By leveraging the power of local search offerings, businesses can drive significant foot traffic, according to a pair of experts who discussed in the topic a recent Loyalty 360-sponsored webinar, Drive More Foot Traffic with Local Search.
Google+ Local Pages has the highest percentage of local search traffic of any search engine, with 65.9 percent of the market share, said Bill Connard, senior director of product and business development for Rio SEO, San Deigo, Calif. Ninety-seven percent of consumers use this resource when looking for local businesses.
“Location landing pages are the hub or the net for the local business listings,” Connard said. Content is the key for the local business listings and is the key to collection and distribution for of consistent, relevant local business data that you will be delivering.”
Paul Bruemmer, executive SEO consultant and managing partner for PB Communications LLC, Carlsbad, Calif., said that the three elements that carry the most weight in ranking local landing pages are the place page criteria, off-site criteria and Website criteria. Using bulk and manual optimization techniques is critical. The manual optimization for every page pushes into the bulk feeds that are distributed to the information services and the IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages).
“There’s a very specific process involved to accomplish the rankings that you are looking for,” Bruemmer said.
The next area of importance is the offsite criteria, according to Bruemmer. This brings to light data fidelity -- where the search engines validate the data. When information is consistent, you get relevancy, trust and authority to have the ranking that you are looking for.
Web page factors include all of the on-page SEO best practices (title tags, keyword content, etc) as well as user functionality, Bruemmer explained. Users expect to see certain things on the pages. Having a rich landing page with a good experience is important for relevancy.
Rankings push traffic, Bruemmer added. So companies should prioritize efforts based on what the search engines want.
The only way to do all of this to scale is automation, Connard pointed out, because it can take up to 15 hours to hours per location to build, optimize and distribute the landing pages. So automation of the process becomes more critical the more locations a business has.
A flexible software solution can enable a company to manage both functionality and SEO through consistent templates without disruption to current IT roadmaps, Connard added. “Automation and local landing pages allows you to control this environment to deliver hundreds of thousands of local landing pages and build and update those pages.”
RIO SEO’s platform also builds local landing pages for mobile, which is becoming increasingly important. Managing the map listings is important, Connard said.
Bruemmer pointed out that a lot of pages don’t go deep enough to provide a specific location landing page for each physical location.
“You need to get that footprint established,” Bruemmer said. Companies need to have calls to action, coupons, promotions, social sharing, location, phone, hours of business and similar information. These are Usability features users expect to find.
Google looking at global search path for rankings, Bruemmer added. The sticker the page, the more authority is grated to that.
Mobile is another important factor, Bruemmer added. Mobile is local; it can bring a lot of additional traffic. It provides an opportunity to include social sharing.
By fully optimizing local landing pages, a national retailer found 60 percent of total website users clicked on coupons; 22 percent of mobile uses clicked on operating hours, 16 percent clicked on maps, 5 percent clicked on driving directions and 2.7 percent clicked to shop online.
For a limited time, access playback to the webinar, Drive More Foot Traffic with Local Search presented by Rio SEO senior director of product and business development, Bill Connard and Paul Bruemmer, executive SEO consultant and managing partner for PB Communications LLC. Click here to watch now.