Auto Repair Marketing Strategy For Small Town Auto Repair Shops
Online auto repair marketing strategy differs depending on the size of the city you are located in. If you are situated in a small town you will need to broaden your online auto repair marketing target to include surrounding communities. Since search engines now have a very strong focus on local search you will need website content that is highly focused on geographical location to get page one positions in search engine results targeting those locations.
Population Limits
Your auto repair website should rank strongly for “auto repair [your town] [your state]”. But if you are in a town with a small population this severely limits the number of people your search listing will be exposed to. To increase the number of eyeballs (potential customers) viewing your website you need website content that is local search optimized, or local search auto repair SEO, for all the surrounding communities you can draw customers from.
Increased Target Market
Auto repair shops located in small communities need website content that targets every city or geographical location they can realistically draw customers from. What is needed is a series of individual pages that are local search optimized to target people who search for your auto repair services AND the town or location they are searching from. This specialized website content is called auto repair local search SEO.
Keyword Focused Content
If your website does not have content that search engines can associate with the search keywords people enter, your website is not going to be displayed in the search results. And IF your website is in the search results page, the position of your website is directly related to the quality of that related content. In other words it is the quality of your auto repair SEO that dictates where on search results page your website will be found – top of page one or buried somewhere on page 52 where no one bothers to look...
Game Plan
For auto repair shops located in small communities once you have content that targets all locations of your target market THEN you can start creating website content that targets specific service related keywords in your immediate location. An example of that is “brake repair [your town] [your state]”. The next level would be brake repair in all the other locations in your target market with “brake repair [other town] [state]”.
Bottom Line
Yes, building keyword targeted auto repair website content is a lot of work BUT it is the only way to build your local search auto repair SEO and a solid online presence. But, unlike most other types of auto repair advertising, creating website content is a long-term INVESTMENT that will pay back for many, many years. No other type of auto repair marketing will give you the return on investment that quality content will.
So to recap your website needs (in order of importance):
- location targeted keyword content;
- service targeted keyword content;
- keyword content targeting BOTH specific services and location.
Action Counts
Roughly 80% of all website visits originate from an online search. This is why getting found in search engines is the #1 factor in increasing traffic, leads, and sales. Amazingly only 14% of small businesses have a search engine optimization plan (SEO)! And an even smaller number of auto repair shops do any active SEO. Most shops have very little competition for local search auto repair SEO.
Contact Robert Maxim to get us to create your auto repair SEO Plan for your auto repair marketing and start creating your local search keyword targeted website content.
Doug Fentiman
Robert Maxim Website Solutions
Robert Maxim International Inc.
5812 Canary Drive
Vernon, BC
V1H 1R3
(250) 541-0703
Copyright ©2012 by Doug Fentiman. All rights reserved under Canadian, U.S. and International law.
Comments
Local SEO
Hi Doug,
If a business is in a small town and needs to or wants to expand its market to neighboring communities, should they build all satellite sites at once? Or is there a benefit to dominating one market first and using that site to help propel them in each satellite site? As Google refines there local searches, will zip codes play an important role in SEO local searchs?
Local Search Auto Repair SEO
Hi Paul,
Some great questions!
If you are speaking of creating a number pages targeting neighboring communities on a single website or domain name there is no problem creating them all at once. (just don't dump 50 pages onto a 4 page website all at once!). These new pages are just more keyword rich content in the eyes of the search engines and in general, more is better.
If you are speaking of creating a series of separate websites, or micro-websites, targeting neighboring communities, you should roll them out in a much slower time line. Since microsites are all using different domains the search engines view them much differently than content found at a single domain. Quickly creating a whole bunch of single page websites all pointing to the same website is viewed as very suspicious by search engines as this is/ was a favorite SEO technique used by spammers and Black Hat SEO. Rolling out one microsite a month should not cause any problems.
I don't think there is any advantage to a progressive roll-out strategy other than doing it slower to prevent raising the suspicion of the search engines. One advantage of a progressive roll-out is taking the time to do a through SEO job on each market.
With “local” search each geographically based market does not influence the other market other than the ranking benefit from “link juice” that may flow through any linked websites/ webpages.
Dominating a specific market will be more a combination of efforts that give you a greater number of listings in a given search result page (pushes competitors off the page) and better positioning of your listings in those search results (greater ranking).
With microsite or “satellite” sites the goal is capturing narrow range of specific keyword searches and driving that traffic to your main website. They wouldn't have any real influence on other markets as their linking focus is the main website.
I am not sure if zip codes have any specific effect in how search engines organize their index, but zip codes are a very targeted keyword and should always be included in your local focused website content.
How important zip codes become will depend on how popular they become as a search term that people use. Search engines closely watch the search terms people use and if they see a greater number of people using zip codes you can be sure they will place more importance on them. At the moment there is nothing “official” that I can find.
Doug Fentiman
Robert Maxim Website Solutions