How to Market Your Automotive Business Online

Own an automotive repair shop? An indendent car sale lot? Then, since most of your customers are locals, you might be thinking that you do not need to spend time marketing your automotive business online. And you would be thinking wrong.

With the rise of the internet, people are turning more and more to internet search engines instead of the yellow pages to find your business. One day printed yellow pages will probably be something you only find in museums. This is good news, as it is generally relatively inexpensive to market online, and if you embrace the approach you will have a serious leg-up on your competition.

First, you need a website. If you already have a web site, don't stop reading - if you must then skip down to our information about link building, as this is something a lot of people ignore (just putting up a web site is not enough.) Your website does not have to be super fancy or expensive - it is more important what you add to the website than it look slick and pro. It should tell people about your business - why should they come to you? How much experience do you have? What special diagnostic equipment, or areas of excellence do you have that make your business stand out? Figure them out, and crow about them on your web site. Start with your existing logo and advertising materials, and you can have a simple website created fairly inexpensively. Once the site is designed, the only recurring cost is for website hosting, which is available from many providers for under $10 a month.

Add your inventory to your site - the more pictures and visual elements the better. People are visual, so catering to that sells. Add an online appointment setting form or an online application to your website to further solidify the leads you will get - ask for their business. Of course, a map to your location, your hours of operation, and contact information must be on your website (but it is surprising how often these are left off). It helps to profile the people who work at your business- with pictures and friendly information about each member of the staff. Testimonials from existing customers should be added as available. While not critical, adding a simple blog to the site can also help, as it gives you a way to let your customers know what's up with your business, and provides yet another way to interact with them and build up their trust and confidence for repeat visits. A blog also provides fresh content to attract the search engine spiders.

Then you need to promote the site. This basically boils down to getting search engine traffic for free. To do that, it matters a little how you create your web pages (on page SEO) but mostly the key is to get quality links to your site from other sites. The search engines will send you qualified traffic, for FREE, but you need to rank highly for the keywords that your future customers are using to try and find you. You can also pay for traffic, by buying ads from the search engines and other sites, and this can be effective, but first and foremost you should optimize your web site for both site visitors and search engines, and then you should work to get links to your site. Free search engine traffic is usually the most effective for getting qualified leads to your site, and for most small locally-oriented businesses, also by far the most cost-effective. Fortunately, when trying to rank for local searches, there is much less competition, and it is very feasible to rank in the very first results returned by the search engines (and hopefully numero uno).

On page SEO is fairly simple. You want to have your targeted keywords in your page title, and also within H1 tags as part or all of the article title. So the title that is in the title html tags (this title is the one the browser displays usually at the very top of the browser window), and also the title that people see as part of the article, within H1 tags, should prominently include your keywords. Your targeted keyword phrase should also be included in the first sentence or two of your content. Don't just spam them throughout your article or page, but do include them in the titles, the beginning of the content and the end of the content. After doing the above for the search engine spiders, the rest of your writing on any particular page should be for your human customers.

What keywords should you choose? First, as an example, if you are an auto repair place specializing in Land Rovers and located in San Diego, obviously you want to rank for phrases like "Land Rover repair San Diego" and "Land Rover mechanic San Diego" and perhaps "Land Rover restoration southern California." A key point here is that most small businesses should concentrate on local search - which means including your city or target geographic area in the titles (or at least prominently in the content) of at least some of your pages. Used car lots and other auto sales businesses similarly should include their location information in their titles. After that you have to try and brainstorm what kind of search terms your potential customers might be typing in to Google.

There are tools to help your brainstorming though. To find additional keywords that customers might be using to search for your services or products, use the Google Keyword Tool. This tool will allow you to enter keywords and then it suggests lots of related keywords for you and will even tell you approximately how often people search for each keyword phrase both locally and globally. I recommend choosing the "exact" setting when looking at how often keywords are searched for, and keep in mind the numbers are only rough estimates. You can then target additional keyword phrases by creating additional pages for your site, or by getting additional links to your site with those keywords in the anchor text of the links. You can also use the Google Keyword Tool on a website (as opposed to entering a keyword phrase, enter a website url), to see what keywords Google sees as related to the site, and this can be usefully run on your competition's website. It does not mean they rank for said keywords, just that their content is related to such search terms.

Once you know what keywords you are targeting, you need links. The search engine spiders see links to your site as votes that affect how highly your page should be ranked and for which keywords. The sites with the most and best quality links win.

All links to your site help. You want any and all incoming links you can get. However, high quality links can be worth as many as several hundred (maybe even several thousand) low quality links, so it makes sense to attempt to procure the highest quality links you can - with the very highest quality link being a so called proverbial "perfect link." So what is a "perfect link?" First, it has your keywords in the anchor text. The anchor text words are like votes for what your site is about, and hence for what keyword searches the search engines will rank your site for. Second, the perfect link comes from a site relevant to yours, a site that is trusted by the search engines, and a site that has links pointing to it from other sites with your target keywords in the anchor text of the links. Many people like to think of something called Google Juice that flows from site to site thru links. Some juice flows by the mere presence of the link, but much of the juice is tied in to which keywords are used in the anchor text. Bottom line, if you have an automotive related site, the best links are from other, respected automotive sites. Relevancy matters.

OK, so relevancy is generally self-evident - a site is either about similar topics to yours or not. But how do you know which sites are trusted by the search engines? In comes Page Rank. Page Rank is a Google invention and it is at least partly an indication of the importance of a site or of its trustworthiness in the eyes of the Googlebot. There are free tools you can get that will show you the page rank assigned to a site or a page. To get those tools, look at what browser add-ons are available for the web browser you use - search for SEO addons or even get the Google toolbar addon. Many such tools are available that will allow you to see the Page Rank of the pages you visit. Page rank is assigned to pages, but people like to think of an overall site's page rank as the page rank of its index or home page. Any page rank above "N/A" is good, but page rank varies from 0 to 10. The higher the page rank, the more likely a link from that page is more valuable, all other things being equal. Be mindful that page rank is not an end all be all kind of thing, but it does serve as a useful guide to which pages have the potential to pass the most link juice, again, other things being equal. Often, just one page rank 6 or page rank 7 link can be all a local site would ever need to rank highly in the local search results pages. This does not mean you need to get a page rank 6 or higher link, it only means that the higher the page rank of the site a link is coming from, then in general, the more it is worth.

So now that you have an idea what sort of links to your site that you want to get, how do you get them? The very best way is to provide remarkable content - content that is so good other webmasters find it useful or funny or otherwise valuable and voluntarily link to it. For automotive sites, such content might include how-to info - how to repair this, or how to check your fluids, or the like. For auto sales sites, you could give consumer advice like where to get the best car loans locally, or provide detailed information about the merits of the cars you sell. Humor and controversy can also be used as link bait. Finally, reference material is excellent link bait - perhaps you have have specs or details for a specific repair that are hard to locate and that you can post to the web for everyone to use (and link to).

Writing remarkable content can be difficult and time-consuming, and people have to find it before they can link to it. So when search engine representatives say the best way to get links is to create remarkable content, they are correct - but there is a big problematic Catch-22 with that in that you need traffic for other webmasters to find that content in order to link to it, but you need the links first in order to get the traffic.

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1. Ask people you know with websites to link to you. Friends, business associates, everyone. Often they will want to do a link exchange wherein you link back to them. Such links are ok, but their value diminishes when it is a link exchange because Google realizes that is what is happening - a link exchange - as opposed to another site voluntarily and unilaterally giving your site a "vote" in a one-way link.

2. You can buy links in the form of advertising. This is frowned upon and if Google finds out about it they could delist your site from their index.

3. You can submit your site to web directories, especially any with an automotive focus. Since anyone can get such links generally, or at least it is very easy, they are usually low quality links. The exception is such trusted directories as DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory. The Yahoo Directory charges for consideration for inclusion, with inclusion not guaranteed, and DMOZ generally takes forever to include you. However, a link in either directory is very valuable. Lesser directories are not worth so much and you should definitely never pay for a link in such a directory. All links help though. I say not to pay for "faster" processing or consideration into any directory except for Yahoo because the link is probably not worth the expense. Here is what Google says about directory links: "Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes."

4. You can write and submit original articles to article directories and information sites like Hubpages and eZine articles - and put them in the automotive category for the most effectiveness. This can be yield good links and also serves as another traffic funnel to your site. Directories vary in their authority, but in general submitting to several of the top directories will be helpful to your linking efforts.

5. Contact me at my automotive site LandRoverGeeks.com: Land Rover For Sale. I will be happy to partner with you (if you have a quality automotive site) in helping both of us to get more high-quality links.

6. You can participate in automotive forums. In general, most forums or message boards allow you have a link to your site in your signature. Then, if you don't spam the forum, and instead add useful posts to the discussion, you can get semi-decent links this way. Again, since these links are ones anyone can get, they are not super high quality. In general, the harder a link is for someone to get on their own, the more it is worth.

7. You can comment on automotive blogs. Blogs usually have a comment section at the end of each blog post. You can make comments that add value to the discussion, and include a link with your comment. Many of these links now get "no-follow'ed", meaning the search engines do not count them in their rankings, but not all are. Further, such links can still get traffic to your site. You have to watch for "nofollow" links wherever you try to get links. For example, Hubpages nofollows your links if your overall hub score is less than 75. A nofollow link has rel="nofollow" as part of the link tag. So it looks like a normal link, but Google will not consider it in its rankings. There are browser addon tools available for free that will mark nofollow links for you in distinctive pink or with a line thru them so that you can easily see which links on a site are nofollow links. Get such an addon and use it.

8. You can create a useful piece of software, theme, or web widget. This is best for those who can program or who can do graphic design. The idea is that if you create, for example, a wordpress theme for automotive sites, and then give it away free for other Wordpress bloggers to use on their sites, then you will get a link at the bottom that has a blurb that says theme design by [insert your link here]. This could yield numerous links depending on how many webmasters decide to use your theme or widget.

9. Give something away. This could be an eBook or pdf article that you offer free on your website. Other sites, including sites that list freebie offers, will link to your free offer.

10. Press releases - if you have a news to release, use one of the reasonably priced news release services available on the web (like PRWeb) to distribute your news release. Include a link to your site in the release, and depending on how many sites decide to publish your news, you could get tons of links.

11. You can offer to guest post on other automotive sites or blogs - and provide great content to other webmasters - in exchange you get a link to your site with the guest post. This can yield very high quality links and traffic and is highly recommended if you have the time and can write useful articles. These links are the best - because they are surrounded by relevant content. You have it in your power to make the article title include your keywords, making your in-content link all the more powerful. You also have it in your power to have it published on a highly relevant site, and it is not a blogroll link or links page link or a sidebar link - it is instead a within content link and many SEO gurus believe these are the links the search engines give the most weight to.

Howdy - 

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