[mechanicsites]

One other item I’ll add regarding pay per click is that you should also use remarketing, period.

Remarketing allows every visitor to your website (regardless of how they originally found your website) to see your ads on Google network sites like YouTube, Gmail, etc.

Also, remarketing cost per click will most likely be much lower than your average cost per click for text ads. This helps your brand stay in front of people and top of mind when they have a problem your shop can help them with. A simple organic visit to your website can enable you to display your ads for this person repeatedly over a period of time up to 540 days (you can set this to a lower number of days if you want).

Remarketing can be very helpful in building up your brand.

[mechanicsites]

The number one thing you can do for your local business to get the phone to ring is to get a good local listing / citation management provider or a company that will manage these for you. This will ensure you show up in all of the popular maps people have on their smartphone or whenever they’re doing a local search on their computer.

A website with no local listings, even with great on-page SEO, will most likely not generate many visits.

The other point that a lot of companies miss or don’t understand is conversion logic. Even if you are getting traffic to your website, you’ve got to turn that into phone calls or contact forms/appointments.

I’ve seen plenty of websites in my time as a designer that look beautiful, but don’t convert because the conversion logic is absent or not even thought of.

The other great thing about listing management and citations is that if you keep up with them, they’re always going to be working for you whether you have a website or not, and if you have a website (as long as your listings are linking to your web address) they will really make the on-page SEO efforts go a LOT further.

Very important to keep up to date over the years as phone numbers, addresses, or web addresses change, and vital to local SEO in 2018.

Along these same lines, you need to make sure your website is mobile friendly, or people will have a bad experience on their phones and go elsewhere. Additionally, Google gives priority to mobile friendly websites for any search coming from a mobile device so this is very important for both ranking and conversions.

Last, SSL is becoming more of a web standard and Google gives you bonus points for having it. It won’t be long before they start penalizing website owners who don’t have SSL.

For me, a local shop needs citations and listings, sound on-page SEO, a user friendly, modern, mobile friendly website with SSL if you truly want to put your best foot forward online. If you do all of these things and start getting some positive reviews in Google and Yelp, you’ll be well on your way to being a major competitor online if not dominating your market if you’re not in a very competitive area.

Edit: Regarding pay-per-click advertising, this can be a good solution if you need customers fast and are willing to pay for them.

With that being said, you really need a company to do this for you if you don’t know what you’re doing, and that carries additional cost and your time getting everything set up with them.

SEO is more of a long-term solution, however, if you can set a budget for pay-per-click advertising and pay a company to manage it for you and they do a good job, you can increase your advertising budget based on ROI.

For shops starting out, this can be good to give them a jump start by running an aggressive initial campaign with a one-time set budget with the idea being that after the one-time budget has been expended, you determine whether an ongoing campaign is something you want to do, and if so, how much you want to devote to it based on ROI.

The important point here is to make sure your budget is large enough to get a good sample size of data so that you aren’t making important decisions based on a very small number of visits.

As long as you have a good sample of data in a short period of time, you can quickly run through several adjustment cycles along the way, perhaps once a week having your management company have a brief call with you to review progress and get your answers to decisions based on results.

Hopefully, by the time your one-time aggressive budget has spent, you’ve got a lot of data at your disposal, you’ve dialed in your ads and landing pages at least 4 or 5 times over, and you’ll be able to make a much more informed decision as to how to craft more of a long term budget for PPC.