Dont lose driving school website

Having set up one of your most important school online marketing tools, you need to ensure you don't lose it, which is why I've shown you how to create a £5 driving school website.

One of the reasons why a lot of instructors lose or neglect their websites is due to running costs which can be a bit high if you use the wrong company to design and create it, couple that with the fact that the design company might not optimise your online presence to properly market your driving school.

All marketing costs are tax deductible, but any business owner will always get rid of any costs that they can't justify, so paying large hosting fees for a website that they don't see to be performing is a wise decision as far as they are concerned. As I mentioned in other parts of this blog, the only driving school marketing I do is with my website, and it works for me, and there is no reason why it can't do the same for you too if you follow the advice given in the various articles onn this site.

I'm just going to show you another reason why keeping your website is important.
A learner driver who passed their test, wrote about it in their blog, and recommended their instructor, adding a link to the instructors website (note the poor anchor text 'go to his website'). In December 2008 when this post was made, the website was up and running, however today, the driving school website is no longer there, while the phone number is also there, not many people will call, but a lot will click on the link. What a wasted business oportunity, if only they knew how to get a good online presence for a reasonable fee.

Additional Reading
Reasons for school website.

1 Reason for Driving School Website

Let me just show you one reason why you should have a driving school website even if you have enough learner driver pupils or are franschised to a national school of motoring.

I recently found this blog post by an American learner driver living in London who had just passed her theory test and commenced driving lessons with a BSM driving instructor who operates out of their Notting Hill centre.

As you can see from the article, she is pleased with Julian (the ADI), and has made a personal recommendation, unfortunately for him, he doesn't have an online presence in the form of a website or blog, and thus all she can do is provide a link (a very important and relevant one considering the article topic and content) to BSM.

If Julian had an online marketing school blog, that link would serve 2 purposes, first it would drive potential driving lesson clients to him which can be turned down if not available. The second role of that link would be a vote of confidence and if it had the relevant anchor text a boost in the search engine results for say "driving instructor in Notting Hill".

It does not cost a fortune to create a website to highlight your driving school services, in fact read my post on how it can be done for £5 a year, once you've created it, put it on your business cards, and let all your current students have them, the more that link to it, the more effective a marketing tool it becomes and it will be the only form of advertising you need to do.

Getting driving school website indexed by Google

Now that you have successfully completed the initial setup of your driving school advertising/marketing website and blog, it is time to get it indexed by the google search engine, as unless you get this step completed, there is little chance of your website being found by people searching for an instructor or lessons in the area you operate in.

Now you might be wondering why I have just mentioned the google search engine, afterall there are many others out there like Yahoo, Bing, Ask. The simple answer is that google dominates the online search market with almost 70% of all information being looked for on the internet through them, and to prove it, I want you to take a look at the graph below which shows how many people found my current driving school website while looking for information on the world wide web during one day.

drivingschoolmarketingstatistics

As you can see from the figures, there is only one place that you want your online marketing website to be indexed, and that is in google, the others matter as well, and that will naturally happen once the most important engine finds out about you.
So I guess all I have to do now is find the form that allows me to submit my website, enter in a few details and I'll be done.
Wrong! Don't go to google.com and fill in the submit website form.

While doing this will be sucessfull, it could take up to 3 months for your marketing website to be found, there is a much quicker way to get indexed.
Find a website or blog that is already indexed, and get them to add a link to you. When the googlebot crawler next visits the site which could be the same day if they posted a new article, it will find the link to you, and add your driving school marketing website to it's index.

Those of you paying attention might have noticed the link I placed at the beginning of this article to my Hampstead driving lessons blog, what I did was post this article half finished just so I could prove this system works, because less than an hour after publishing, I did the following.

driving school marketing in action

A search on google.com for 'driving lessons hampstead' as shown above, notice that it is not a very competitive term as there are only 35,200 results and this is the first page. Notice the entry in position 4 above "Driving Lessons Hampstead NW3 | The Driving Schools Blog"

Now look at the entry 3 positions below that in the next picture!

driving school marketing blog indexed in position 7

It is my newly created Hampstead blog in position 7 on the first page of google. Now before you start asking how much I paid to achieve that, let me explain a few things to you.
Google likes fresh content and will promote new websites or articles as they become available for a short time, that and the fact that the driving school domain name contains the searched for terms, helped to get the website registed on the 17th September 2009 on the first page of google in less than a month on a not too competitive search result.

The website will later fall off the first page as other content is published, and to get it to say on the first page needs some work which I will tell you about in a later internet marketing article, so come back soon.