“Hotel in Milan”, “The best bar in the Navigli”, “Urgent plumbing in the area”: every day we ask the search engines indications near us. In these terms, the link between online and offline becomes ever closer. We cannot see traditional commerce and e-commerce as two distinct spheres, on the contrary, optimizing one’s presence on the web can boost the entire brand and bring customers to physical stores.
How to give a positive boost to your business? Local SEO is the answer. According to experts, it is among the SEO trends also for 2019: in fact, the contents geolocated and optimized with ad hoc keywords allow to be found in the right place at the right time, from the Web to the territory.
What is Local SEO and how to best exploit it?
In a few words, let’s talk about the geolocated organic positioning of a website on search engines. A strategy that can be winning when a company needs to be found by potential customers and operate in a well-defined area and offer services directly to the public. Proximity searches have a feature that guarantees an advantage: they are targeted, therefore they have a much higher conversion rate than the generic ones. As an accomplice, there is the mass diffusion of smartphones that amplified near-me requests.
SERP shows both the activities present on Google My Business and the pages registered organically, such as the Store locator tabs. How can we best implement these aspects?
Google, like other search engines, returns the best results for this type of search, enclosed in two different highlighted boxes:
- Local pack, includes the 3 most relevant results related to the query, accompanied by reviews, address, closing hours, website and directions, works for example for bank branches;
- Local Teaser, always with 3 results, includes an image, a very short description and other useful info, such as type of cuisine and average price for restaurant searches.
Google My Business strategy
Google My Business is a tool available to companies and businesses: on one side, it provides a tab with useful information about the company to show to users, on the other side, it allows to measure the relationship between online and offline through specific metrics, such as analytics on calls, requests for driving directions and photos that generated more traffic.
The completeness and the attentiveness of the tab are the starting points to correctly implement Google My Business. Here are some best practices:
- Data always updated, it is essential to have the company’s name, the precise address and telephone contact, but also the opening hours and closing days are important parameters;
- Data consistent with the main website, social accounts, and maps;
- Geographical positioning that must be correct and precise;
- The indication of the product categories, carefully chosen;
- Careful link management: either to your site or to other services such as social media or TripAdvisor;
- Include posts, offers, answers in a complete and captivating description;
- Promote positive reviews;
- Consider the history of the tab.
Store Locator: provide the user with the map of your stores
In the case of chain stores and franchises that have hundreds of shops, a structured strategic approach is necessary, especially if there are numerous stores throughout the territory. The Store Locator is a great tool for the user looking for the closest shop to his location, but it is often not easy to manage searches and filters on very large lists.
Condense the individual store tabs on one page, the lack of URLs dedicated to the most searched locations and the content returned in JavaScript, which are therefore not correctly interpreted by bots: these are the three main issues related to Store Locators that are rarely optimized considering the SEO aspects. Which aspects to act on?
- Correct URLs able to position themselves for the main SERP searches, possibly one for each point of sale;
- Relevance of the content with the user search intent;
- Richness and originality of the contents;
- Care of SEO tags;
- Performance, meaning the tab loading speed;
- Authoritativeness, through backlinks.
Not only Google: local SEO and vertical search engines
We have often stated that there is not only Google in general and more so, but we also must not forget vertical search optimization when it comes to local searches.
Some examples are platforms such as Yelp, an ad hoc geolocated search engine for restaurants, venues, and services, or even Tripadvisor.
Not to mention the navigation apps, like Waze, or in-car navigators, which can make the difference in the search for specific types of services, such as repair shops, gas stations or shopping centers.
I would use results, but indications is a closer translation to the Italian word used.
This is very badly written in Italian. Please check with the writer if my translation meets what he/she meant