Over the last couple of years, some significant changes in consumer behavior regarding researching retail sources of everything – including auto service – have left some repair shops behind because they were not paying attention. Luckily, it is easy to catch up.
There are several easy things you can do to improve the Google My Business (GMB) listing for your repair shop at no cost whatsoever beyond the time it takes you to do it.
The one thing you can count on about Google is that the rules of the game are constantly changing. Google’s commitment to providing searchers with the purest, most useful results means that it keeps changing things to prevent business owners from scamming its system while providing various tools to help people use it.
It can be challenging enough when customers get to review the service they receive from your business, but when the employees get in on the act, it can be a bit too much. Perhaps, however, it can be your ticket to lower turnover, happier customers and more business.
Roger McManus decodes Google Analytics metrics for measuring traffic to your website.
Google Analytics can make most shop owners’ eyes glaze over just thinking about it. This article will surprise you. Though the setup is easy, let someone who “speaks the language” get you started. Once you see what you can learn and how easy it is to find the information, you will be hooked. Let this article be the bait.
You can write – and pay for – advertising that will try to convince prospective customers to give you a call. Or, for free, you can get satisfied customers who are far more believable to write it for you. Consumer reviews represent, perhaps, the most powerful advertising messages you can develop. The good news is you don’t even have to pay to get them published.
There are fancy Google terms for it, but the bottom line is you create a single webpage that is dedicated specifically to any town from which you want to pull business. This page is known as a service-area-specific page or sometimes referred to as a geo-targeted page. For our purposes, we will adopt a term that has become more popular as more people learn about the power of this strategy: “city pages.”
This is a step-wise progression through the process of creating city pages. While many business owners may not want to execute this personally, you can hand this off to a writer who can produce the copy for the webpage that your webmaster can execute.
The question of whether to invest or not gets down to whether the piece of equipment will save or make you more money than it costs. Sometimes the total cost of a capital equipment investment can be off-putting, yet often the numbers prove that the equipment ends up being less than free.
Instead of waiting for customers to remember you when they have the need for automotive service, why not advertise to only those who are ready to buy now?
It is easy to dismiss social media as a bunch of individuals who generally chat about things as mundane as their kids’ soccer games and swapping cute cat videos. The problem with social media is that the connection is not obvious as to how it relates to street-level retail. But, to dismiss it because you don’t understand how it can help grow your business would be a mistake.
