By Lori Barrett
As I was brainstorming topics for this month’s column, I kept coming back to the idea of getting the most out of our IBD websites. We brushed past the idea in our first column: Long story short, yes, you still need a website, even if you’re not doing e-comm sales, and even if you have an active Facebook page. But outside of, “yes, you need a website,” we haven’t really talked at all about how to leverage your online presence.
If you’ve been reading this article monthly, you’ll know that we’ve touched most of the basics and now it’s time to fill in the gaps. Website performance and optimization can get complicated quickly, but there are also simple ways to improve performance with little or no added expense. There are also lots of more time-consuming, long-play ways to keep it building, so I figured I’d offer five easy tips on getting the most out of your website, and a few more in-depth ways we can keep on building our online visibility, all at little additional cost.
Five easy things:
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Keep your hours and days of operation updated. Think of accuracy on this front as a trust exercise from Google: they cross-check hours across your Google Business Profile and website, and if they somehow feed a customer bad info, they (Google) take it as a mark against their trustworthiness, and ding your shop for it. We generally trust Google Business Profiles because they do the heavy lifting here: if you mess up something as basic as when you’re open, they don’t want to recommend your shop. Harsh, but true.
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Have a dedicated page for each of your top service packages. Google doesn’t rank sites, but rather evaluates each page against the template of how well that page answers a specific query. That’s why a page that addresses each service separately, e.g. tune-ups, suspension service, bike building, bike fits, and so on, will be judged as answering each of those queries with more specificity. It also allows each page to encompass its own search terms, which then gives search engines more grist for the informational mill.
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Create online scheduling for your service center. Most website-building tools have blocks or apps that can easily be inserted into an existing site. A quick tour around Squarespace allowed me to (in about 20 seconds) make a scheduling page and build out offerings in Acuity, which syncs with all major calendar apps, to prevent double booking. It also has a secure payment portal through integrations with Stripe, Paypal, or Square.
For me, one of the best features is the custom text reminders to clients for upcoming service appointments: it’s automated and requires no more action on your part to keep the customers engaged. Additionally, it spares anyone the feeling of being annoyed with follow-ups, a real bonus in my book!
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Have a pop-up that collects email addresses. Always be list-building. Incentivize sign-ups with a discount or (perfect for an LBS,) a local trail map pdf or the like. Why collect emails, if you’re not selling online? The easy answer is that, unlike social media followers, an email list is a group of contacts that you own. There are tons of horror stories about Meta changing one element in its feeds leading to no one getting the product launch/event invite/sale announcement that you were relying on to close an end-of-quarter sales gap. Email marketing gives you some more control of your destiny.
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Be sure your site’s SSL (secure sockets layer,) certificate is up-to-date. This shows up to the visitors in the difference between a site that starts with “https://” (good SSL certificate,) and “http://” which can make browsers like Chrome display a “not secure” warning. Sounds more techy, but most modern hosting sites (Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, Wordpress,) include free SSL automatically and it’s generally a one-click fix in the dashboard.
OK, now for the bigger concepts that can really move the needle over a period of time but take longer to implement and longer to see the results in improved web searchability and performance.
Three long-play ideas:
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Make a page linking top local rides, as they relate to your shop. Are you an urban shop? Make a page of the most common local commuter routes (and add to it as time goes on). Mountain bike shop? Aggregate some of the best local trails with staff descriptions and reviews for each one. While this is, first and foremost, a service to your customers, It reduces barriers to entry for the activities your shop supports. It also gives content that is engaging and if useful, will be shared amongst your customers and can be reasonably evergreen, meaning it doesn’t need a lot of updating on an ongoing basis. (Although adding to it or changing it as trails and road conditions change is a good idea.)
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You know those service package pages we talked about above? Make another section of the website with common tasks to do at home and embed short videos in them with common tasks like changing a flat or adjusting saddle height. Heck, you can do one as simple as airing up tires, which can be intimidating to people who are newer in the sport.
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This is a great customer-supporting, time-saving trick: Have those common task questions queued up on a page with embedded videos that can easily be emailed or texted, saving staff time. Additionally, your website then becomes a resource for these small tasks, bringing customers to your site for valuable information.
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Last booster note on this, as it relates to search visibility: The longer a customer spends on your page, the more valuable search engines deem the content, and more likely they are to recommend it next time!
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Use customer reviews for actual website content, as opposed to a third-party badge widget. It feels a bit counterintuitive, since the badge widget is drawing information directly from Google and what we’re suggesting is essentially re-typing the review in the backend of your site. Basically, a badge widget pulls content from another company’s servers, which does two things that work against you: it slows web performance by slinging data back and forth on the web a bit more, but more importantly for searchability, it doesn’t read the reviews as “yours,” e.g. it’s not counting the words that the customers are using. Customers also often use very search-friendly terms that we want Google to index: “best bike shop in XYZ town,” “only suspension service in town,” “fast flat tire service,” etc.
MY middle-ground suggestion here is have a “Reviews” page that leads with a badge widget showing the pull from Google — although then you still have the slower-result issue — then do a copy paste of business reviews that can be read and indexed by search engines.
Hopefully, these concepts help in propelling your IBD sites to the forefront of searchability and (more importantly, perhaps) usefulness to customers. Making your website a resource that your clients can rely on for accurate information (those services, scheduling, and hours ideas,) and return to time and again for easy task how-to’s and different routes to try, serves your community better, and signals to the search engines those notions of support and usefulness.
