Local search is becoming the new hot thing in the search world. Especially with statistics from iMedia showing that as many as 70% to 90% of those with the intent to purchase in a brick and mortar store start their research online.
That means the guy down the street from your store could start his research at the engine level and then walk down the street to buy from you. But how do you make sure he does? How do you make sure he knows you sell what he’s looking for?
In actuality, those questions surpass search and touch on many areas or marketing, but I’ll focus on a few tips that will help you get started into the area of local search.
The first and simplest way to get started is to make sure your street address is on your web site. Do you have an “About” section? Be sure your full address and phone number are listed there. This is, of course, assuming your site is properly optimized and that a search engine spider would be able to access that page, and thusly index the address.
But if you sell products and you want to be sure your address is on each product page, then placing your address in a footer is a good idea. A good footer should also have a link to a complete site map. Adding a line that contains your address won’t take up that much room.
You could also add in a more substantial address presence on a product page. For example, if you had a product page for orange widgets, you could include something like, “Come see this product in our store at…” as part of the description.
But what if you have more than one store? Local search is still for you and can provide you with plenty of sales.
A good implantation would be a store locator. Many sites have store locators where a customer can put in a zip code to find nearby stores. The problem with this is that in some cases it serves the information on those nearby stores dynamically from a database, raising the likelihood that a search engine spider would never see and catalog the addresses. There are many ways around this without killing a zip-code finder (or similar) style tool, but one quick way is to also provide a static page of all the stores with their addresses and phone numbers.
Using the other example above, in a product description you could encourage search-to-foot traffic conversions by including, “What to see this product? Find a store near you…” with an easy link to a store locator. Better yet, if it is a returning user and you knew their general location (based on if they previously registered) you could fill in that address of the closest store for them right on the product page without them having to send them over to a store locator function.
Getting a separate 800 number just to list on your web site is a good way to begin to measure if people are doing searches and product research online, but would rather make an offline contact to finish the purchase.
Using some of the above suggestions also has another affect. It lets customers know that you encourage them to contact you and experience your brand in whatever manner is comfortable to them. My mother does a lot of product research online, but she still mainly buys in-store. For people like her, if they feel like the transition between the two is seamless, they are more likely to become a customer.
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