The Best Keywords For Your Auto Repair Shop
How to Find The Best Keyphrases For Your Brand
Picking the right phrases and keywords for your automotive repair shop is essential for any successful automotive SEO campaign. Afterall, what’s the point of ranking well for a particular item or service if no one is searching for it? Or if there’s no return on your financial investment for ranking for it? Today, we are going to go over what makes a keyword “good”, what questions you should be asking yourself to determine the best ones for your own automotive service shop, and taking a look at the top 10 most popular phrases that we see.
What makes a good keyword, “good?”
A “good” keyword or keyphrase can mean different things to different people. To make it simple, we’ve narrowed it down to three key concepts that will help guide you on your path to selecting the best keyphrases for your automotive business. It’s important to pick and optimize phrases that:
- Will deliver qualified traffic,
- Has enough search volume to make a profit, and
- Is a good fit for your business.
How can I find out what keyphrases will be best for me long-term?
While selecting your auto repair shop’s keywords can be as simple as picking the ones that have the highest search volume, it’s important to consider all of the potential pros and cons of each phrase, weighted against what your goals are for your business. Before picking out your search terms, ask yourself:
- “What do I want my brand to be known for?”
- “What services do I have the highest return-on-investment for?”
- “Do I have any technicians with service specialties that give me a unique edge in my area?”
Picking your phrases based off of perceived volume can be a good strategy, but 9 times out of 10, our team recommends going with phrases that are important to your brand and that give you the highest profit margins. For example “oil change” is a very high volume phrase, but most shops will run oil change specials that actually make them a loss-leader service to get people in the door. If the company in question doesn’t have the best customer retention plans in place, this could easily end up being a situation where they are spending money to bring in customers who won’t be spending any, which creates a situation where you lose money in the short and long-term. On the other hand, if you are targeting something like “transmission repair”, it may get less total hits than something like “oil change”, but because of your profit margin, you could end up making considerably more money by targeting this service.
Our Top 10 Automotive Repair Keyphrases
With this in mind, here is a list of the top 10 most popular keywords chosen for auto repair shops:
- General Repair
- Auto Repair
- Oil Change
- Brake Repair
- Transmission Repair
- Tire Repair
- Wheel Alignment
- Hybrid Repair
- Emissions Testing (or Emissions Check)
- Check Engine Light
- Car inspection (or State Inspection)
This list isn’t full-proof and there are other terms than these that can be successful, depending on who your customers are and what your local demographics look like (for example: suspension repair can also be a good choice in certain markets). But the list is a good place to start and get your mental wheels turning about what the best phrases for your own auto repair shop may be.
In a lot of ways picking out your keywords is one of the critically important steps to starting any successful SEO or automotive digital marketing campaign. Afterall, choosing what to target can help inform what content you put on your site, what special landing pages you may want to develop, can help guide the creation of coupons & specials, and in general sets the stage of what your brand will ultimately become known for online — so choose carefully and thoughtfully!
Charlie Needham