Every local business still needs to use the internet to attract local customers. Just over 70% of customers will visit a business after finding information about them online. Therefore, if you don’t have a presence online, your automotive business could lose out on customers.
So, how can your local automotive business find its customers online? Here are some quick tips for you to use to utilise automotive marketing.
Claim your Google Business and Bing Places spot
Local SEO starts with ensuring you’re listed on Google Business and Bing Places. These services locate your business on the local map when someone searches for your service on the respective engine.
In addition to the location, you can include a website address, telephone number, opening hours and other critical details. Reviews of your business can also be displayed. This is an important step for your local SEO, as map results are displayed at the top of search results.
Use Google Posts
Last year Google released Google Posts. This is a way for you to keep people up-to-date with the latest news, deals and events happening at your premises. The best benefit of Google Posts is that the updates published here can appear in search results.
Use this feature regularly, at least once a week. The more active you are, the more your website will rank on the search engine.
Keep contact details up-to-date
Google will monitor the information you publish on sites like Google and compare that with information on social media and your website. If there’s no consistency, then Google will mark you down.
To prevent any search ranking penalties here, you can keep a document that details all the places you need to make changes when there’s a need to. Therefore, you know you’re keeping Google happy.
Get ratings for your business
If you want to look great on local results, you need to ensure you’re getting reviews on Google and other sites. Google loves to display what past customers thought of your service and they use gamification to attract reviews.
You need to ensure you’re pleasing customers and getting them to leave reviews on Google about your automotive business. The more reviews you have, the better placed you’ll be on the Google search results.
Don’t just stick with Google Reviews either. Ensure you’re registered on other rating sites like TrustPilot. The more opinions of your automotive business you have, the better search engines will place you.
Optimise your website for local searches
If you want Google to see you as a local business, you need to be sure that you’re telling Google you’re local. That means ensuring your city and/or county is included in any url, title tags, headers, meta descriptions and content on your website. The tags should also include a keyword of what your business does.
An example of this would be “Used Car Sales – Halifax” or “London Windscreen Repairs”. These tell Google exactly what your business does, and where, meaning it will display in the more relevant searches.
Start a good, local, link campaign
Linking from one website to another is still an important part of SEO. But this task is a long journey. Don’t accept work from people who say they can get you ranking quickly from good link-building.
Start with other local businesses, and possibly local news sites, linking them to yours. Start small, start slow, and build a quality list of links to your site. Do too much, or choose poor quality websites, and you could face a penalty.
Be part of a community
Start to become part of your local community and reach out to individuals in a blog and on social media. Businesses that utilise blogging can get 70% more leads and social media helps to index your web pages better.
You don’t need to do a lot on these platforms. If you can post one blog article per week, and three updates per social media platform per week, it’ll be a good start.
Whether you’re selling cars, or repairing them, your automotive marketing needs to be good. More than two thirds of customers use search engines to find services and if you’re not found, they can’t buy from you.
