It is understandable why a business owner may be hesitant when it comes to marketing dollars. A marketing budget can seem like a black hole — without the right strategy, money goes out the door and never comes back. But what if there was a marketing strategy that cost you nothing but time? And it comes on a platform that most of your customers are already using.
You already know your customers are using Google to find your business. But what exactly they find is fed from your Google Business Profile. When a customer searches for a business on Google Maps, for instance, they’ll find not only where it’s located but also other basic info, such as hours, services, customer reviews, and more. By optimizing your Google Business Profile, you can help make that first (virtual) impression as positive as possible.
“The industry is a need-based industry,” says Daniel Burkholder, founder of Body Shop Marketing. “So our strategy needs to be a little bit different. That’s where the search becomes such a strong play.”
Marketing professionals like Burkholder can assist a business with all their marketing needs. But he cites the Google Business Profile as one of the most powerful tools available to business owners, provided they optimize it correctly.
as told to Todd Kortemeier
Customers will find you on Google
When somebody needs an auto body shop, there’s a few places they go. They might ask their dad, they might ask a friend, or their insurance may direct them to a certain shop. But the younger generation is finding a lot of their answers on Google. So that is one place that you want to be, and obviously you want to be the No. 1 shop when they’re searching, because statistically, the No. 1 shop gets 40% of the calls and clicks. And especially the Google Map results, because that’s getting the largest portion of real estate. Whether you’re on desktop or mobile, the Google Maps search is getting the highest, most real estate.
Once they find you, be sure you know what they see
The more consistent activity you can have going on at your Google Business Profile is sending—I use the word “signals” — it’s just sending those signals to Google, “Hey, this is an active profile.” New photos are getting uploaded every now and then, updated photos. They’re not having pictures that look like they come from the 1980s; we are in 2025, so you want to keep putting some new pictures there showing what’s going on.
Reviews are a great strategy. I like to tell people it is part of the puzzle. A large portion of consumers that leave reviews like to see a response within 24 hours. So if you can leave a nice, thoughtful response within 24 hours, that’s great. And here’s another little side note — Google doesn’t tell us this, but there’s some thought that even including keyword phrases in your reply, saying things like, “Hey, thanks for choosing (shop name) as your auto body repair shop” can be helpful. And obviously, replying to the negative reviews is huge. Honestly, for myself as a consumer, I like to see how the owner or management replies to those bad reviews. It tells me a lot about them.
Be visible to the right customer
In the admin side of your Google Business Profile — and this gets displayed publicly then as well — under Business Information is the Business Category. And what I see happening is collision repair shops will have their main business category as “auto repair shop.” Well, to Google, an auto repair shop is a mechanic shop. So you can see the conflict there. You don’t want to rank for auto repair shop. You don’t want to be ranking when people are searching for “transmission repair near me” or “engine repair near me.” Google has a business category that is “auto body shop.” So that is what you want as your primary category. Now, Google does give you the option to select secondary categories. That’s where I would say go in and select all those secondary services that you provide, whether it’s glass replacement, detailing, etc. You’d have to look through what Google has there and what matches up with your secondary services.
Set aside time for updates
I would say you should probably have at least two to three activities going on there on your Google Business Profile per week. That could be a review response, or adding some new photos, or doing a post. Some shops are using the post update section for before and after photos, photos of things going on inside the facility. Google gives you a nice little area there where you can write a post. It’s pretty much like a social media platform at that level, and it’s a great way to send signals here, again, to Google that there’s activity going on there at the website.
Continue to learn
If you’re interested in learning more, on my Body Shop Marketing YouTube channel we’ve got all kinds of webinars that we’ve done in the past, talking about these kinds of things. Also, I’m happy to walk through it with a shop owner, I’m happy to review it with them and kind of tell them, “Hey, here’s some things that you could be doing.” Above all, don’t sleep on this opportunity that Google is giving you. The Google Business Profile is a free tool. And it has lots of cool tools inside of it that you can be utilizing. So definitely make sure it’s optimized, and keeping it up to date and maintaining it is really key for ranking high in the local search results.
