ads lower quality scores, which drives up CPCs, and Google’s algorithm favors fast-loading websites that are designed for mobile devices.
Our auto service website design team focuses on technical optimization, as well as conversion rate optimization, to ensure your business is armed with a great website that will complement our SEO and PPC effort, helping drive more customers to your automotive repair shop.
2. Auto Service Google My Business Optimization
Auto service SEO can help position your business directly in front of local customers that are looking for a car repair shop. While ranking your main website on top for a variety of keywords and search terms relevant to the different auto repair services you offer is a great strategy, Google My Business listing optimization is also important, as it’s directly responsible for your business being shown in the Google Maps results.
When Google detects a search request that is best answered by displaying local business results, its algorithm pulls data from its business directory. To be listed on Google’s directory requires that you complete and submit a Google My Business profile.
There is no cost to start or maintain a Google My Business profile. All that is required is a free Google account. Many businesses just fill out the basic information and submit the listing without even considering auto service search engine optimization.
We often find that the majority of our auto service marketing clients already have a Google My Business profile claimed and published – it’s just not optimized to perform well in Google’s local search results. This is to be expected though, as most people aren’t aware of what auto service SEO involves.
Our team of auto repair SEO experts will perform a full audit of the entire Google My Business listing, focused on making sure all contact information is complete and accurate. The main keywords we will be targeting are identified and then the business description is rewritten specifically for those terms, giving you maximum visibility in Google Maps.
Auto repair Google reviews are also the main focus point, as they help your rankings and also help make your business more trustworthy, as consumers put a lot of trust in third-party reviews. We make contact with all previous customers and then set up an automated system to solicit reviews from new customers as soon as they leave your auto repairs shop.
When you have an auto repair marketing agency running your campaigns it enables you to take full advantage of all inbound lead generation options available, like Google My Business text messaging, which allows potential customers to ask questions and schedule appointments via text.
3. Auto Service Google Local Services Ads
The most effective way to attract new customers to your auto repair shop is by running Google Ads using the Local Services format, which drives interested customers to contact you immediately right from the ad – either by phone or through a request for information submission.
While auteur repair SEO can deliver amazing results, it can take time to rank your website for the most competitive auto service related keywords, and depending on the amount of local competition it could take a little bit of time before your Google My Business profile is ranking on the top of Google Maps.
In the meantime though, Google Local Services ads allow us to target any keyword we want and bid on a per-lead basis. When your ad is displayed and the consumer chooses to interact with it then can click-to-call from their mobile devices or they can submit a request to be contacted by your repair shop.
This ad format removes the previous barrier most PPC ads face – your website – and puts the lead directly in contact with your business without them having to be redirected to perform that action on another platform. This results in a very high-quality lead, looking for an auto repair shop locally.
Managing these inbound auto repair leads is simple and easy to handle using the platform’s dedicated app. You don’t have to be stuck behind a desk fielding leads, which is great for the hands-on owner/operator. Keep your mobile phone on your and answer calls and inquiries as they come in, and drive those customers through your doors with same-day appointment setting.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, successful local auto service marketing starts with making sure you are sending interested prospects to a website designed to generate leads. From there both organic and paid traffic needs to be targeted, which begins a never-ending cycle of data collection, analyzation, and optimization.
This is where many local businesses fail – they experience some level of success and ROI and then slow down, whether it’s lowering the PPC budget and not testing new keywords, or slowing down the link building effort, and slacking off on collecting Google reviews.
Once the auto service marketing campaign is rolling and delivering results you don’t want to take your foot off the gas. This causes bumps in the road and lead volume can slow down allowing your competition to benefit.
It takes a lot of effort to get the auto service marketing campaign rolling and delivering a steady flow of new customers, and the last thing you want to do is slow that momentum. It will take another large effort in terms of cost and time to get rolling again.
This is why it’s beneficial to hire an auto service marketing agency to build-out, manage, and maintain your entire digital marketing effort. We work exclusively with auto repair clients and understand the industry inside and out, which gives us a competitive advantage over other agencies that aren’t industry-focused.
If you would like to learn more about our full range of auto service marketing services and how we can help push new auto repair customers through your doors daily, contact us for a complimentary online visibility audit and strategy session. Together we can see if we are a good fit to be your marketing partner and explore the options available to increase your customer volume.
