Tune-up Your Ads About Tune-ups

Six tips to help you reach more automotive repair customers

In the movies I saw as a kid, by the year 2000 humans would be living on the moon, eating entire meals in pill form and—most importantly—we’d all have personal jet packs that would make things like traffic and flat tires a thing of the past. Nine years past that, we still live on Earth, eat meals with a fork and, like it or not, still drive cars.

Cars mean repairs, preventative maintenance, upgrades and more. Luckily there are plenty of people out there who offer all those services, but the question is—how easy is it to find them online and what could they do to make it easier?

If you’re an advertiser who specializes in automotive affairs, be it car painting, repairs, part replacement or anything else road related, you’ll want to make sure that your search listings pass inspection with users. We’ve come up with a few suggestions that should help tune up your listings:

Free is better. Listings that offer free estimates generally outperform listings that don’t. The word “free” can open a lot of doors, especially when people are looking down the barrel of what may be a costly car repair. If you offer free estimates and you don’t mention it in your creatives, be sure to rectify that. If you don’t offer free estimates, consider changing that policy, because clearly it makes a difference to people seeking car repairs.

Do it fast. Listing the turnaround times of your repair work is a great idea – unless it’s a longer amount of time than the advertiser right next to you. Be sure to check the marketplace when adding things like turnaround times to your listings, to make sure they’re competitive with what’s out there. If you’re advertising a three-day turnaround but your neighbor is advertising two, it’s a pretty sure bet which listing will get the click.

Front-load your key terms. We always stress the importance of keyword insertion in search listings, as they help listings appear more specific to user queries. But along with that, we also recommend front loading those keywords whenever possible, so that they appear early on in the creatives. While any inclusion of the keyword is a good thing, the sooner a user spots their query in your ad, the better.

Maintenance is different than repair. Ads offering preventative maintenance may not be the best match to general repair terms, such as “auto repair.” Typically people searching on those keywords need immediate help, and a listing that offers help for people who haven’t actually run into car trouble won’t help those who have. If you offer actual repair service, consider tailoring your ads for general car repair keywords to users seeking immediate repairs and creating a second “preventative maintenance” creative for keywords like “car care” and other before-the-fact keywords.

No one likes a car salesman. Since space in creatives is so limited, it’s a good idea to use that space in the most efficient way possible. Things like slogans and “salesy” jargon (”Come steal our deals!!”) really just take up precious room, without actually giving users any real idea of what you offer. It’s far better to use that space to explain the items and services that you’re offering to potential users.

Go local. Since most auto repair and maintenance businesses serve a very specific area, it’s a good idea to consider geo-targeting. Geo-targeting serves your listings only to the area that you offer service in. It provides more targeted traffic to your site, since your ad will only show to people who are close enough to actually be able to use your service.

Of course the usual suggestions still apply: use keyword insertion to make sure keywords appear in the creatives, as well as alt text to make sure they appear just the way you want them to. Watch out for grammar and spelling, as well as things like repeated words, or accidental use of words that sound correct but don’t read correctly, such as “break” instead of “brake,” etc. Avoid serving up highly specific results for general keywords, such as “car service” leading to an ad that offers service for 1992 Honda Accords. Unless you only service one very specific type of car, general keywords should lead to general ads.

With a little bit of maintenance, your automotive search listings should have your customers speeding (or possibly pushing) their way to your garage. But I’ve still got my fingers crossed that one day I’ll have my very own jet pack, or at the very least, a condo on the moon.

—Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst