Home - Local Professional - Case Study for Metric Auto Works

Metric Auto Works

July, 2005 Update:
With Metric's site being established for over a year, their online visibility and rankings are even much higher than the October 2004 examples below. As well, they now successfully integrate on and offline marketing efforts, such as including web-only coupons to attract new customers, and employment opportunities.

Profile - Twin Cities full-service import auto repair center. With 30 years experience as trusted and respected experts, they've been able to do well with high word-of-mouth marketing. Their repeat customer committment is quite amazing.

Goal - To attain more local auto repair customers who might not know of them. Since their repeat customer ratio is so high, they wanted to create new customers.

Budget - Small

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Metric Auto Works (opens new site and window) had a nice and simple Flash driven site to attract local viewers. We determined 4 factors that could make their site more visible and bring more people to their door.

1) - High search engine rankings with regional modifiers (in this case, Minneapolis and St. Paul)
2) - Low cost/high return Pay Per Click (PPC) ads
3) - Offline marketing techniques
4) - Future plans

1) - Since search engines have a harder time reading Flash pages, we met with the developer to discuss an additional text-based site. This made the site easier for spiders (bots) to crawl. We performed keyword research, created appropriate Title and Meta tags, edited and wrote content, started a link building campaign including targeted directory submission and provided additional tips and suggestions.

Results - First page rankings in both Yahoo and MSN for key phrases and climbing results (as of this writing) in Google.

Examples: (as of October 10, 2004 and can change anytime)
minneapolis nissan repair - #3 in Yahoo, #5 in MSN
minneapolis import auto repair - #1 in Yahoo, #3 in MSN, #19 in Google
st. paul auto repair - #9 in Yahoo, #12 in MSN
car diagnostics minneapolis - #1 in Yahoo, #6 in MSN

One important aspect was to place their address and phone number on top of every page. Within a couple weeks of seeing rankings, they already received at least one new customer from their site being visible. In an industry like this, one new customer can pay for a lot of Internet marketing and advertising costs.

2) - Because of budgets, we opted for a regional Google AdWords campaign (only 5 dollar set up charge). We created a low cost (mostly nickel and dime per click) campaign for targeted phrases their potential customers search for.

Note: When running regional AdWords campaigns, you can choose to run the ads in a specific area, therefore blocking traffic from other areas that wouldn't bring you business. You can also run the ads nationally and include a regional modifier (in this case Minneapolis) to suggest to people you only offer services in a particluar geographical area. Or, you can do both. In this case, we decided running ads only in the particular region would be most cost-effective.

Results - 1st page sponsored results for terms such as 'nissan repair', 'mazda repair', etc... Plus, since these ads are only shown in the Minneapolis - St. Paul area, they receive only targeted clicks. These are currently set at only a nickel per click.

Note: We also put 'Metric Auto' as a phrase. Although we don't normally recommend using your company name as PPC keywords, this term currently provides the highest clickthrough rates. Many of Metric's potential customers are web savvy, but many are not. They know the name of the company, but don't know the URL. They go to Google, type in 'Metric Auto' and instantly find them.

This is even true with Yahoo. Millions of searchers each month use search engines to find yahoo.com. Type yahoo.com here.

3) - Metric Auto Works has always done some traditional marketing, whether it's running print ads in a newspaper or publication, or being listed in local print yellow pages. They are now looking to integrate on and offline marketing to enhance each other. A good example are advertisments on their racing cars. By including their site URL, that greatly increases online exposure while using the cars at races or displaying them at events.

4) - Future plans include continuing to enhance Metric's on and offline marketing techniques to work with each other. This could include placing coupons on their site, increase the PPC budget or start a specific Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) and portal campaign.

As of now, we have not implemented a regional IYP campaign. The current default 'regional' IYP price point, in our opinion, would not provide as good of a return.

There are some national IYP's and portals that are really inexpensive and can provide positive results. Switchboard, SuperPages and 'local' portals such as CitySearch can not only provide direct traffic, but search engines such as Google deep crawl their pages very easily. In other words, an IYP or CitySearch ad can appear high in the search engines.

Localmn.com
15 S. 1st St, Suite A516
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
612-226-8852
Email info@localmn.com