The body shops with no website, and the review gap that comes with them
The benchmark report shows a wide review-count gap between collision shops with a website and shops without one. What is behind it and what to do this week.
A driver gets your name from the insurer's list, or from the tow operator, or from a neighbor. Before she calls, she searches it. What she finds is a Google listing with a phone number, a photo of the front of the building, and no website. Then she searches the next name on the list.
That is the moment this post is about, and the benchmark report has a number on it.
The number
Across 70,441 collision listings in our data, 35.4% have no website linked to their Google Business Profile. That is one of the highest no-website shares of any trade we track.
The number next to it is the one to act on. Shops with a website have a median of 91 reviews. Shops without one have a median of 21. Same trade, same Google, same drivers, and the review count on one side is a multiple of the other.
What the gap is not
It is not proof that a website causes reviews. Nobody writes a review because a shop has a website.
What the gap shows is that the shops with a website are the shops that run a process. They have a service writer who asks at delivery. They text updates twice a week. They post photos. The website is one more thing a shop like that does, so it travels with the reviews. If you built a website tomorrow and changed nothing else, the review count would not move.
But two parts of it are real and direct.
First, Google rewards complete profiles in the map pack, and a linked website is part of complete. A shop with no site is competing for the three map spots with one hand tied.
Second, the driver who searches your name needs a place to land. The insurer's list gave her a name. The tow driver gave her a name. Your website is where she confirms that the name is a real shop, sees a repair that looks like her car, and finds the phone number in a button she can tap. Without it, she confirms the next name instead.
Why body shops skip it
The honest answer is DRP volume. If the carrier sends the cars, why market? A lot of shops built on program work never needed a website, and the listing has been enough for fifteen years.
The problem is that DRP is where the margin is being squeezed, and customer-pay is where it is not. Customer-pay drivers search. They read reviews. They compare two shops on a phone in a parking lot. A shop that wants more of that work has to be findable by someone who has never heard of it, and a Google listing with 21 reviews and no site is not that.
What to do this week, in order
Monday: search yourself. Pull out a phone, search your shop name, and look at what a driver sees. Is there a website link? Does it open? Does the phone number work as a tap? Are the hours right? 8.5% of shops in our data list no hours, so check that too.
Tuesday: if there is no site, get a one-page one up. It does not need to be pretty and it does not need to be expensive. One page, with the shop name and address at the top, hours, a tap-to-call button, a line that says which insurers you work with and that you also take customer-pay, three photos of finished repairs with the make and model, and a form where a driver can upload a photo of the damage for a rough estimate. That last one is the single most useful thing on a body shop website, and almost none have it. The full list of what the page must do is in the website essentials guide.
Wednesday: put the review link on it. Get the short review URL from your Business Profile and put it on the site, in the delivery text and on the counter. That is the day the review process starts, and the delivery-day script that makes it work is in the reviews guide.
Thursday: link it. Add the site to the Business Profile, and while you are in there add a public email. Only 14.9% of shops list one, and adjusters and fleet managers use it.
Friday: look at Saturday. 36.1% of shops list Saturday hours. A driver who got hit on Friday night wants an estimate on Saturday morning. If you can staff a writer for four hours, say so on the profile.
What it changes
None of this moves you to the top of the map pack by next Friday. What it does is take you out of the group of shops that a driver dismisses in three seconds and put you in the group she calls. From there, the reviews are a delivery-day habit, the photos are a phone in the writer's pocket, and the gap in the benchmark starts closing from your side.
The rest of the numbers, including where your state sits on reviews, ratings and hours, are in the benchmark report.
A one-page site, the review link and the profile cleanup are all things you can have built in the free 14-day trial, any service, no card. Text or call (385) 213-1580.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, auto body and collision shops among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor