Establishing your small business takes more than stamping your hours and services offered on your website. Creating a smart marketing strategy requires you to utilize multiple facets, such as a blog! When used properly, a blog will help establish your company as a thought leader, improve search engine discoverability, and ultimately drive sales.
Here is a more in-depth look at why you need an automotive repair blog.
Become a Thought Leader in Your Industry
Thought leaders are brands and people who have gained recognition and credibility as an authority in their field. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is to start a blog for your shop that consistently provides useful, pertinent information to your target audience. By publishing blogs, consumers will realize that they can come to you for all of their automotive repair needs.
Establishing Trust
When publishing a blog, the goal isn’t always to drive a sale necessarily. While this may seem counterintuitive at first, it is important for the longevity of your relationships with your customers that you establish a sense of trust. In fact, one of the biggest hurdles auto repair shops face is a lack of trust due to inflated and unnecessary service charges, negative experiences, and doubt surrounding a mechanic’s skill.
A great way to start chipping away at these concerns is by writing articles that not only show your expertise in automotive repair, but also your shop to connect more personally with readers. If executed properly, a steady flow of blog content can even make it easier for potential customers to find your business when looking for auto repair shops in Google or Bing.
Be More Discoverable with SEO Best Practices
Simply releasing auto repair content isn’t enough to drive more people through your doors, you need to make it easy for your audience to find you online. Producing fresh, quality content is a great way to put yourself on the map and increase your search engine optimization (SEO).
Search engine optimization is the practice of improving your website traffic through organic search engine results. This means that when someone searches for an auto repair or tire shop, your auto repair shop website appears on the results page.
Try these best practices:
Post Consistently
Search engines, such as Google and Bing, love to provide fresh, informative, and valuable content to searchers. So, posting content consistently is essential to outperforming your competitors on the SERP (search engine results page). Your customers will also appreciate up-to-date blog content. Attempting to engage your customers with 3 year old content can be difficult, whereas having content that’s a month, week, or days old will show your commitment to providing your customers with valuable and actionable information.
In fact, according to a recent study by Marketing Inside Group, small businesses with up to 25 employees that post more than 11 blog posts a month saw 3.5x more traffic than other small businesses who published one blog per month.
Include Backlinks
A backlink is simply a link from one website to another. When search engines see that your site ‘talks’ to other reputable sites, they view it as an endorsement of your automotive repair blog and it increases your site authority.
Here are some backlink best practices to help improve SEO:
- Only link to trusted websites
- Use the target keyword as the anchor text
- Make sure the site is related to the automotive repair industry
- Don’t link to the same site repeatedly
For additional SEO benefit, invite industry experts to write for your blog and offer to do the same for them. By doing this, you can backlink to your own blog posts and boost your website’s domain authority.
Use Keywords
The utilization of keywords is critical to creating an easily discoverable blog post. A keyword is a term someone types into a search engine to learn more about a subject. For example, if somebody were to search “auto repair shop”, you would want your business to appear within the list of search results.
By including relevant keywords in your shop blog posts, you increase the value of your site in the eyes of the search engine. Consider using free keyword research tools to help get you started.
Attract More Customers
The core purpose behind implementing new marketing efforts is ultimately to drive more sales, and blog posts can help you achieve that goal. In fact, studies have shown that producing consistent, quality blog content can convert readers to leads offline in just 2-4 months.
Here are some best practices to help convert online traffic to your auto repair shop:
- Utilize a call-to-action: Though your post should not be a sales pitch, it is important to direct the reader towards what you want them to do (i.e. click on a link, become a rewards member, make an appointment).
- Share on social media: All posts should be created to easily share on social media. According to Neil Patel, “In this digital age, the public decides who has the best content - not the writer or marketer.”
- Engage readers in the comment section: Not only does responding to comments help to build the bond between your business and the consumer, but it also gives ample opportunity to convert readers to leads.
- Promote your events: Have a big sale or an anniversary party? Invite readers through a post on your blog. Then follow it up with pictures and a recap of the event.
Have an All-Encompassing Strategy with BayIQ
Implementing an automotive repair blog can help differentiate you from bigger chains and other local competitors, giving you the chance to establish some industry authority and drive more sales. That said, a blog is just one of many components of a successful online marketing strategy.
With the help of BayIQ, automated marketing software just for the auto repair and tire industry, you can automatically send service reminders, create a loyalty program, solicit reviews to be posted on social media, and even curate informative reports with their fully integrated point-of-sale system.
If you want to attract more customers to your auto repair shop, contact BayIQ and see how they can take your business to unprecedented success.
