AutoVitals - Auto Repair Made Easy » AutoVitals – Auto Repair Made Easy

Do you need a Mobile Website?

2012-02-20T06:09:28Z

Using smartphones and tablets to search for local businesses has become a wide spread habit and is going to increase, because it is highly convenient. Due to the much smaller available space on especially smartphones easy navigation becomes key for a great user experience. Lets look at a typical website, which has not been optimized yet:

You can see that 16.7% of website visitors went to the site on a mobile device, the iPhone leading the chart. This rate of mobile visitors varies by region. Hi-Tech hot beds like Silicon Valley lead the chart with 15% to 25% of all visitors. This number easily justifies the need for a mobile optimized website, especially if you look at a bounce rate of 75% like in the image above. That means only 25% of all visitors on the mobile site explored the site further and clicked on a link or button on the home page. There are more than one reason for this, but the inability to easily navigate is at the top of the list.

What does optimized for mobile mean? Check out a full site on an iPhone, which is rich and easily navigated on PC browser:

Navigating this site on the iPhone is possible but a little challenging. Thus our criteria for simplification of a mobile site have been concluded to be:

Scrolling down is easy, so information is placed on top of each other in a one column design.
Allow to call the business and find it on the map with one click.
Allow for convenient appointment requests and ask only for the absolutely necessary information.
Create a branding experience, and provide information about services offered

Last but not least: Allow for a switch to view the full site for gathering more information. The images below show the screen shots results for those user interactions, which are mostly done on a mobile site:

Clicking on the standard website URL (it automatically forwards to the mobile site) and scrolling down:

Clicking on the phone number or address reveals:

Calling or finding the shop is now super easy, just one click away.

Last but not least ‘requesting an appointment’ is shown below, in one of the future releases existing customers will even be able to select their vehicles and safe some typing.

Do you need a mobile website for your business?
The numbers suggest so.
Why don’t you check your website on a smartphone and then make a decision? We are happy to help you determine how many visitors have looked at your website on their mobile device.

As always, check back for more or subscribe to posts on this blog, you won’t be disappointed.
Uwe (Oova)

Every business needs 3 ingredients for an effective website, do you know which ones?

Improving Customer Service Beyond The Counter

2012-02-04T17:39:53Z

Triggered by shop owner feedback about how AutoVitals services help them, I took the opportunity to contribute a series in Shop Owner Magazine. The first article is about leveraging the web for lead generation and can be found here. As always, your feedback is very important to me, please feel free to add your comments and suggestions. Thank you.

Imagine this: Your seasoned service advisor could be the one receiving those 45-90 calls every month, and his conversations could lead to 15-30 new customers coming into your shop every month. Are you willing to pass up that kind of lead volume?

The next article in the series is about the counter experience, while the vehicle is in the shop, and the motorist is at the counter or at home/work. Please let me know, what specific topics you are mostly interested in.

Have Search Results Become Unpredictable?

2012-01-23T04:06:04Z

Ron Haugen (the author of the great movie clip about finding a Saturn repair shop) and I had a chat about Google plus and its repercussions on search results.
Over the course of the conversation the following questions emerged and we thought questions and answers might be worth sharing. Here they come:

1. Word out there is that if you do not have a Google + account, your business’ search engine ranking will suffer, is this a valid concern ?
Absolutely valid and if you don’t buy at least Ads worth $500 per month with Google, you won’t have any chance getting on even page #2 in Google search.

I am just messing with you and I am sorry, but the temptation to mock fear based sales tactics is so high I couldn’t resist.

Lets get as accurate as I can:

Your business search rankings won’t suffer if you don’t have a Google Plus account. What you should consider though: If you can engage your prospective and existing customers in a meaningful conversation online, share valuable content they are interested in on Google Plus and earn ‘+1′ clicks in return, Google will consider your ‘social ranking’ as one of many parameters in determining your search ranking. In other words, having an account alone doesn’t help much, you need to use it to engage in a meaningful online-conversation with your customers. It does make sense, doesn’t it? Just like real life, the more people talk with and about you, the more attention by searching motorists you deserve.

2. Is it possible that Google users will see different search engine results when logged in than those who are not, and if so, does that mean we will have to do multiple work to please different search engines and their members?

First question first: YES, logged-on Google users see potentially different search results than those who are not. The reason is that Google ranks relevance of the search result to you. If you check out certain websites more frequently than other websites (you found them using the same or similar search terms) it seems logical that you have personal reasons to do so. Thus Google assumes those sites are more relevant to you. Making sense?

That also means that those of you, who check out their own or their closest competitors’ website too often when logged onto their Google account, will enter a reality distortion field (which can be very flattering, I admit). Rather use the ‘incognito window’ in Chrome when checking ranking results.

Hm, but doesn’t that mean that every Google account user sees a different search result and it is unpredictable for us to know what they see? True, but for another reason we haven’t mentioned yet: Google has started tagging and featuring websites as search results friends in your social network like. “Friends” can mean you have them in your Google Plus circles, or you just had an email exchange with them. See the comparison below. The search result for ” auto repair campbell ca” at the top is done without me being logged on and below you see people in my network having +1′d the site. No change in rank, but something your eyes pay attention to.

More interesting is the following example (please blow up the image by clicking on it). It is a Google search page #1 for ‘BMW repair Newport Beach ca”, not logged-on at the top and logged-on below that. The search ranking has changed based on the social ranking, probably because I visited the site several times and it has been +1′d. In summary: The fact that Rocky (the owner) and I are connected on Google Plus makes a web page on his site featured even before the business listing. Powerful stuff, isn’t it?

3. Does Facebook have any weight or effect on a search using Google, and does Google recognize Facebook?

Yes, for simplification reasons, just look at Facebook as another business directory, just like yellowpages(dot)com, competing for ranking on Google. Below is a Google search result on page 2 when searching “auto repair clive IA”.

4. We are always hearing that Google is making algorithm changes that impacts search rankings. How often does this really happen, and how does an individual or even a company like Auto Vitals keep up?

If we knew how often it happens in advance and what pattern there is, our life would be a lot easier. The not-so-satisfactory answer is: it happens when Google sees a reason to change the game of search by increasing the value for the searching public and thus maintaining its leading position compared with its competitors (are there any serious ones?). Google has started to give local businesses a lot more attention on search, which resulted in at least 3 major changes in 2011 alone. The introduction of ‘social search’ when they started Buzz (now Google Plus) and how they combined it with search results is the most powerful change I know of and we haven’t seen the full extent of it.

I can’t say how other companies do it. We try to do two things.

Anticipate what Google is going to do, implement it beforehand and be ready when it happens. We have been successful for two of their major changes this way.
Spend tremendous human and software effort to always know, almost at every hour of the day, how all of our clients rank, what selected indicators tell us about trends and how we can incorporate findings in the software so that changes to our clients’ websites and listings can be published within a few hours to a day for every single one of them. Collaborating with industry experts helps as well.

5. From Google’s view, is it important to have an account for your business, or for the business owner, or both ?

Google gives us tools to accommodate what we need. It is up to us how to use them. If you want to split your personal life from your business activities, create your personal Google Plus account plus a business page. This is the most common approach. The need for more than one full account, as some do on Facebook, to differentiate between social and business, is not as strong due to the Google Plus Circles. That is another powerful concept, but maybe more about this in another post.

I hope I didn’t waste your time. Please keep the questions coming if I can help.

Uwe

Reviews Featured on Your Website Are ALL on Google!

2011-12-01T02:08:05Z

Reviews help getting potentially new customers trust you.
You knew that already.
Dominance on Google page#1 helps getting new customers find you.
You knew that as well.
Did you know how awesome that can look if combined?
See image below.

And did I mention that Google picks up your review stats off your and our website and shows it to prospective customers (blue arrows in picture above)?

See for yourself above OR type your business name in Google and enjoy (assuming we designed and manage your website, of course).

Uwe (Oova)
Wanna Try?

Call on Click

2011-12-04T21:54:15Z

Many small business owners are wondering how a web presence can be taken to maximum effectiveness, in other words: how are calls to action actually designed so they attract visitors to click on them. Or, simply “Is my website effective?” other questions we hear are “Should I spend the money on a site optimized for mobile phones?”; “When do I know I need to update my website?”

Our simple answer is “Measure and Modify”. As in real life nothing is perfect, so why not getting a baseline and start improving from there, before spending money on less effective projects?

There is an abundance of neat tools to get the exact information you need to make decisions. Lets look at some examples:

1. “You need a website optimized for mobile, since 36% of all searches use smart phones and will ultimately look at your website.” WOW, if that was true, you better get a mobile version NOW.
Lets use real data from websites we host and where we measure effectiveness. Below is a comparison of an auto repair shop website in Simi Valley, CA and Pleasanton, CA. Pleasanton is a town with median household incomes around $99k, it seems that quite a bit of bay and silicon valley (=internet company) executives live here. Simi Valley is used as a comparison, where the mix of professions seems more balanced. Both websites are leading in rank for a lot of relevant search keywords and count more than 700 hits per month.

Browsers used to look at an auto repair website

Mobile browsers account for not more than 3.5% of all clicks on both websites. Does that justify a specific website development? You decide.
PS: 36% is actually the right number (as of July 2011), but includes all searches on smart phones, anything searchable using a browser.

2. “Add movies to your website, they help attract visitors to call you.”

That is a good one, and true as general statement. The devil is in the detail as they say.
So many business owners and web designers get a movie about the shop or a customer testimonial clip and put it on the most precious real estate of the home page.
A no-brainer, isn’t it?
Lets look at a click map of a nicely done shop website with a nicely done movie:

Only 2.7% of the clicks went to the video

What you can see is that only 70% of the visitors clicked anywhere on the home page. Not bad, but not stellar either. Of those 1537 clicks only 2.7% were interested in watching the video. Hm, disappointing, how can we improve that?
One way is to look at the user experience in the context of search. Or in other words: People don’t have time, and check out only things, which seem interesting and in the context of why they visited the website. Watching the movie while they are in the first 10 seconds of making the decision whether or not the website will be explored further is the wrong place and time. Making sense? Where should the movie be placed instead then and what should it convey through it’s opening image? What do YOU think?

Lets have a look at a more effective home page and make sure we have enough new visitors looking at it.

Every visitor clicks at least once on the home page

More clicks than visitors, that sounds promising. No video on the home page, only a teaser to a video. A photo gallery introducing the shop, highly clicked (upper right corner). Who would have thought?

Having trouble deciding what to tell your web designer? We can help.

See you next time here or somewhere on the road.
Uwe

Engage your auto repair customers at the counter and beyond

Monitor and Increase Technician Productivity

2011-10-09T14:34:31Z

Are you setting goals for yourself and your technicians? Do you know how many hours the service advisor sold based on the inspections results done by the technician? Do you have regular talks with your technicians and service advisors to optimize work flow in your shop?

Most of you probably answer with “No, I don’t have a tool to measure this accurately enough.”
That tool exists and its name is QuickTrac.
Larry Moore has implemented this tool after having established the necessary processes in his shop and got the buy-in by his service advisors and technicians.

Listen to his presentation and find out how AutoVitals helps the service advisor reduce manual entries dramatically.

As always, feel free to comment here
Uwe (Oova)
Get your web presence boosted

Success Metrics You Shouldn’t Overlook

2011-09-26T03:13:13Z

I have been asked by shop owners and industry experts alike, how it would be possible to make Google ranking and reviews tangible.
So tangible that a decision to invest in SEO, a website, review collection etc. can be justified and tailored to the shop’s needs.

Before I do that, lets have a look at why Google is so important. Just follow the trend comparing Yellow Pages and Google Maps as search items in the image below between 2004 and today. Do I need to say more about why Google search should not be overlooked for local businesses?

Now lets set the baseline for a realistic look at the power of Google Search. Although not an easy task, since trillions of factors influence the numbers, which matter to you as local business owner, I was looking over our stats and zeroed in on a virtual area, representing “most likely town”.
In “most likely town” live app. 60,000 people driving 20,000 vehicles every day to work. The commuter traffic in and out of town is balanced out, the median household income is about $50k and the age profile looks as shown below, with a healthy portion of 25-55 year olds, but also some college students, who all use the internet on a regular basis.

In a second step I took the number of our search database for similar towns and selected a few shops, where we measure website traffic, appointment requests through the shops’ websites and tracking phone numbers. I determined, how websites and business listings, which are not highly ranked stack up against well optimized websites plus I compared those two with websites and listings, which meet the criteria of an highly ranked, high reputation web presence.

Voila, the results are in and here they are (please click on the image to make all details visible):

I am interested in your feedback and what numbers you normally experience.
Uwe
Increase your customers flow using the Web Booster.

PS: As I was digging through the stats, I found one exceptional graphic, I don’t want to hide. It is from a Google Places account for a client we started with recently and show the daily impressions of the business listing and website on Google. It is a bigger town than “most likely town”. Enjoy

A New Way of Leveraging Reviews

2011-09-11T16:09:54Z

Although Google has stopped aggregating third party reviews (see here for why it happened), reviews haven’t lost their power. On the contrary.
In addition to showing reviews augmented with stars on the Google places listing, reviews can help local businesses to dominate search results, which are relevant to their business.
AutoVitals is tapping Google’s ability to find relevant content on the website, we have created for our clients and let Google feature the content, which matches the keyword sequence searched.
In other words, depending on what is searched, Google features different content from a website authored with AutoVitals’ WAT (Website Authoring System).
Lets assume we look for ‘BMW Repair Goleta” (Goleta is a city with 20,000 drivers). The image below shows how Top Shop dominates that search with its places listing and website, AND highlighted is what content has been picked up by Google from the home page to be featured for the “BMW Repair” search.

Now lets look at a different search: “Mercedes Repair Goleta”. Again Top Shop dominates Page #1, and looking more closely you can see that Google picked up different content, which matches the search for Mercedes Repair.

Placing valuable and relevant content on your website and updating it on a regular basis is important to not only educate your website visitors but to get on page #1, and dominate it.

Happy dominating

Uwe

Use the AutoVitals Website Authoring System to dominate search on Google.

Do u txt? Highly effective use of texting for efficient customer interaction

2011-08-22T05:46:57Z

Text messaging has penetrated our life so much that even people like me and older use it every day. Although we might feel still some resistance letting people outside of our family and friends into our “inner txt circle”, our 17 year old daughter Lina is sending thousands of txt messages every month. “I am using email only for getting college coaches interested in me (she is trying to select the right college to play volleyball for), otherwise I am using txt. It is faster to type(!) and I get immediate responses.” Case in point: if you want to respond quickly or get an immediate response from your customers, txting is the way to go.
You knew that already, didn’t you?
We at AutoVitals looked at specific scenarios, where txt messages make the difference for shop efficiency and customer satisfaction and implemented those.
The most important scenarios are:

Notify the customer that the car is ready for pick up

Inform the customer that an estimate is in their email inbox and ask them to authorize by replying “yes”

Remind the customer about a scheduled appointment and let them confirm/re-schedule the appointment

Since AutoVitals integrates with any shop management in real-time, the vehicle in question will show up on the Today’s Vehicle Page in a matter of seconds after the estimate or invoice is printed. Sending the customer a “ready for pick up” message by email and txt is a matter of two clicks. The email/txt is already pre-worded and can be edited before sending off if needed.

Select the vehicle to notify the driver that the vehicle is ready for pick-up

As you can see on the vehicle thumbnail (we call that vehicle tile), there are icons indicating how your customer wants to connect to you. The Facebook “f” with a little “T” means that the vehicle owner uses facebook connect to access their AutoVitals account and the text capable phone number is known as well.
Other options are
a. only the phone number for texting is known
b. the email address is known, and texting is possible
c. the email address is known, texting is possible and access to the service history and recall alerts is activated

A reply by the customer could look like this:

Once the customer has replied to the text message, a little red “T” starts being animated on the vehicle tile on the Today’s Vehicle Page indicating that you should check the response.

Clicking the “T” opens the recent communication:

and allows to reply if needed.

Let’s look at the estimate scenario. Once you have created the email package with the estimate, an image showing the car’s problem area and an educational topic to reinforce the need for the proposed work, you check the text message notification.

Your customer receives the text message, opens the email, gets educated and convinced that the work is needed and replies with “Yes” to the txt message or the email. Done. The work is authorized.

Last but not least the appointment scenario:

You customer has received the appointment reminder two days before due, for an appointment scheduled a while ago (maybe at the last visit).
Replying “yes” will confirm the appointment and takes the vehicle off the list of customers to be called for the appointment reminder.
Easy and convenient, isn’t it?

What do you think? Are there more scenarios you can think off where txting can be hugely effective?

Please let me know!

Oova

Increase your shop efficiency and interact with your customer through the internet

Dear Business Owner/Web Designer

2011-07-29T01:30:30Z

Have you ever had discussions with your web designer/client on how the website should look like?
Discussions about what image to place where, what color, what layout, what design in general?
And did you catch yourself getting more and more agitated because you realize this is a discussion based mostly on aesthetics? And since tastes differ, there is no right or wrong?

But what should we base our decisions on then?

Here is a proposal: It all depends on your goals:
1. Do you want to have the best designed website in town, maybe even with the fanciest features web technologies can offer?
Go with the best web designer you can afford. Maybe you’ll win a design award.
2. Do you want the highest Google ranking possible?
Go with an SEO expert and let him tell the web designer what to do.
3. Do you want the most effective website possible?
That is a trick question, since it sounds like “Do you love your mother?”, right? Not quite. If you can define what effectiveness means to you and your business and you know how to measure it, you have a solution.
Lets define effectiveness as highest ranking possible and highest percentage of clicks on the call to action buttons on your website. Can you measure ranking? Yes, research the most searched items in the industry you are in (hint: tire related searches are 6 times more often searched than auto repair related searches) and optimize your website for it.
Can you measure clicks to your website? Yes you can, it is called heat map and looks like the one below (Here compared with the published website)

Not only can you see where people click and make sure a minimum of ‘empty’ clicks on the website happen, you also can determine the distribution of clicks. Click on the image above and look at it in its own browser window. You will see what menu links/buttons have been clicked on and how often. The last step you need to do is to define what the optimal user experience is for your business.

Is it desired that new visitors to your website click on the request appointment button right away? YES, absolutely. Is it realistic? NO, absolutely not.

What is realistic? Maybe the new visitor wants to check out first what the business is about, credentials and reputation and alike? And maybe whether the services offered match the problem solution they are looking for? So the “Request Appointment” button needs to be on the About Us page, right?
That sounds more realistic. Is it the best solution? Find out yourself. There is no BEST solution, there is only ‘test and modify’. Oh, you have/are a web designer, who builds a website for a one-time design fee, and the website is supposed to last forever and every change costs you money/time? Hm, ‘test and modify’ can get expensive then. Switching the designer/business model might be a consideration.

Start looking at other websites and focus on user experience instead on flashy images, movies, slide shows and alike. Ask your customers what they like/dislike about your website.

Let me know what you have found. Response is promised.

Oova
Connect with auto repair customers on all levels