Creating local buzz for any business is one of the most effective ways to boost brand awareness and revenue. The concept is simple: your immediate target market is those that are around or near your business location. You need to make sure that they know you offer the services and products they need so that they’ll come to you for them when the need arises.
For local tire shops, specifically, it would be very helpful for the business for neighborhoods and communities near them to think of them as the first choice for their tire needs. The nature of the business alone already provides plenty of opportunities for business success.
For one, most US households own at least one car, and that’s a fact. According to statistics from the US Census Bureau, as much as 95% of American households own a car. Regardless if it runs on gas or electric, one thing’s for sure–they will all need tires to run.
So tire shop owners actually have an advantage insofar as creating the need for their product or service is considered. The real tricky part here, however, is the competition that they will have to face.
If you’re in the local tire shop business, here are some helpful tactics you can do to boost your sales with help from SEO.
Understanding The SEO Basics For Tire Shops
The first thing you need to know is how SEO works. This acronym is short for Search Engine Optimization, which simply means that it’s a way to optimize your presence in the results list of search engines like Google.
Done right, SEO for tire shops can give amazing results to your business. Having a good ranking on the search results exponentially increases your chances of getting new customers. Think of it from your own perspective as an online user.
When you search for a product or service, and the search engine pulls up a list of choices, you would want to pick the best choice. The general perception is that the top result in the list is the best choice, that’s why it’s listed first. This does not necessarily follow, of course. But, the point is that being in a prominent spot in the search engine results is akin to having a brick-and-mortar space in a location with the highest foot traffic in the mall.
So what can you do to boost your local tire shop sales when you’re surrounded by plenty of competition?
Build a User-Friendly Website
Your website is going to be the main gateway for your potential clients. Ideally, a good website would contain your logo, an About section presenting who you are as a business, a Service page listing all the services and products you offer, and a Contact page.
Don’t be too quick to dismiss the Contact page as a minor sub-page; next to the Home page, this is what most users check out so they can call, email, or visit the business they’re looking at.
Having a good flow and structure to your website also helps keep the readers engaged. If your payment page is not loading or functioning as well as it should, the reader could get turned off and move on to the next option, for example. Therefore, making sure that your website is structurally sound from the backend, and is optimized for SEO can help greatly.
Build Local Presence and Relevance
To build local presence and relevance, you can create a blog that would allow you to put up content about what’s going on in the local community. The important part here is that you need to make sure that you tag your neighborhood.
Hashtags are a great way for creating associations between content and keywords. In the case of your local tire shop, you can use hashtags like #carsafety or #tirecare in a post relating to a news article about road safety in the winter season.
This kind of content helps build your name recall and expands what you have to offer to the community as an active member, not just a business out to make a quick buck from them.
Optimize Online Tire Shop Presence for Mobile Use
Where you send your message is just as important as what kind of message you send. A good SEO practice is to optimize your website for mobile use. This means that your website or blog needs to read well even if it’s on a smaller screen like a mobile phone, as compared to a desktop or laptop.
Think about this statistic: smartphone users in the US alone are already at 307 million as of October 2022. That’s 307 million potential clients, give or take a few hundred thousand, perhaps, since most of these people are also car owners, in all likelihood.
All of them are on their mobile devices, searching for products and services relevant to them. They don’t even need to be all that savvy. As long as they get the results shown to them when they make the search, it could become a practice that they will constantly depend on.
In short, create a good-looking, smooth-running website. And then make sure they fit on mobile devices.
Create a Google My Business Account
Another thing you need to optimize is your Google listing. This is especially helpful for boosting your presence on Google Maps, which is very important if you want clients to come to your tire shop.
With your Google business profile, your business will be appearing in the search results, on the Google Search Knowledge panel, and on Google Maps.
Get Good Customer Reviews
Last but not least, encourage your clients to write good reviews about your tire shop. Although digital marketing has grown in leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, word of mouth remains to be the most effective way to market a business.
Brands have met great success thanks to glowing reviews. Businesses have also shut down because of negative reviews. Again, it will boil down to the perception presented to the greater public.
So do good service in your tire shop, make sure your customer is satisfied and happy, and then have them talk about you in their customer review to further enhance your tire shop’s local buzz.
