Driving School top 3 on Google

My driving lessons in NW3 school website is now in the top 3 spots on google.co.uk for the search terms "driving school hampstead" as well as lessons and instructor.

As I mentioned in my getting driving school indexed in google article there are not many websites competing for driving lessons in hamsptead (only 35,000), so I haven't really done any work on promoting this website because I'm not really targeting clients in this area of London.

I have however made sure that the on page optimisation (8 pages in total) is done with the written content covering the subject of driving lessons in Hampstead NW3, sprinkling in words like school and instructor where appropriate, couple that with the domain name containing my keywords and a few links from this blog and blogcatalogue.com, the age of the website has now allowed it to climb up the rankings of google since the domain was registered in september 2009.

Now as you can see driving school marketing using a website does take time and effort, but it DOES work, and ANYONE can do it, which is why I created this blog to give you tips on what to do.

I will obviously continue to monitor my website performance, to see if any of the competition is getting ahead of me, but in the meantime I'm now in a position to get a few more enquiries which I can either take or turn away. Would you like to be in the same position, you can do it yourself, or pay someone hundreds of pounds.

Advertising driving school on Google

I will be writing an article soon on using google adwords to advertising your driving school online, but in the meantime here is some advice for those of you already marketing your business or instructor teaching services on the internet through google's pay per click system.

Make sure the website page you are paying google to direct traffic to can sell your product or services.

An important part of being a good business owner is knowing who your local competition is, and what they are doing, so I saw an advert on a google search page for a new driving school operating in my area and decided to find out who they are and what they do, so I went to the website.

Just one page with a few words (including some grammatical errors and a false claim), and a large graphic mentioning the lesson price of from £18 pounds per hour.

I don't know how much this instructor was paying for each time someone clicked on the link in google, but the only people that will pick up the phone and call this person is someone looking for cheap lessons around the £18/hr range.

There is nothing there to sell the services of the instructor, I don't even know the business owners name!

I reckon the driving instructor was conned into giving a supposed marketing company some money to setup a website and get traffic to it, maybe £200 including the google adwords budget all gone down the drain because I doubt he will have a decent conversion rate on anyone that calls from seeing such a poor example of driving school marketing.

This is not the first time I've seen a one page driving instructor website being used as the landing page for a google marketing campaign, I once contacted an ADI offering a fixed fee to setup a 5 page blog to replace a free page that only mentioned the lesson price and area the school operated in addition to telephone number.

Before you spend too much money driving google traffic to a website page, put yourself in the shoes of a cash stripped learner driver and ask the question why would I use this person? Will I get value for my money? What is the track record (can it be proven)?

If you are a new driving instructor or PDI, subscribe to the blog (enter your email address in the box on the top right, the system is powered by feedburner, and I don't use your email details for anything else including selling to 3rd parties) so you don't miss any future marketing/advertising articles or tips including using Google Adwords to promote your services on the internet.

Driving school website suspended

Can you afford to allow your driving school advertising website to get suspended especially after spending time and effort in getting it to rank for the driving related keywords for your local instructor market.

I was today doing some research on the internet for some driving instructor related services, saw a website on the first page of google for the terms I was interested in, clicked on thr link, and this is what I got!

One of the reasons why I advice driving instructors to register their school domains themselves is that it gives them the freedom to choose who they use as a website host, whether it be a free one or paid! I included step by step details of how to do this in my earlier article, and the good thing is that it only costs £5 a year, so there is no reason why any of you reading this can't do it.

If you don't mind using a blog to market or advertise your driving school then you can use google's blogspot hosting for free, so all it will cost you is £5 a year to have an online presence which you totally control.

Remember with a website learner drivers come to you of their own accord, other advertising relies on you impressing them enough to try you.