Member Article

Why your business needs a store locator

Having a store locator is vital for your business, especially in today’s ever-growing technological era. With more people starting their buying journey online having a store locator can convert your online visitors into offline customers. Not only that but there is the added benefit of improving search rankings and increasing brand awareness. A strong store locator will give the customer all the information they need to find the store which will speed up their research process and remove frustrations.

The benefits of a store locator are clearly visible, especially with how effectively they can drive customers to stores. By enhancing your store locator and linking it up to local pages, you’re likely to see an increase in traffic to your site, and thus an increase in footfall to your physical store.

The best store locator pages should be capable of geolocation and split out each location’s details into different sections or pages. The addition of an interactive map will then help to bring all the information together, making it as user-friendly as possible to visitors. Key information to include for all individual locations are: an address, a phone number, opening hours and imagery of the specific store, so that customers have everything they need on your site to take their custom to your store.

A mobile-friendly store locator is a particularly useful tool to help drive footfall. Most customers search for store locations while on the go, so by optimising your location pages for mobile, you’re encouraging potential customers to visit a store there and then. Furthermore, by integrating Google Maps as your map provider, these customers will have little trouble getting to your store. In fact, research has shown that 88% of mobile searchers end up visiting a related store they’ve searched for. Studies also show that 76% customers those who visit the store within the same day. Of those, 28% will convert in-store once they’ve searched online. This means that once a potential customer has done their research and are on the go, a strong mobile store locator will encourage them to go to a store and make their purchase.

It’s all about the customer experience and directing them straight to your products. With a solid store locator put in place, customers save time and money by making the research process smoother.

Ducati, for example, implemented a store locator for their dealerships, with each dealer having a respective local, and the results were phenomenal. By enhancing their online presence with local pages, they were able to drive footfall to their dealerships. Local pages saw three times more traffic, while there was a 55% increase in annual traffic from SEO. Furthermore, the impact on physical dealerships was large, with 50% of visitors who went to the local pages ending up going to their local dealer as well.

T-Mobile in the US wanted to make it easier for customers to find them, so they opted to clean up their listings for their local pages. They updated addresses and phone numbers, and removed duplicate listings, which helped them increase online visibility and gave them a more consistent online presence.

These aren’t the only success stories to have come out of implementing a store locator, with many brands seeing an uplift in both online traffic and offline footfall by using the tool. The impact of fleshing out or adding a store locator is clear to see from the results of increased online visibility and encouragement of more footfall from customers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Irma Hunkeler .