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Over the past several months I’ve been taking you on quite the journey into Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), and leveraging EAT to help a business appear more often in maps. I even shared a case study on Google Business Profile and EAT.
Last week we spotted some news about store locators on a study (and a mention of our Advice Locator Pages) that was recently conducted on their value. Today, we’re going to discuss another important component of local – and this time in relation to the business’ website, a store locator map and location pages.
Location Pages Are Important
As you may know, location pages can be extremely powerful in helping a business that services multiple geographic areas to place in search results. For brands and franchises, using them can be quite helpful.
As digital marketers, in the past we would build individual locations pages on a business’ website for each location they have or service. Depending on how many locations (or the service area), it can be quite time consuming and tedious – and it can be expensive, as a web developer or someone with web developer skills is required to create each page.
With a store locator such as ours, these pages can be created dynamically through the store locator technology. The page automatically appears on the business’ website through the code snippet that is added to the website. This makes it simple for the business and/or the agency representing the business to easily add new location pages to the business website – without the need for a web developer. A store locator also makes it easy for the customer of the business to enter their ZIP code on the business’ website and find the location closest to them, or to learn if they service their area. Customers love this convenience.
Using a Store Locator to Help a Service Area Business
One of our Advice Local partners has given us permission to share how they’re going to be using our proprietary technology, Advice Locator Pages, to help a brand that delivers products to their customers’ homes.
This brand has a single business location, but they deliver to 44 ZIP codes surrounding their business location. Manually creating a service area page for each of these locations would require quite a bit of web development time, and each time the business would like to add a new ZIP code it would require more web development. Our partner has solved this issue for their client with a store locator.
With some modifications to Advice Locator Pages, we are helping to highlight the business’ delivery service and online ordering capabilities on each location page. The technology team at Advice Local is integrating all the important schema and technical elements required to help these pages place in keyword and proximity searches. Meanwhile, the partner is getting all the keyword-rich content written to populate the store locator.
Store Locators Are a Franchise’s Best Friend
Traditionally, store locators are used to help a business place in search and drive traffic to their brand or franchisees’ physical locations. Consumers that visit a business’ website value locators also, as it helps them find the location closest to them.
This same partner is also using our store locator for a franchise who has brick-and-mortar locations around the United States. The locator will serve as the franchise’s page on the corporate site, and help each location place in search results for the cities/ZIP codes that have the service area.
To see other examples of how a store locator can be used to help a brand or franchise get visibility, look here on Street Fight, where they share how L’Oréal is uniquely using their store locator, and how another business started using a store locator when COVID-19 became an issue.
We Have Store Locator Resources to Help You
We have a guide, Putting Multi-Location Businesses on the Map, that shares quite a few tips and tricks that can really help you help your brands and franchises get found in local searches.
At Advice Local, we are dedicated to providing superior listing management solutions for our partners. If you haven’t had a demo recently, request a demo today – you will not be disappointed.