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  • cornerstone

    Member
    September 25, 2012 at 9:00 pm

    IF YOU GET A PREFERED AD WHERE YOU ARE IN THE TOP 5 LISTINGS IN YELP,MERCHANT CIRCLE,YELLOW BOOK AND OTHER SIMULAR WEB SITES YOU WILL PAY $30 AND UP PER MONTH.THEY DO LET YOU HAVE A FREE LISTING,BUT ITS BURIED WAY BACK WERE NO ONE WILL FIND YOU.AT THE BEGINING OF THIS YEAR I GOT A CALL FROM A COMPANY CALLED AUTOREPAIRLOCAL.COM.THE OFFERED TO GET ME LEADS OFF THE INTERNET FOR $14 A LEAD.I WAS ALREADY IN THE TOP 3 IN GOOGLE SO I SAID GO AHEAD.THE FIRST TWO MONTHS THEY GOT ME 6 LEADS THAT PULLED IN $1800 AND COST ME $180 FOR THE 2 MONTHS.THEY RECORD THE PHONE CALLS, SO YOU CAN LISTEN AND VERIFY THEM.I STARTED GETTING CALLS FROM MY EXHISTING CUSTOMER THRU THEM.I MENTIONED TO THEM THAT MY EXHISTING CUSTOMERS WERE CALLING FROM THERE LISTINGS AND THEY REINBURST ME FOR THOSE CALLS ALSO HAD SOME CALLS THAT DIDNT RELATE TO MY BUSINESS AND THEY REINBURST ME.IF YOU DONT KEEP TRACK THEY WILL CHARGE YOU.TO GET TO THE POINT THEY PUT YOU OUT THERE ON 30 LOCAL WEB SITES WHERE PEOPLE CAN FIND YOU.ON THE AVERAGE THE LAST 6 MONTHS HAVE BEEN THE SME AS THE FIRST TWO MONTHS.I AM HAPPY SO FAR AND BELIEVE I HAS SAVED SOME MONEY.

  • larrybloodworth

    Member
    September 26, 2012 at 3:56 am

    My wife and I do our own website and SEO/SEM for our transmissions-only shop and have been for the last 4 years. The only people we pay are Google and MSN (Bing/Yahoo).

    We bought our way to the very top of all 3 search engines and that’s the only places we care to be. We have learned to never pay to be on anybody else’s website. We learned this by counting the quantity and quality of the calls, not the number of clicks. That’s worth repeating: Count calls, not clicks.

    “Traffic”, “Clicks”, “Visitors” and similar terms are simply the wrong metric. We have nothing else to sell online but a free phone call. If you can tell how many phone calls you’re getting from a particular advertiser or search engine then you’re ahead of 98% of the other automotive businesses.

    If you have a pool of dynamic phone numbers, that allows you keyword level call tracking. In other words, you not only know what search engine the call came from, you know what keyword drove the call. There’s a lot of keywords that generate a lot of clicks and few or no phone calls. I call those “click-burners”. They are almost always 1-word keywords.

    Conversely, there’s keywords that don’t get a lot of clicks, but a very high percentage turn into a phone call. Moreover, there’s some keywords that have a better than average chance to turn into a very high ticket. Like “Dodge diesel transmission” or “Duramax transmission”.

    One-third of our phone calls are now coming from mobile devices. A mobile website should be an abbrieviated version of the regular website and have only 1 page with click-to-call and a map that when clicked, starts the user’s navigation app.

    I don’t know how much of all of what I just said applies to a general repair shop, but it sure does apply to a transmission shop.

    Thanks,

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