The major focus of this post is about SEO for driving instructors. If you don’t know what SEO is, you’ll learn all you need to know here.
It does not matter whether you’re a startup or established driving instructor. You can grow online with the right SEO strategy.
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves all the things you do online to grow your business. By growth, I mean attracting more qualified leads, improving visibility, ranking and credibility.
Can a driving instructor do SEO? Of course, an instructor can. Anyone can do SEO, but the result is what separates the SEO gurus from the rest. You might spend productive time optimizing your website to boost visibility. But at the end of the day, you’ll discover you have been chasing shadows.
Instead of wasting time, let BitChip Digital marketing agency help you. Our SEO strategies are effective and yield results.
What Is SEO For Driving Instructors?
Search engine optimization involves all you do online to gain success. In the case of a driving instructor, SEO involves using a combination of strategies to make a driving instructor’s business popular online.
With the best SEO practices, you can drive traffic to your driving instructor website with SEO. In addition, you can also rank high on SERPs, and increase your credibility online.
In plain terms, SEO helps to increase organic traffic and even foot traffic to your website and business respectively. If you target the right keywords, people will not only find you online. They will take a decision to visit your physical location and patronize you.
We can help you achieve success online. At BitChip Digital, there’s nothing we want more than seeing our clients succeed online. There’s a high competition out there. Of course, you’re not the only driving instructor out there. Hundreds of others like you are out there and are hunting for clients just like you.
You can outperform and outrank them. Just focus on SEO, and you’ll see the impact on your business in the long term. SEO can set you up for future success. Note that result from search engine optimization might not be instantaneous like paid ads, but SEO is cost effective and can have a long-term impact on your business.
Off-page And On-page SEO
Both terms are SEO. However, on-page refers to the things you do online to make your website visible in search engines. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to the things you do offline.
The major aim of off-page SEO is to make a website search engine friendly. However, these are two techniques that can bring you success. All you need to do is get help from a SEO expert.
A Handy Tip: SEO isn’t a one-off marketing campaign. If you want to succeed online, you must continue doing that thing that took you to the position you’re in.
1: Make locating your driving instructor website online a breeze:
Search engine optimization can help take your driving instructor website to the top of search engine result pages for targeted keywords. By targeted keywords, I mean the keywords you’re hoping to rank for. And as you know, I treasure long-tail keywords. So I am referring to long-tail keywords.
Let’s assume you targeted the keyword “book a driving instructor in Brooklyn.”
If a potential customer searches on Google using the above search term “driving instructor in Brooklyn,” your page will be displayed if you targeted the keyword and the page was indexed by Google crawlers.
The competition for long-tail keywords is low and it’s not difficult to rank on these keywords. Short-tail keywords are more competitive. Thus, they boast higher competition. So, conduct proper keyword research before writing. Learn about your target keyword’s search volume, and find out what your competitors are doing with the keywords.
2: SEO vs PPC: Which is cost effective?
You already know the answer. SEO is more cost-effective.
If you’re not using SEO for your driving instructor websites, you can invest in paid adverts. PPC can offer you instant success. It will land qualified leads to your platform. Paid ads place your website at the top of the search engine result page (SERPs). Unfortunately, once you stop funding your ads account, you’ll disappear from the front page. This is one of the dreadful things about paid ads.
PPC offers an instant solution, but the impact won’t last for long. Furthermore, traffic stops when you stop funding your ads account.
But the good thing about SEO is that you’ll continue reaping the benefits of your marketing effort even when the campaign stops (although SEO isn’t a one off. You need to keep pushing to stay on top). At BitChip Digital, we advise clients to keep doing the things they did SEO-wise that brought them to the top.
Understand that your competitors are working hard to outrank you. Everyone is looking for loopholes in your SEO campaign to outperform and outrank you. Therefore, you must continue with your SEO strategy and follow best SEO practices too.
A Handy Tip: SEO is more budget-friendly. With PPC, you have to pay a couple of dollars for every click you receive. In addition, your budget determines the traffic you’ll get.
Anyway, SEO isn’t free. But you can determine how much you want to invest. If you want to do your website SEO alone, you’ll need a premium keyword tool. Free keyword research tools exist, but we don’t recommend them. The free keyword research tools don’t offer in-depth information that will help you make an informed decision.
Hiring an SEO agency also requires money. However, you can always decide how much you want to invest. The good thing about hiring an SEO agency is that you may reap the benefits of the campaign even after ending the project.
3: SEO improves your ranking:
The first page is where 95% of the search traffic goes. Page two takes a meager percentage, and it keeps reducing from that point onward.
With SEO, you can prepare your website to rank high for target keywords. It can take you to the first page and the top of the SERPs. PPC would only take you to the front page as long as you keep funding your account. When funding stops, off your page goes! That’s the reality of paid search.
With search engine optimization, you’ll receive organic traffic naturally when you rank on the first page. That’s how SEO works.
Search engine optimization boasts a combination of strategies. And keep in mind that it involves more than doing keyword research and writing long or short content packed with images. You must know where to place the keyword strategically in the content.
Other moves you need to make for your site’s SEO include link building, improving site load speed, making the site mobile-friendly, and so on.
The major thing is getting your website optimization right. When you do, the sky would be your limit. You’ll rank high on SERPs, making it a breeze for potential customers looking for a driving instructor to locate you.
4: Improve online credibility:
Part of SEO entails writing high-quality content and placing your keyword in the content strategically. The keyword helps Google crawlers to have a proper understanding of what your content is all about and index it.
The content you write and publish on your driving instructor website is for your visitors, while the keyword is for Google crawlers. These crawlers need the keyword to understand what your content is about, as I have previously said.
How can you set your driving instructor business apart? You have to build online credibility. Make your clients trust you by providing valuable content. Provide driving information that will help potential customers and clients be better drivers. Make your website a hub of driving information and lessons.
Make people angry to share your content on their social media pages. Of course, your content has to be extremely good for people to feel confident about sharing it on their social media pages.
A Handy Tip: Don’t forget to enable the “Social Sharing Button” on your blog. Make it easier for your visitors to share your content across the various social media platforms with a push of a button.
As a driving instructor, you have to show your expertise and knowledge of the industry with your content. However, if you’re too busy to write, you can get help. But hire an SEO agency that has a driving instructor writer that can produce content in your brand voice.
5: SEO can help boost revenue of your driving instructor business:
With SEO, you can place your “driving instructor” website at the top of search engine result pages, making it a breeze for prospective clients to locate you. Organic traffic improves when your website appears on search engines and the first page. Note that the majority of online users only end up on the first page.
SEO will help get more online and foot traffic to your doorsteps. And this will result in higher revenue and client-base.
6: SEO gives small and large businesses equal opportunity to compete online:
If you’re running a small driving instructor business, be grateful that SEO exists. Why? SEO offers both big and small businesses equal ranking opportunities.
When you search for driving instructor-related keywords on Google, you’ll discover that some of their websites are using paid ads. Paid ads send them to the top of search engine result pages, even without much effort. Let’s assume you exchanged your cash for the hard work it requires to climb to the top of SERPs.
Understand that PPC is expensive for most small businesses. It’s not even an option for some, giving the cost involved. The payment for ads isn’t one-off. You need to keep funding the account to sustain traffic to your website.
Large driving instructor businesses have the resources to run Google ads for several days, weeks, months, or even throughout the year.
Search engine optimization offers equal ranking opportunities to all businesses. It doesn’t matter your size or financial capacity.
Google doesn’t really focus on ranking based on a company’s history, finances or size. Imagine if this were to be the case. It would have been harder to rank on search engines, especially Google.
I am not saying PPC is terrible. It’s not. We’re only trying to compare costs and explain how PPC can be expensive. However, you can get massive traffic through paid search. But unfortunately, it won’t impact your ranking (unless Google has changed its mind, which I am sure hasn’t happened and may not happen)
A Handy Tip: Pay-per-click (PPC) can give you instant results. This makes it a great strategy for driving instructor businesses and those with the financial capacity.
Now, keep this in mind: you can combine paid search and SEO. You can run both simultaneously.
Running paid ads and SEO will increase your chances of getting traffic online on a daily basis.
7: Make your driving instructor website mobile-friendly:
Did you know nearly 60% of all online searches now take place via mobile device? That’s the report from a study HitWise conducted. People now search information online, purchase items, find business locations, and book hotels via their mobile phones.
Mobile devices are convenient. They allow people to access websites on the go. People don’t need to wait until you arrive home and gain access to your desktop or laptop to buy online or search for “driving instructor near me.” They can do it conveniently from their mobile devices.
We’re already in a mobile-first era. And it’s no longer news that over 6 billion people use mobile devices today. In fact, you’ll discover that people spend more time on their mobile devices than laptops or desktops.
In 2022, reports indicate that 68.1% of all website visits that took place came from mobile devices.
Google adores and doesn’t hesitate to reward mobile-friendly websites. Why? It’s because it knows such websites offer better user experience.
Google cares about users a lot. It wants people to find solutions online with ease. Thus, websites that offer better UX have a higher chance of ranking high.
How to determine if your driving instructor is mobile-friendly or not. Here are tools you can use:
Google mobile-friendly test tool:
You can determine whether your website is mobile-friendly via the “Google mobile-friendly test.” It’s a simple test anyone can do.
Enter your URL and click on the “Test URL” to run your site’s URL and determine if it’s mobile-friendly or not.
The result of the test will be displayed to you. It will show you if the site is mobile-friendly or not.
Make use of your browser:
Here is another great way to determine if a website is mobile-friendly or not. You can use your browser to figure this out. You can either use Google Chrome or Firefox for this.
Personal mobile device:
You can check if your site is mobile-friendly by using your mobile device. Open your browser and type the site’s URL.
If any portion of the content is cut off, or if you have to scroll right or left before viewing some section, your site isn’t mobile-friendly.
Check with Chrome Devtools:
Devtools refers to website development tools built into the Chrome browser. This tool can help you check if your website is mobile-friendly or not. You can try it out and see for yourself.
Google PageSpeed Insight:
Google PageSpeed Insight is a free tool provided by Google. This tool will not only help you determine if your site is mobile-friendly. It will offer you a chance to determine how mobile-friendly your site is.
Google PageSpeed Insight offers you data on your site’s performance, not only mobile-friendliness.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, fix the problem. Most people may choose to redesign their websites to keep things fresh. Just make your website mobile-friendly.
8: Build healthy backlink profile:
Backlinks are one of the top Google ranking factors. They can help your driving instructor business grow online.
Get quality backlinks from niche-specific sites. Niche-specific sites are sites that are similar to yours.
Consider the quality of the sites you’re getting your backlink. Make sure they’re not spammy and unnatural. Don’t create a site to serve as a backlink farm. Google dislikes such, as you may not get any value from such backlinks.
The site’s authenticity is another thing you need to consider. Ask yourself these questions:
- Was the website created to host your links?
- Is the site you’re getting the links from spam?
- Are your backlinks natural?
- Are the links from niche-specific sites?
You need to make an effort to create a healthy backlink profile. And avoid spammy websites. It’s not difficult to identify a spammy website. Just look at the number of sites linked to some of its pages for clues.
9: Change your keyword strategy:
It’s time to change your keyword strategy. If you have been using a free keyword research tool without seeing results, now is the time to upgrade to premium tools.
We have discussed keywords in the beginning of this post, so this should sound like a reminder. If you want to succeed online, conduct proper keyword research.
At BitChip Digital, we use a wide range of keyword research tools. Why? We want to have as many details for each keyword as possible to make an informed decision.
We provide free keyword research too! We can help you with free keyword research upon request.
Improve your keyword strategy and you’ll start seeing positive results. This tip is not only for driving school business owners but anyone that’s into digital marketing. Start targeting the right keywords, and you’ll see your website grow.
Avoid targeting keywords with massive competition (short-tail keywords). You might not see tremendous results from such SEO efforts.
Target long-tail keywords with low difficulty. Let it be your primary focus. Long-tail keywords have lower search volume and are specific.
Here is how the long-tail keyword is: “best driving instructor in Texas.” You can see that it’s a combination of words. Unlike the short-tail, this long-tail keyword is tailored to specific visitors.
Potential customers that target such keywords are likely qualified leads. So, you’ll not only rank high by targeting the right keyword but receive higher qualified leads. Any individual that uses this search term is looking for a driving instructor in a specific region, Texas.
Some keywords are more specific and localized. You’ll find search terms like “affordable driving instructor in Houston, Texas. Now, you can see that the user is seeking a driving instructor, not just in Texas but specifically in Houston.
So, what long-tail keywords do for you is that they bring you both online and foot traffic.
10: Use business directories:
Here is a bonus tip: don’t forget to list your business on credible business directories and get reviews.
You can list information about your business on Google My Business page, among others. In addition, request existing clients to give you reviews. You can ask them to leave reviews on your website, Yelp, Facebook, and others.
Conclusion
This is a guide on SEO for driving instructors. You can see the massive benefits SEO can offer your driving instructor business.
Proper optimization can help improve your website’s ranking on search engines and organic traffic, making it easier for prospects to find you online.
We have discussed the steps you take to make your driving instructor business succeed. Understand that the impact SEO can have on your business can lead to offline success.
Endeavor to make your website mobile-friendly. Improve load speed, conduct in-depth keyword research and write quality articles. Other things you can do is backlink. Build a healthy backlink profile
At BitChip Digital, we understand SEO in and out. We have been in this business for many years and know the steps to take to make your driving instructor appear on the first page of search engine result pages.
You can contact us today to discuss ways we can help grow online.