You spent thousands of dollars on a brand new flashy website, you have your teenage kid activate your Facebook page, you even hired a photographer to take team photos. But when you do a “Google” search for in your location, all you see is your competition and their bad website.

How does Google find web pages matching the keywords you typed in, and how did it determine how websites are ranked? If your competition is ranked higher that you, it just means they themselves have been proactive in working on their website, or they hired someone to do it for them.

Here are 10 Steps on beating out your competition through the internet!

1. Get a Professional Website

Make sure you have a website that represents your business well
86% of people use the Internet to search for local businesses. This means your website is the your first impression. If you have an embarrassing website, you could be losing business this very moment

2. Have an Online Marketing Strategy In Place

Hire a web marketing expert, NOT just a website designer to help you put your new website into good use. If you owned a race car who would you hire first, a paint / body guy, or a guy that knows how to maximize your engine? Having a nice looking website doesn’t help your business without a solid search marketing expert to help drive you business.

3. Optimize your Website

More traffic = More business to your shop! SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the very first step in getting your website ranked on all major search engines. What this really means is you’re getting the most clicks for FREE.

4. Unique Content

Invest your time and create unique content for your website, in the form of copy on main and internal pages and blog posts. Aim for at least 300 words website per page based on keyword research.
Have your web marketing expert integrate your content into your site layout for optimal SEO.

5. Start Blogging

Companies that blog increase traffic by 55%. Each time you blog you create a new page as part of your website for search engines to read and rank.
Imagine blogging everyday, you’ll have over 300 website pages that will be indexed by Google, Yahoo & Bing; giving your business more chances to be rank higher on search engines.

6. Start Using Google+ Plus

Google+ Plus Local is a free business directory, it’s a combination of social and directory listing, where people can view your general information like location and hours, as well as write and read reviews from other customers.
Google now displays Google+ listings in search, usually on the first page. For instance, if someone searches for “auto repair in Atlanta, GA” shops that have updated their Google+ pages will be shown within the first page. This is invaluable for SEO, and best of all, it’s completely free to set up and use!

7. Claim other Local Listings

Besides Google+, there are hundreds of other local online directories that can deliver more traffic to your website. Using these other directories increases the number of links to your websites. This is called “Link-Building”, and it helps establish relevancy to help your SEO rankings.
Quite a few of the online directories collect customer reviews that could either help or hurt your business if not maintained.

8. Consider Using Facebook & Social Media

Claiming builds your social pages builds instant relevancy in the eyes of Google. Getting people to like, comment and post on your social pages tells Google that you’re the popular kid at school.
It’s a great way to stay in front of your current customers without being too intrusive, and you can even feed posts from your blog directly to your social media pages to increase links and get people reading your blog posts.

9. Invest in Paid Web Traffic

Pay Per Click (PPC) or Paid Ads has huge advantages! You can determine your own budget and only pay for results. PPC results are easy to measure and ensure you have a high return on investment.
Lucky for automotive business owners, “automotive”-related keywords are still relatively cheap compared to more competitive industries, so the cost of starting and running campaigns is low.

10. Hire an Expert

The Web and the Internet is rapidly changing. What you did last year – your website design, code, etc. – might already be out dated. An expert should be able to show you an abundance of success stories and high ranking results
Experts sometimes can advise you on NOT what to do as much as what to do. In-house marketers have a tendency to use your money for their own personal trial and error, which can obviously cost you a lot of money. An expert will know exactly what to do, and what to avoid to maximize your marketing dollars.

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