How Auto Shops Can Master SEO and Beat the Competition

Auto shops face heavy competition. This can put your business at risk of leaving money on the table if you fail to create a solid online presence that attracts the right customers.

You can start updating the optimization on your website to earn better rankings for Google searches and beat your competition today. Paired with the right shop management software, you will make great strides.

You can use these 11 actionable search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to help increase your local rankings and get your share of business from the internet.

Auto repair analytics lead at one of the auto repair trents in 2022

Clean Up and Optimize Your Website

If you do not have a website, you need to get one immediately to have a chance of competing online. The website must be a modern website that is responsive or built for mobile if you want prospects to take your shop seriously. It gives the first impression of your shop, so it makes a huge difference since you only get one shot.

You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money to build a website that looks professional. Many companies out there offer this service at very affordable rates. Make sure your site points out your unique selling proposition, why people should choose your shop, useful content that will help your prospects solve their biggest problem, and offers an easy way to contact you. It should say more about your prospect and less about you and your shop.

A mobile-friendly website allows prospects to easily view information on mobile phones and tablets which now make up more than 63 percent of searches on the internet. If your website does not do this, you will be penalized by Google which makes it difficult to attain higher rankings.

11 Actionable On-Site SEO Techniques

1. Website page speed can help or hurt your Google rankings, so you need to make sure that your web pages load quickly, especially on mobile. You can click here to check your website’s speed.
2. Your physical address and phone number should appear on the top right-hand corner of your website on every page, in addition to being on the contact page. This makes it as easy as possible for a prospect on your website to reach you.

Tags mean you’re ‘it’

Title tags and meta descriptions should have your main keywords in them as well as the city you are located in and your business name. This provides the headline and description of your shop that prospects will see when they run a Google search..

4. A Title Tag in HTML specifies the title of a web page. Title tags show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result. For example: Expert Auto Service & Repair in Dallas, TX.

5. The Meta Description under your page title outlines briefly what you do, where you are located, and how you can help.

6. Header Tags (headlines) or paragraph headings distinguish important text from the main content on your web page, so you want your main keywords to reside within these header tags. These tags carry a certain degree of importance by search engines, and even logically from a user’s point of view, reflecting a general idea of the content or paragraph.

How to ‘up’ your presence even more

7. Schema Markup provides code on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users searching for your business. It also plays a part in local SEO.

8. Robots.txt files tell search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site. This avoids overloading your site with requests.

9. Page Errors on your website lead to sections that don’t exist or dead-end when someone clicks on a link to a non-existent page. It will show a 404 error. Having broken pages on the website hurts the user experience as well as your rankings.

10. SSL Security Certificate protects your website by making it secure and preventing your website from hacks and malware. This affects Google’s ranking algorithm. You can easily purchase one from your website hosting company.

11. Internal Site Links connect one page of a website to a different page on the same website and aids in website navigation.

Take the time to go through your website to confirm or fix the items listed above and you will see your website rankings jump, giving your shop the opportunity to compete in your city!

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