Is Your Website Turning New Customers Away Without You Knowing It?
We have found that many automotive shop owners view having a website as a checkbox in their business plan – it’s a “set it and forget it” mentality. While having a website should be a checkbox in any business plan, if you really want it to work for you, it’s not as simple as marking it off and moving on.
A Good Website is Like a Good Car
Just like in auto repair, when it comes to your website, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. If you want a great looking automobile that gets you where you want to go week after week, you need to purchase a well-built vehicle and keep it maintained by trained experts who service it with the right parts, equipment, experience and care.
If a website is not designed, built and coded properly, it can end up costing you lots of money in the long run. While there are many people who can slap up a template website design or basic “webpage” online for you in just a couple hours, that doesn’t mean that this quick fix will really work for you. Would you trust someone to fix your transmission after only taking a couple free online tutorials? How many experts are there that understand how to build a website specific to YOUR business?
Your Current Website Could Be Wasting Your Money
It’s a well known fact that when it comes to advertising, getting your name and business in front of people is not exactly cheap. The demand for market-share and advertising gets more expensive by the day. It really has turned into an arms race to keep up with competition to keep the business coming in!
As a business owner you need to know what kind of return you are getting on every dollar you spend – and that includes every advertising dollar. Think about it: do you know how your current website is performing for you, or are you just paying a monthly fee without knowing if your website is bringing you any more business? A poor performing website could be tearing a hole in your wallet.
When you spend money to get your name in front of people, you have to make sure that that money is working to convert website visits into phone calls. If you are paying to have 100 people visit your website, you need to make sure you have a beautiful, informative website that will ENCOURAGE these people to pick up the phone and call you – otherwise you’re wasting both money AND precious opportunities at converting new customers.
How about a fishing analogy? Let’s say you need to catch some fish for dinner, but you set out with a net that has giant holes in it. Sure, you have a net, but the fish are just going to swim right through! No matter how much money you spent on that net, or how much time you spend trying to get the fish to swim towards your net, once they get there they are going to swim right through and you’re going to go home hungry. But, if you take a little time to build a better net and fix the holes, you’ll catch more fish in half the time. With a little effort up front, you’ll get better results for a longer amount of time!
A Website That Doesn’t Convert Clicks into Calls, Doesn’t Work
The national average in the automotive industry for page visits turning into phone calls is between 5-7%. That means that for every 100 people you pay for to visit your site, only 5 to 7 of them will call you. Seems like your engine has sprung a leak, doesn’t it? With the websites that we at Autoshop Solutions build, we aim for at least a 20% conversion rate. That’s 3x the number of calls for the same amount of website visits. (Of course we know how to increase your website traffic as well, but for now we’re talking about website conversions.)
Research shows that you have approximately 8 seconds for a potential customer to decide if they want to do business with you once they land on your page. Eight seconds is not a lot of time. When a customer is not getting the answers they are looking for immediately, it is very easy for them to hit the “back” button and go back to the list of your competitors on Google or whatever search engine they used to find you. You need to have a website that not only looks professional and inviting, but gives the potential customer all the information they need to make the decision that your shop is the one for them. People are impatient. If a website is confusing and frustrating, you had better believe they will associate that with actually coming in to visit you, and they will choose to give their business to someone else.
So if you’re spending a lot of money trying to rank on the first page in Google, or on direct mail pieces or on social media, or whatever you’re using to drive people to your website, but your website isn’t up to par, you’re wasting time, money and opportunity. Getting people to your website doesn’t get you more business, getting those website visits to convert into actual calls to your auto shop does. Don’t be fooled into thinking its all about where you rank. At the end of the day, it’s all about who’s phone is ringing more.
You worked hard enough for every dollar you will spend this year on advertising, don’t let it swim through the net.
Autoshop Solutions