Is your website struggling to bring in fresh leads? Are people finding it difficult to locate your automotive aftermarket shop online? This might be because your online presence is lacking.
Get People To Your Site For FREE
In our last article we talked about
Why Ignoring Your Website Is Costing You Money. This month we’ll be discussing what you’ll need to do next once you have that shiny new badass website for your shop.
Let’s start by going over short review of some key posts to remember for that badass website.
Is your website struggling to bring in fresh leads? Are people finding it difficult to locate your automotive aftermarket shop online? This might be because your online presence is lacking.
If your online presence is failing you, then now is the time to ramp up your strategies before it starts to cost you even more money than it already has.
Your online reputation is essential for your growth as a business because your audience relies on online research to make informed decisions about purchasing goods and services. If your reputation is poor or you don't have a positive or a very limited online presence you could lose out on clients.
Now, you might think that you don't really have an online reputation so what does it matter? But if you're online, your website is online, and you advertise your services online, you already have an online presence. You're just not aware of it, which is a big problem.
To help improve your online presence, you need to start with your website and your site should:
- Represent your work
- Give an excellent first impression
- Have up-to-date content
- Be accessible
- Be professional looking
- Be easy to navigate on all devices
- Have updated security
- Be user friendly
Today, we're going to show you what you can do to improve your shop's online presence. Stop wasting money on a website that doesn't get you the leads you're after and start attracting more qualified leads!
Make your audience aware of who you are
This is the first part of the
Customer Engagement Lifecycle. When somebody's looking for information on a service, they're going to search online. If you don't have an excellent online presence - then they won't be able to find your business or the information they're looking for on your site. Instead, they'll head over to your competition to check out their services.
If you want to rank at the top of the search results and become a prominent presence online, you have to start making changes. You’ll need to start the next step by getting in front of eyeballs. Otherwise, your well-crafted website will just sit there gathering dust.
Without a solid online presence, your audience won't know who you are or where to find you. It doesn't matter how fantastic your website is. If your audience doesn't know who you are, how do you expect
them to find your website?
Visibility and awareness is key to improving your digital footprint, and the best way to enhance your digital footprint is by:
- Enhancing your Google Business Profile (previously Google My Business)
- Updating your online citations (listings)
- Setting up social media accounts that your customers follow
- Using email marketing
- Getting high-quality backlinks from trustworthy sites*
- Engaging with people in the industry
*A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. The more quality backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be in Google's eyes.
Google Business Profile and your online presence
Local citations are any mentions of your business's name, address, or phone number online. Citations usually include listings on local business directories, comments on industry websites, or mentions on social media platforms.
DEFINITION | Citations = Listing
A local citation is any online mention of the
Name, Address, and Phone number of a local business. They include local business directories, websites and apps, and social platforms.
Citations help internet users discover local businesses and can also impact your local search engine rankings and it also helps build trust.
Let's take a look at a few of the improvements you can make in closer detail so you can figure out exactly how to enhance your online presence and get more high-quality leads through the door.
Citations are a great way to boost your SEO Search Rank, and help get discovered by prospects, and improve your online presence so you can demonstrate how badass your services are.
The most popular and important citation to get a hold of is your Google Business Profile or, as it was previously known, Google My Business.
Google Business Profile examples
When we conducted our research into automotive aftermarket performance, restoration, restyling and race shop websites, we learned that only 60% of shops had actually claimed their Google Business Profile!
This was unbelievable! It meant that almost 40% of shops still hadn't availed themselves of this free marketing tool that would help improve their SEO ranking and enhance their online presence.
Google Business Profiles are an awesome way to get noticed online by your audience because it pushes your shop to come up in related search results.
96% of local businesses are viewed 25+ times per month when they have a Google Business Profile set up.
Start getting more high-quality leads to your business by setting up or updating your Google Business Profile today!
The importance of social media to your online presence
I'm not sure if you've noticed or not, but there are a lot of people on social media these days -
3.6 billion
people, to be exact. With that many people scrolling on Twitter, interacting with Instagram, and checking out the latest post on Facebook, you'd be mad to miss out on this marketing opportunity.
Social media is an essential tool for improving your online presence and getting noticed online by your target market.
We found that 88% of auto performance, restoration, restyling and race shops did have a social media presence, which was fantastic. However, our research still noticed that 12% of the shops we surveyed didn't have any social media presence at all.
Social media is vital to your online presence, so if you haven't set up your social media, now is the time to do it.
Find out which social media platform your audience favors and set up an account on it. Update it, optimize it and start posting regularly so you can get noticed by interested potential clients. But keep in mind that if you're going to use social media, it’s very important that you post on a consistent basis. When was the last time you visited a business Facebook or Instagram page and the last post was years ago? I know when we see that we wonder if the business is still actually in business.
Social media is another free marketing tool that you can use to reach so many people online. Plus, by interacting and engaging with your audience and the industry, you'll be able to boost your online presence and get more people interested in what you do.
Why do blogs help you improve your online presence?
Did you know that blogs can help you get
67% more leads every month? That's a whole lot of leads to be missing out on if you're not writing regular blog posts for your shop.
Blogs are terrific for educating your audience and positioning you as a knowledgeable company within the auto restoration industry.
12% of shop websites didn't have an updated blog but if they did have a blog and were updating it regularly with valuable and relevant content, their website would rank higher on the search results.
The higher on the search results you rank, the more likely people will see you, open your blog, and consider hiring you to upgrade their vehicles.
People like to feel comfortable with the shops they work with, and by showing them you know what you're doing, they'll be happy to work with you on their next restoration project.
