How Online Auto Parts Buyers Shop for Parts & Accessories
If you sell auto parts online, then your website needs to make a great first impression because auto parts buyers are fleeting. This is good information to keep in mind if you’re marketing your online parts store with an automotive paid search or SEO campaign.
In a recent study published by Google, it was revealed that auto parts buyers visit a lot of sites, tend to not come back much, and make fairly quick decisions. Here are some highlights of the Google online shopping study.
3 out of 4 auto parts buyers visit several auto parts sites before buying online
Most auto parts buyers visit two or more sites before making a purchase. Only 24% visited one site; about a third looked at two to four sites before making a buying decision. The largest group of buyers, 44%, looked at five or more auto parts websites before buying.
6 out of 10 Google auto parts shoppers come to your site only once or twice. That’s it.
The majority of shoppers only come to your website once or twice. That’s all. That means you must do everything possible to get them to convert: eliminate roadblocks, improve navigation, and have competitive pricing and shipping. If you’re managing your content for automotive SEO, while you’re looking at your content also check to see if you have enough information on your products to get your shoppers to convert to buyers. Review your site’s structure, too–do you have pop ups that get in the way of shoppers looking for the parts they need?
The old saying, you only get one chance to make a first impression, is very true in auto parts online marketing and when reaching Google auto parts shoppers. Even though online parts shoppers may look at a lot of sites they’re not necessarily coming back to your site over and over.
The Google study showed that 38% of auto parts shoppers visit a website only once and another 21% visit a website two times before making a purchase. Another 22% will visit a website three to four times, 17% will visit five to nine times, and the hard-core comparison shoppers, 3%, will visit a site 10 or more times.
This means for most of your online shoppers you only have one or two chances to get their attention and get them to convert to buyers.
This is also a good reason to have a retargeting campaign in place, to encourage shoppers to come back and revisit your site if they have not yet made a purchase.
SEO: How auto parts shoppers search with keywords before buying online
Most shoppers are searching by using a combination brand and category keywords. This is important to know if you are managing an auto parts PPC campaign, or if you are managing automotive SEO keywords.
When shopping for auto parts and accessories, most shoppers use a combination of brand words and category words.
Brand terms will be the manufacturer of a product, or the website of the online retailer. Or, in the case of private branded products or a manufacturer selling direct, they’re the same thing.
Category words are terms like “carburetor” or “tonneau cover.”
The Google study showed that 43% of shoppers are using both types of words when searching online for auto parts.
A slightly smaller group, 39%, only searched by category words.
The smallest group searched only by brand terms. This is important to keep in mind if you are only using brand terms in a paid search campaign; you’re missing out on the largest group of online buyers.
These SEO and PPC auto parts stats are from the Millward Brown Digital/Google Auto Parts/Accessories Purchase Study, published at Think With Google.
