Feature:
How Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Helped Rejuvenate Automotive Repair Business

Metro Wheels has a wheel/rim repair facility that processes hundreds of damaged wheels every day. They also sell new and used alloy wheels across the southeastern United States.

After 16 years in business, Metro Wheels wanted to use its website to generate leads. They approached Capture Commerce, a local Search Engine Marketing company, for help with search engine optimization after becoming frustrated by paying higher and higher pay-per-click rates each month.

The company’s goal was to gain top rankings in the natural or organic search engine results for the keywords from their pay-per-click campaign, which were some of the most competitive search terms in the auto industry. To achieve that goal, potential car owners with wheel problems needed to find the site for a range of search terms like alloy wheels, wheel repair and rim repair.

Capture Commerce taught them how targeting less competitive keywords in addition to the most popular industry buzz words would allow them to gain quick top rankings and increase overall traffic to the site.

Capture Commerce also introduced Metro Wheels to a link-building campaign, a key element in organic search engine marketing that is often overlooked by many businesses.

Link-building campaigns involve securing directory registrations and establishing link exchanges with other websites. For Metro Wheels, the campaign also included publishing articles online and implementing an RSS feed so individuals could gain instant access to new articles as they were published.

Each phase of the campaign was carefully crafted to fit their marketing message and often included adjusting keywords and website content as well as making enhancements to their navigation to improve the usability for website visitors.

The results for Metro Wheels have been substantial. They’ve gone from receiving almost no business from their website to receiving an average of 30 e-mails daily which yield $500 in incremental sales. Their enhanced search engine performance has also increased their out-of-state business. Metro Wheels now does 7-10 out of state wheel repairs a week, averaging $120 each.

Truly optimizing their website for organic search took a substantial effort on the part of Metro Wheels to not only understand their audience and their motivations but to identify the precise terms that buyers were using to locate services over the web. For a business that had previously only experimented with pay per click, this required a change in mindset but their efforts have paid off. Their website ranks No. 1 for numerous terms and also holds several top 5 positions.

To learn more about search engine marketing, check out www.searchenginewatch.com or review the articles in Google’s help center under “My site’s ranking in Google.”

Tom Shivers is a search engine optimization professional and president of Capture Commerce, Inc. Learn more at www.capturecommerce.com.

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