Automotive ad agency shares how repairers can build a brand, websites and drive SEO

Sokal, an automotive digital advertising agency, outlined how to build a successful brand and website during a Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) Repairer Driven Education session at the 2025 SEMA Show. 

Andrew Wagner,  Sokal videographer, told the audience that a cohesive brand and marketing strategy will help shops create lifelong customers and maximize their marketing spend. 

Branding

“Branding is your first impression,” Wagner said. “It’s your business’s initial handshake.” 

Wagner said it is more than just logos, colors, and a “cool” slogan. It is about how people feel when they work with you. 

For example, the Snickers brand has built a strategy around the term “satisfies.” 

“They’re not trying to hide what they want you to get,” Wagner said. “They want it to be obvious.”

Strong branding is knowing your ideal customer and what will resonate with them, he said. 

“In a sea of collision repair centers, what makes you special? What makes you stand out? Do you specialize in EVs or luxury vehicles? Whatever it is, you need to know it, and you need to leverage it,” Wagner said. “If your brand identity is weak, everything else has to work harder. Your website has to be more convincing. Your paid social needs to be more engaging, and your SEO and paid search need to just be, overall, more successful. All of these things have to redeem that first impression.”

It is often a business’s first impression in a digital world, Wagner said. Customers oftentimes engage with the brand before they have a conversation with the business.

Forbes found that consistent branding across all of a business’s touchpoints has the potential to increase revenue by nearly 23%, Wagner said. 

If the website, social media, or advertising looks different, it can create confusion and diminish confidence in a brand. 

“Having a brand that your customers, or potential customers, can easily trust means more business, more people are going to follow a call to action in your advertising, or you’re just going to get, overall, more organic searches for your business’s name,” Wagner said. “All of it boils down to this: having a strong brand means that all of your marketing efforts have something solid to rely on, something consistent, something dialed in, and purposeful.” 

Wagner said businesses need to ask themselves a series of questions when building a brand, for example:

• • What do I stand for in my business? 
  • What’s the opportunity in my current market? 
  • Do I offer something special or unique? 
  • What am I going to compete against? 
  • What is going to resonate with them?

Businesses then need to focus on three goals: building trust with their customer base, establishing themselves as the expert, and executing consistency in their strategy. 

“If you’re going to spend a lot of money on advertisement, like a website, you need to start with your branding,” he said. “Branding sets the stage, but it’s just the beginning.” 

Website

After branding is complete, the next step is to ensure that you have a good website, according to Garret Zafuto, Sokal’s SEO manager. 

“That’s because nowadays websites are the digital storefronts of the internet,” Zafuto said. “Whether you’re looking for a restaurant, whether you’re looking for a plumber, or even a collision repair specialist like you guys here, people are constantly looking at websites to decide where they’re going to spend their hard-earned cash.” 

Zafuto said websites are likely even more important for collision repair businesses because people aren’t browsing a shop’s website just because. 

“They’re browsing it because they recently got into a wreck,” Zafuto said. “If you aren’t making a really good first impression, you’re already losing that sale.”

Websites must be professional and reflect branding, Zafuto said.

“You don’t want your website to look like it was made on a budget,” Zafuto said. “Because that’s going to turn people off right from the start. The design should be clean. It should be simple.”

The website should have a comprehensive view of what your business does without crowding the screen with irrelevant details, he said. 

Professional images of work being performed in the shop can help tell that story, he said.

Video is also becoming more popular. A quality video showing someone painting a vehicle can convince consumers that a business is competent in doing the job. 

“In a sense, a video pulls the customer in and creates a vibe,” Zafuto said. 

Once a customer has decided on your shop, you want to guide them on how to use the service, he said. 

“If I were a business owner, I would ask myself, what do I want my customers to do? Do I want them to call me up? Do I want them to submit a contact form? Maybe I even want them to browse some of my other pages to learn more about my business,” Zafuto said. “Whatever those things are that you want people to do on your website, you want to make sure those buttons are really easy for people to find.”

He shared an example of a website that had a bright, flashy yellow “get started” button. 

A clean navigation bar is also important to help consumers find more detailed information about the types of services a business offers, or drive them to a contact page. 

Page speed is also critical for a professional website, Zafuto said. 

“You want to make sure that your website runs really well on all devices, including mobile devices,” Zafuto said. “If a customer tries to access your site and it takes forever to load due to the massive image file sizes, or maybe your website’s just running on really poor code, they’re going to leave your website, and they’re going to go to someone else.”

Websites can be designed with mobile optimization, in which images are scaled down for mobile devices. This keeps a website running faster and looking better on phones or tablets. 

“According to Google, 63% of global internet traffic has moved on to mobile phones over the past year,” Zafuto said. “So if your website doesn’t look good on a mobile device, if it doesn’t look good on an iPad, you’re already on the back foot.”

SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a “fancy way of saying you are making a website that Google likes,” Zafuto said.

It focuses on the search terms that customers are using, he said.

“We’ve talked about how websites are arguably the most important thing about your presence on the internet,” Zafuto said. “Let’s talk about making a good first impression, which comes down to your metadata.”

If you search for a collision repair shop near you, you will see the website with a title and a little description underneath, he said. The title and description are where a website’s metadata is located.

Metadata can be put into the code of your website to teach Google how it should best represent your business when it shows up in search engines, he said.

“I call this making a good first impression because it’s the first thing that a lot of people are going to see before they actually click on your website,” Zafuto said. “What do you do with that information? Make sure your metadata is concise, to the point, and it gets the point across really quickly. We know that that’s really important with marketing.”

Google reads the website the same way a user does, he adds. Information such as BMW or Tesla certification should be written on your website so that Google can also read it, he said.

Zafuto adds that even simple information needs to be written on the website. For example, if your business does collision repairs.

Businesses also need to make sure that webpages are linked together correctly. If, for example, a contact page is never linked on the homepage, Google won’t know that the contact information goes to your business.

The ways a business can show up in Google have changed over the decades, he said.

Google’s standard option gives a list of businesses with blue links. It shows your star rating and information about the business.

“You definitely want to show up in this section,” Zafuto said.

Next, Google has a questions and answers section, which Zafuto says is relatively new. It can be a good place for business owners to see the questions customers are asking and the information they are interested in.

If a business answers these questions on its website, it could help it show up higher in search results, he said.

Google Gemini is the newest option.

“It’s an AI tool that shows up directly on the search engine results page,” Zafuto said. “It’s going to become a bigger deal in search.”

It typically is a little more informative in nature, he said.

The AI crawls several different websites, combining the information into a snapshot. Sometimes the AI links out to websites where it received the information.

Zafuto said Google is still working on the functionality, and some of how it works could change.

The map pack is another important Google feature for businesses, he said.

“It’s really important for a local business like a collision repair shop because you get this really cool map with the different collision repair shops that are near you,” Zafuto said.

Businesses must set up a Google Business Profile (GBP) to be on the map pack. It should be kept up-to-date, and information in the profile should match the business’s online presence, including all other business listings on Bing, Yelp, and Apple, he said.

Quarterly audits are necessary to ensure the information remains correct, he said.

“Google loves to kind of come behind you and change things about your Google Business profile,” he said.

Businesses should also stay active by responding to all new reviews, even the bad ones. A polite response can show potential customers that you are still an active business.

“In addition to that, post on it regularly,” Zafuto said. “You can treat your Google Business profile a little bit like a social media. You can put specials that you might have or updates to the business on your Google Business profile.”

GBPs also have a blue button for booking that collision repair shops should have activated, he said.

Lastly, many businesses are starting to ask how to appear in AI searches on platforms such as ChatGPT, he said.

AI will be the search landscape in the future, he said.

“The good news, though, is that these AI tools already rely on existing search infrastructures,” Zafuto said.

Tools like ChatGPT and Claude already rely on Google and Bing to get their information.

“But that isn’t to say that there aren’t some things you can do to help yourself with AI,” he said.

Structured data on your website is one way to improve appearance on AI platforms, he said. He added that this is a type of code that goes into the backend of the site. Businesses should ask their SEO professional or website provider how to add structured data.

Writing information in a question-and-answer form also helps AI tools find your site, he said.

“These AI tools really like it when you’re answering specific questions that users have,” Zafuto said.

This could include an FAQ section, he added.

A SCRS panel held on the Collision Repair and Refinish Stage during the 2025 SEMA Show also discussed how shops can drive work into their bays when business is slower.  The panel members included Andrew Batenhorst, Pacific BMW Collision Center manager, Ron Reichen, owner of Precision Body & Paint,Amber Alley, manager at Barsotti’s Body & Fender and Justin Lewis, Accurate Auto Body president,

Images

Featured image: (Left) Andrew Wagner, of Sokal and Garret Zafuto, Sokal SEO Manager, during a Repairer Driven Education session at the 2025 SEMA Show. 

Embedded photos are of branding and website examples created and provided by Sokal.