What do you mean “it’s a cat picture”?! I don’t know, I’m an urban city kid. Blame Google!
Now, where was I? Yes: this article is about what and how I did for digital marketing and SEO of a friend’s bicycle shop in my city. If it helps you with your shop – great. I don’t consider myself to be an SEO expert, so take all I wrote here as: “to the best of my knowledge,” or “as far as I know.”
Table Of Contents (T.O.C.):
- Introduction
- The Basics
- Customer Reviews
- Website Contents
- SEO
- Email Lists
- Website
- Webshop
- How To Protect The Client From Yourself?
- How Much Does All That Cost?
10.1. General Website Costs
10.2. SEO Costs
10.3. Social Networks Marketing - Conclusion
- Footnotes
1. Introduction
My friend Miloš has started his bicycle repair shop in Novi Sad (Serbia). Miloš is a good man and an excellent mechanic, and he’s also gathered a team of high-quality people.
However, in addition to a lot of hassle with workshop setup, legal and paperwork stuff, a good service means nothing if no one knows about it. Word of mouth does go a long way, especially in the long run, but that takes time to “kick in.” That is why SEO and digital marketing can help a lot.
We didn’t know anyone better to help with this, so I happily volunteered to help with the stuff I do better than most bicycle mechanics. 🙂
2. The Basics
We registered a domain (biketeam.rs) and I built a website (the initial steps for making a WordPress website).
Lazar (his Instagram profile), as an experienced designer, came up with the visuals, while I took care of the technical stuff.
On the Google My Business platform, we registered the shop – to show the location and allow for customer reviews via Google (the shop’s GMB page). One of the advantages this brings is to easily show the location with navigation to the shop, like this:
The next important thing is creating a Facebook account, an Instagram account, and connecting the two. They too allow you to define a shop and its physical location, which can also help customers with navigation.
3. Customer Reviews
Comments and feedback have greatly improved BikeGremlin websites and YouTube channel over the years. This especially goes for the (constructive) criticisms and corrections. So, I can confirm from my first-hand experience the importance of listening to and “gathering” impressions. Good customer feedback can be a great marketing tool, but how one deals with and what one does with the negative feedback makes the difference between good and bad businesses.
That is why I made sure to create a Bike Team shop Google reviews page.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s wise to depend on a corporation, so I’ve also created a Bike Team website reveiw page (“ocene” means “reviews” in Serbocroatian):
biketeam.rs/ocene/
In addition to that, I made a QR code that can be printed, pinned on a shop wall, so clients can easily leave their reviews:
This way, in a relatively short amount of time, one can gather high-quality feedback from people who’ve really been to the store.
Of course, for this to work, one must print it, stick it, and remember to ask customers for reviews. In my experience over the past decades, a surprisingly high percent of owners and employees disregards the importance of digital marketing.
I used the free Site Reviews WordPress plugin, that lets the customers confirm & verify their reviews via email, without their email being publicly visible. It also enables the Cloudflare Turnstile spam protection, which is very important and very good.
4. Website Contents
I firmly believe that a man should put his name and face (photo) behind something he’s proud of. That’s why I recommended that Miloš’s photo should be on the “About Us” page, despite Miloš’s modesty.
In addition to that, I wrote several pages that answer the questions we all have about bicycle service: who we are, what, why and how we do, where we are located, what are the prices, deadlines, should we make an appointment… Fortunately (or unfortunately 🙂 ), from experience I already know very well the common questions of people looking for service (or parts for bikes, and new bikes), so I didn’t need anyone’s help to do that.
Of course, it would be a very good idea to write twenty more articles about the work, and answers to the questions that customers most often ask. You don’t need any SEO experts for that. Any business owner (or an employee) knows this. They deal with it on a daily basis. They just need to sit down and write it – which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, no one bothers to do. 🙂
5. SEO
Let us get to the famous SEO. What I don’t see SEO experts talk about is SEO for different languages. I don’t mean writing articles in different languages or even the “hreflang” tags. No. I mean how search engines work for different languages.
For example, when it comes to my native, Serbocroatian, Google is still quite stupid so to speak. For example, it doesn’t see that “bicycle repair” and “bicycle repairs” (in my native) are basically the same thing (definitely very similar).
Hence, search results often return only pages that contain the exact phrase, as it was entered. It is also worth noting that most people in Serbia Google using the Latin script (not the Cyrillic one), and that Google (just like Serbian and Croatian politicians) fails to fully comprehend that Serbo-Croatian in Cyrillic is the same thing as in Latin – just using a different alphabet.
Those are some of the important nuances related to SEO.
Our goal is to rank well for the following queries:
- “bicikl servis novi sad” – 12th position from the start (around 10th of February 2024)
- “servis bicikla novi sad” – 12th position from the start
- “bicikl servis blizu mene” (when googled in Novi Sad)
Ideally, we should rank highly for the similar searches in English, but that is less important.
Update:
After less than two months, before the end of March 2024, we’ve moved into the top 5 search results for the above-listed queries.
To reach this goal, it is important to write good articles, Facebook posts, Instagram photos, etc. And to encourage customers to leave reviews – as objectively as possible.
What most people fail to understand is that SEO is not something you “build/set-up” and leave. It’s like training/gym: you need to do it on a regular basis, and you don’t see any results right after you start, but you see a huge difference in a year or two if you keep at it.
Yes, there are techniques that provide quick short-term results, but they are a suicide in the long run. They are a lot like stealing: it may improve your budget for a while, but you will soon end up in prison with the shameful reputation of a thief (this doesn’t apply to politicians, but it definitely applies to business owners).
To make the matters worse, Google and its ranking algorithm are a black box. No one knows how articles and websites are ranked. In addition to that, the ranking algorithm changes (often on a monthly basis) and other websites (“competition”) change too. So, it is practically impossible to run an experiment that would hold water in any decent scientific journal. That’s why in the SEO world there are a lot of fraudsters and snake oil salesmen. It is impossible to tell them apart from the good professionals during the first year or two (at least for an average customer who’s not an expert in the field).
If you want to start with SEO on your own, I wrote articles that could help you:
Website optimization and security are also important for SEO (Google ranking), but they are a logically different category (links from the start of this sentence give lists of articles on those topics).
Free tip:
– Write down every customer question (and every problem you face).
– On a daily and weekly level, go over your list and “group” the same/very similar questions as one question, with a number in brackets showing how many questions were “merged” under one.
– Keep doing that for at least two weeks (a month is better).
Those are the topics for your articles (and videos). Start with the most frequent questions, or the ones you think are most important to answer.
Not even the most expensive SEO agency can know your clients better than you do.
6. Email Lists
For most companies that sell stuff (goods or services), mailing lists can be a profitable tool. They help you stay in touch with customers, let them know about sales, etc. Unlike Google rankings that are often affected by things out of your control (you can affect them, but can’t really control them), your mailing lists are yours.
To do their job for you, mailing lists must be of a high quality. What does that mean?
- Subscribers must confirm the subscription via their email (this is called “double-opt-in“).
If you just collect emails without confirmations, I can go to your newsletter subscription page and add an email “melania.and.ron@gmail” – and your mailing list will start sending emails to a non-existing email address (bounce) or spam someone who hasn’t subscribed to it (in case such an email address exists). This puts you on spam blacklists in no time! - Your sending domain, mail server’s IP address, and email-related DNS records must be configured properly and not be on any spam blacklists.
- Every email you send must have an “unsubscribe” link/button that actually works.
- You should make an automated tool for removing emails that are not delivered (deleted or blocked – i.e. “bounced emails”) from your mailing list.
Otherwise, you risk getting on a spam blacklist.
If you wish to shoot yourself in the foot (so, this is what I DON’T recommend):
- Buy one of the mailing lists on the Internet, with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of emails.
- Make subscriptions without email confirmation (no double opt-in, “so that people can subscribe more easily and so we can get more subscribers”).
In my experience, a mailing list is not profitable for a bicycle repair shop in Novi Sad, at least when I consider the expense-profit ratio (you will be spending money or time and energy). Having said that, one could start gathering emails and figure out what to do with them at a later date.
7. Website
I’ve already touched upon this, but it deserves a separate “chapter.”
On various platforms and social networks you are just a guest and they can remove your account whenever they want, without any explanation. It does happen.
Your domain (like “bikegremlin.com” or “biketeam.rs”) and your website are the only things that you own1 on the Internet. Invest some money and effort into what’s yours.
- The website must look good and be easy to navigate – both on a computer and on a smartphone.
- It must be secure, so that visitors don’t get a virus when visiting your website.
- Speed and stability are important (you don’t want visitors going to your site and checking if their Internet is broken, because it’s not working or loads too slowly).
Your website is your digital identity. All your accounts on various platforms and social networks should include and link to your website (there usually is a field for your site link when you are creating or editing an account). The site should contain:
- An explanation who you are and what you’re doing (“About Us”).
- Contact information (address, phone, email, contact form).
Contact Form by WPForms is a good WordPress contact form plagin which nicely integrates with Cloudflare Turnstile anti-spam protection.
If you build your site with WordPress, it requires regular maintenance (you can’t just set it and forget it).
A forum can be a great way to connect with your customers, get feedback and answer any questions, but it requires some time and effort. Unless you are prepared to spend some 30 minutes each day for forum administration, don’t start. It will not provide any short or mid-term benefits in terms of revenue or “Google ranking” (only in the long run, talking a few years, if you’re lucky).
8. Webshop
A webshop requires some technical skills or extra costs (one not excluding the other), but it can pay off with increased sales revenue (across the whole country) and even improved Google ranking.
For example, I know that Bike Team has the best price in my country for triple Shimano cranks that I need at the time of writing. When people ask for shopping advice on forums and websites, it’s easiest for everyone if I can just share a link to a product (with price, online order options, physical store address etc.). Such links are also backlinks to the website/brand.
9. How To Protect The Client From Yourself?
If you are among the 0.001% of the people who have patience and can hold concentration for longer than 60 seconds, this article might help you a lot when it comes to this topic: “Domain and website security.”
Briefly:
- For clients – do business with people you trust.
I’ve heard countless horror stories about “cheap developers from fiverr” who clients knew nothing about, except the low price. - For developers – set everything so that your clients are OK even if a train runs you over tomorrow.
Hence:
- The client must have a Gmail account secured with a strong password and 2FA (two-factor authentication).
- All the important accounts (domain registration, hosting account etc.) should be registered with that email.
Developer’s access rights should be the minimum needed to get the job done (and revoked once the job is finished).
In addition to that, you should define precisely, in detail, what and how should be done, and when is a job considered to be finished. Everything that “goes without saying” can cause misunderstanding, because different people presume different things.
10. How Much Does All That Cost?
I already wrote the article “How much does a WordPress website cost?“, but here I will put an emphasis on the brand and SEO related costs.
10.1. General Website Costs
- Domain registration: about $20 per year
About $10 per year for a .com; about $25 per year for a .rs domain. - Web hosting: about $300 per year
You can save more than half of these costs, but with an increased risk of website going down, not recovering quickly, getting hacked etc.
My short list of decent hosting providers. - Logo design, colour palette, website UI/UX and branding: about $2,000, one-time payment.
- Website building: from $500 for simple websites, to several thousands of dollars for more complex websites or webshops.
- Email ([email protected]): from $50 to over $500 per year, depending on whether you like to store gigabytes of emails or use them reasonably (emails are not a database or a backup).
- Website maintenance: from $300 per year for basic security and updates, to $300 or more per month for greater and frequent website changes, edits and content updates, web-shop maintenance etc.
10.2. SEO Costs
SEO services may cost you from a few hundreds of dollars per month, to several thousands. What does this depend on?
If you wish to be “the first on Google” for terms that sell well at high profits (lawyer services in USA, renting yachts at popular vacation locations, selling certain electronic goods etc.), the competition is fierce and you will need a lot of great content and good relations with owners of top-tier websites in that “niche” in order to get some high-quality backlinks.
On the other hand, to rank highly for the stuff like “bicycle repair shop,” especially locally (your city and its area), you need a lot less investment and effort.
These kinds of investments can be profitable if done right. Do you have to pay for SEO?
In my opinion (based on my experience), it is better to spend nothing and do it as well as you can on your own (this website has some good tutorials to help you started – just use the website search), than to try and save money on SEO services. Cheap is very often bad, with no effect. Note that doing SEO yourself will take you time and effort.
Can you do without SEO?
Yes. Definitely. Paid advertising still works very well, and you can more easily compare costs to profits ratio (SEO service results are a lot more tricky to track, especially in the short and mid term).
10.3. Social Networks Marketing
You can do this yourself – make posts and reply to comments on social networks. It does require time and effort, in addition to everything else you do for running your business. If you won’t put in the effort, it’s better to do nothing: people expect some interaction on social networks – they aren’t just advertising boards.
Many companies (at least in my country) hire students for this job, for cheap. Note that your “social media manager” will need to have access to your accounts in order to post, and that a PR blunder can cost you money (though some say there is no bad advertising).
The next favourite choice for Serbian companies is adding the responsibility for the social media management to one of their employees. Depending on the person’s talent, and enthusiasm for this task, the results vary.
SEO agencies can add social media management to their offer. After all, it’s best done as a part of a general brand marketing strategy and closely related to SEO.
Similarly to SEO services, the prices vary from several hundreds to several thousands dollars per month.
Conclusion
This is a sort of a SEO and digital marketing basic guide – based on my knowledge and experience. I hope it will help at least one person.
My aim was to demistify the SEO-related language and offers – and make life easier for both companies/clients and SEOs.
I don’t know about other countries, but in Serbia, if you enter a company and fix a dripping faucet or squeaky doors, people are delighted. On the other hand, even when you are asked to help with the “computer stuff,” it is often not appreciated and your work is not even noticed by most people (and company owners).
I plan to keep this article up-to-date according to website raking changes (for better or for worse 🙂 ).
In a separate article, I talked about what to do if your website doesn’t rank on Google?
Footnotes
- Technically, you are also just renting your domain. It too can be taken, but in practice that only happens if you do something criminal, get into politics, or trigger enough social justice warriors, so they start a campaign against you (we live in a world without freedom of speech and you can’t change that). ↩︎
