Car Count Daily

Hey, shop owners. Thank you very much for joining me on this edition of Car Count Daily. My name is Ron Ipach, but you can call me Captain Car Count, because that’s all I’ve done for the past 20+ years, is help thousands, and thousands of auto-repair shop owners, just like you, to get and then keep all the top-quality customers that your shop can handle.

Now, today we’re going to be talking about having an auto repair website for your shop. This idea was brought to me by Susan who sent me an e-mail letting me know that she’s going to be updating her website, which is a really good idea. If your website is old or if you don’t have one, you really do need to have a newer updated website. I suggest that for everybody. Her questions was really to the point, how much should she spend on a website and how important, really, is having a website right now?

Let me go ahead and cover the second question first. How important is it? It’s important. You really do need to have a website. It’s not nearly as important as everybody makes it seem, especially with the guys who want to sell you a website, but the reality is, you do need to have a good website. Most people will go to your website, kind of check you out a little bit before they choose to do business with you. It’s similar to people reading reviews. Everybody looks at a review before they decide who they want to do business with. They’re going to review you. If you’ve got good reviews, chances are they’re going to check out your website. If you have a auto repair website that’s made by a six year old, ten years ago and it looks like crap, chances are that’s going to turn them off. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time, money, or effort to have a professional looking website, an updated website. It is important that you do have it because people will check you out online. Ever since I started doing these Captain Car Count videos, I’ve had a lot of people checking out my website. It just goes to show, when people find you they want to know more about you. That’s why it’s important you have that good website.

How much should you spend and how much time should you spend doing it? Not a lot because the reality is, most people aren’t going to find you by searching for a auto repair shop in their area. There’s just too much competition. Unless you really want to jump into that fray and work with search engine optimizers so that you’re at the top of the page all the time, most shop owners don’t have the time or money to mess with that. You just need to have a good looking website. You can get a cheap website. You can get one made for $500 and that’s pretty much all you need to spend. I know I’m going to have some people argue with me on this, especially with the people who are providing website as a service. The reality is, you want a good professional looking website, but the majority of people are never going to find it. The only people who are going to find your website are the ones that are actually typing in, doing a search for you.

On the other hand, you can get some beautiful made websites for thousands of dollars and then spend hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds or dollars every single month to keep them optimized, to keep them on page one. If that’s the game you want to play, that’s perfectly fine. Me? I’d rather you just have a nice looking website so when they do look and check you out, they’re going to find something really nice. I hope that helps.

I wouldn’t spend a ton of time on there. I guess probably the reason why I talk about this in the way that I do is I find too many people spending entirely too much time putting together the perfect website. They spend hours, and hours, and hours with their designer and back and forth, back and forth for the perfect website that the majority of people are never going to see anyway. Put your time, and effort, and money where people are really going to find you. I’d suggest market more to your current clients than market to people that have never seen you before, which is what your website is doing. You’re marketing to people that don’t know you from Adam and chances are they’re never going to find you anyway, even though you have this beautiful site. The better looking your site is, doesn’t get you to the top page of Google or the main search engine. Put your money, and time, and effort in things that really matter.

Have a good website, a good professional looking website, but you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars and spend hours, and hours, and hours putting that together. I certainly hope that helps. If you want to argue with me, if you want to tell me how much you love me, hate me, make suggestions for future Car Count videos, please go down below this video, write your comments in there and I will see you on the next Car Count Daily.