Premier Auto Web

Getting positive reviews for your Auto Repair Shop

Did you know that 80% or more of online shoppers incorporate a business’s reviews into their decision making process? Another interesting fact is that over 80% of people will hesitate to make a purchase or buy a service from a business with negative reviews. Most people also trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Besides the added value great reviews brings to acquiring new customers, there are other benefits as well.

Search engines use reviews as a ranking factor, especially when it comes to local search. The more positive reviews a company has the more likely their website will rank higher when it comes to local search and maps. The one place where it probably matters the most to get great reviews is on your Google business page. If your shop doesn’t have one, you should really look into creating one as it’s free and relatively easy to do. Other business pages that are important are Yelp and Facebook. All of these enable customers to write reviews.

Once you have these business pages set up, the more challenging part can be getting customers to review your business. This may not need to be said but if you want positive reviews, the first thing to do is to work on providing the best possible customer experience. Customers that are very satisfied are usually more than happy to write reviews. It’s also important to make the review process as easy as possible for your customers. There are several ways to make this happen. You can have cards printed up and left on the front desk with your review sites listed and simply ask the customer on the way out. Another way is to email the customer and have links in the email that the customer can click on which will take them to your review sites. One more way is that you can ask your customers through a post on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter. The easier it is for a customer to review your shop, the more likely you’ll get reviews.

The one unfortunate outcome from soliciting reviews is that you may get an occasional negative review. The best way to handle this is to reply to the review in a positive manner and try to resolve the customer’s concerns. People understand that you can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time. If you do your best to respond in a positive way, potential customers will see that as well. Probably the worst thing you can do upon receiving a negative review is to simply ignore it. Other customers may look at your lack of response as a sign that you don’t care. If you react in a positive way, you’re more likely to see positive results.

A well managed process for getting customer reviews can benefit your business immensely. At Premier Auto Web, we have an automated review process that we include in our all in one package. If you’d like more information, we’d love to talk with you.

What your website says about your auto repair shop

You never get a second chance to make a first impression! That old adage is especially true for your Auto Repair Shop’s website. Believe it or not, your potential customers will make preconceived notions about you and your business just from spending a few seconds looking at your website. In addition, studies show that up to 80% of people will research a company online before they make a decision. Will they click off your website and go to your competitor’s? Let’s hope not! We want to make sure that your potential customers are fully engaged and not give them a reason to look anywhere else.
If your shop’s website is old and outdated or if it doesn’t look like you’ve ever updated the content, here is what you might be telling your website’s visitors.

You don’t care if you show up in search results.
You’re not interested in finding new customers.
You don’t care what people think about you.
You don’t care about your business.

I’m sure that’s probably the last thing you want someone to think about after visiting your website. With more and more people finding and researching companies online, if your website is behind the times, your business will soon be as well. So what can we do about it?

If your days are filled up with writing tickets, ordering parts, supervising technicians and all the other time consuming tasks of managing a shop, you may find it difficult to invest the time into improving your website. The other part of this puzzle is that there’s a pretty steep learning curve to be truly competent in web design and the other related technologies such as SEO, Social Media and PPC. There are also many different paths toward a solution. Do you go with one of these build it yourself website solutions or do you hire a designer? What about the other related technologies? Do you going to hire someone for each of them?

An important fact to keep in mind is that a well built and managed website solution backed up by the related technologies will pay for itself many times over. I’ll explain how this works. When you have a well built, great looking website, your potential customers will much more likely make an appointment or request an estimate. Now you have a new customer who if treated right may even send their friends to your website when they need auto repairs. They may even write a nice review about your shop. What this means is that you’ll get more website visitors, more customers and more tickets. That all means more money back to you!

To sum it up, I wouldn’t think of a well built website solution as an expense but rather as an investment into your shop and into your business.

It just so happens that at Premier Auto Web, we provide just this type of all in one website solution. If you’re interested, we’d love to talk to you!