Creating a mutually complementary in-store and online presence is one of the biggest marketing challenges retailers with websites and brick-and-mortar stores face. All too often, they exist as separate entities, battling for custom rather than working together to enhance customer experience.

One of the most effective ways for retailers, restaurant chains, hotels and service providers to bridge the gap between the physical and the online is to add a store locator to their website. That makes it much easier for online browsers to find their nearest outlets, turning online traffic into footfall in stores.

But many businesses don’t make their store locators work as hard as they should. These days, next-generation store locators from developers likeBRIDGE can be optimised to attract internet traffic in their own right.

In this article, we’re going to look at the key advantages of a store locator in terms of the SEO of your site and introduce some best practice tips for optimising your store locator content.

Why optimise your store locator content?

Optimising your store locator content is a job that’s well worth doing when you consider the potential rewards:

Improved visibility

Optimised store locator content can improve local search by boosting the rankings and ultimately the visibility of each store in the search engine results pages.

Local search is any search aimed at finding something within a specific geographic area, for example: “coffee shops in Shoreditch”. It’s conservatively estimated that 40 percent of all search is made with local intent. That means you could miss out on a huge amount of traffic if you don’t have location-specific pages for your stores.

Cut out the middleman

There are lots of business directory sites and online yellow pages like Yelp that contain location-specific information about hotels, restaurants and stores. If you don’t have location-specific content then these are the results that are likely to show in the search engine results pages when browsers search for your specific store locations.

The trouble is that these sites often contain outdated information and even negative reviews that could prompt prospective customers to go elsewhere.

Branded content gets a boost

The major search engines, particularly Google, give preferential rankings to brand name sites for location-specific searches if they can find relevant local content. If you create optimised content for each location, it’s likely you’ll outrank other sites, boosting site traffic and improving the overall user experience.

How can you improve your store locator SEO?

In our view, the benefits of optimising your store locator content are quite compelling, particularly given the potential rewards for what is relatively quick work. But what simple steps can you take to optimise your store locator for local search?

Include the right links - You must include links to all of the store location pages that the search engines can easily follow. This allows them to be indexed so they can appear in the search engine results pages. If you have multiple locations in certain cities, you may even have to generate a hierarchy of pages to link out to all your stores.

Create a page for each store - Ideally, you will have a standalone page for each and every store. This will ensure the content is hyper-relevant to that city, postcode and local area.

Write unique content - You need to make sure the content on every store page is as unique as possible. It should contain things like contact details, opening and closing hours as well as information relating to any promotions or offers that are specific to that store.

Write title tags and meta descriptions - Every page needs a unique title tag and meta description. The title tag should include the business type, city name and brand name without exceeding 60 characters. The meta description should contain a short description of each location and a direct call-to-action, at a maximum of 300 characters.

Include images - Ask the manager of each store to take a picture of their storefront which you can upload. People love images. We can form impressions immediately from images that might take several minutes to create by text. They also make it easier for customers to find your store.

Get links from other local sites - If individual stores are involved in the local community, are members of business networks or support local charities, requesting links from local sites to the store’s location specific page is an excellent way to build its authority and boost its visibility in the search engine results page.

Let’s get optimising!

Many businesses fail to see just how beneficial store locators can be when it comes to SEO. Yes, they are an effective way to drive online traffic to your stores, but they can also be a valuable source of traffic in their own right, allowing your stores to market their products and services directly to new and existing customers.

- by Vincent Naigeon

A global survey of 13,000 marketing, creative and technology professionals has found that customer experience management has emerged as the top strategic priority for businesses in the coming year.

The findings were published by Adobe and Econsultancy as part of the former’s Digital Trends report for 2018. 45% of respondents ranked customer experience as one of their three most important tasks in the next 12 months, with 20% listing it as their primary strategic focus.

Many think that they are on their way to achieving that goal, with 62% claiming that they have a “cohesive plan”, as well as long-term vision and executive support for making it happen. The report suggests that one of the keys to building effective customer experiences is creating cross collaboration between creative, content, marketing and web teams.

Those businesses that employ tools to facilitate streamlined workflows between different business functions are 62% more likely to show better business performance. 43% of respondents, however, reported that their current tech set-up is fragmented and inconsistent.

Intelligent planning

AI is seen as a key driver of customer experience execution, particularly in large enterprises, where 24% said they are making investments in the technology. The push towards AI adoption is often coming from the top of organisations. 57% of the c-suite respondents said that their companies were already using AI, or planning to.

There remain significant skills gaps in a large number of organisations. 40% or organisations currently lack the AI knowledge or resources that they need to make their plans a reality.

“Digital means that customers now have more power to engage with brands in their own terms,” John Watton, Senior Marketing Director, Adobe, said.

“This has changed the way companies interact with their customers, who expect great experiences as standard. For businesses that put the customer at the centre of everything they do, it’s clear the investments are paying off. But customer experience cannot just be the remit of marketing or customer services; it must be driven through every function of the organisation, from marketing and IT to product development and design. By breaking down organisational silos and using data and AI to combine analytical insight with design and creative capabilities, brands can offer stand-out experiences across every interaction.”

- by Colm Hebblethwaite

Marketing directors can’t make decisions in a vacuum. They need information about their customers, their channels and all the touchpoints that help them to connect with each other. How can they deliver what the customer wants unless they can see through the customer’s lens?

Customer interactions with a brand are now defined as their ‘journey’ and it is insight into that journey that helps organisations to plan product roadmaps or launch new services. McKinsey calls it ‘journey analytics’: the combination of big data technology, advanced analytics, and functional expertise, which come together to develop a comprehensive view of the end-to-end customer journey that gives marketing departments all the information they need.

Journey analytics captures customer feedback from everywhere, doing the hard work in bringing together the ways in which customers engage, what they are trying to accomplish and where there are areas of friction that need ironing out. Their journey can be seen clearly, and shared across the company so that changes can be made and ideas implemented with confidence.

Using analytics to enhance the customer journey is a process that can be taken in stages. Here is an introduction in five steps:

1. Gather the data

When customers interact with a brand they leave clues about their levels of satisfaction and engagement that can be acted upon by marketers.

If you think about the number of touchpoints, from loyalty programme information and purchase behaviour through to online reviews, social media references and conversations with customer service representatives in contact centres, these interactions deliver data that helps marketers to visualise the customer’s journey, assess their responses and uncover sentiment.

The smallest detail can reveal the most interesting finding, and as the data accumulates across all of these areas, it provides an accurate, and often unexpected perspective.

2. Reshape Customer Feedback

Data relating to customer interactions is both quantitative and qualitative. Structured quantitative data, which might include when the customer last purchased from a brand, how old they are, where they live and the products they most frequently buy, together with qualitative feedback, such as the unstructured voice of the customer needs to be married together. This requires Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. This transforms the unstructured information into something that can be analysed. NLP can reveal a customer’s sentimental response and spot discord based on how, and how often, the customer talks about the experience.

Sentiment analytics have the power to ascertain what customers like or what they don’t, and more importantly, why. It is the difference between quantitative data that informs a company that their customer service is rating 6 out of 10, and qualitative data that explains why, and it enables specific issues to be addressed with accurate information. This delivers the ‘moments of truth’ that for marketers are akin to the holy grail.

3. Analyse Customer Data in a High-Level Journey

Now it’s time to place the data into logical journey touchpoints. A retailer, for example, could segment the data for the “Purchase Online” journey as follows: Research products available ➔ Open Account ➔ Select delivery options ➔ Pay for Goods ➔ Establish Online Connectivity. There would then be lots more steps, but maintaining a high-level allows marketers to place all data related to that area in one bucket to determine which areas to drill into.

This enables the emotional high and low points to be assessed using customer sentiment as they move through the journey, and focus on extreme areas of positive and negative sentiment. A robust analytics solution will help marketers to include actual customer comments, such as those delivered to contact centre staff, in the charts that are produced, and which can be elevated to board-level.

This way, the company can see representative and statistically relevant comments in context rather than just anecdotal pieces of information that don’t accurately portray the bigger issues.

4. Take action

Of course, there’s no point in marketers doing any of this unless they then show their team, and the extended company, how to set a path to improvement, the reasons for doing it, and the key objectives. Interactive dashboards on analytics solutions allow marketers to illustrate the impact that all stakeholders have on the customer journey. This is empowering, helping to drive communication and process improvements, system enhancements, and policy changes. The insights can be easily consumed and deliver contextual understandings of trends. Interactive dashboards also allow for real-time root cause analytics that throw light onto issues being faced by customers. With this information, marketers can work with other departments to manage these issues and reduce the necessity for customers to call back into the contact centre.

5. Avoid pitfalls

As with any tool, unless journey analytics are used properly, they will not deliver. Forrester Research has said that this happens when journey analytics are used in one of three ways:

·         to validate assumptions instead of to discover;

·         in a silo, instead of throughout the enterprise;

·         and as a one-off project instead of a as a change management tool.

Analytics should be fed with both qualitative and quantitative insights and with feedback from multiple sources so the results are based on how the customer actually interacts with the brand across all channels.  Most importantly, the data should be shared on a regular basis with the key stakeholders via dynamic dashboards. And marketers should not forget, customer journey mapping too often ignores the unstructured feedback provided by customers, so customer testimonials, verbatim comments and what customers say to contact centre customer service reps in conversation, is vital.

By following these steps and implementing the right tools, journey analytics can become the lens through which a marketer views the customer’s journey and experience. When implementing this, it is important to map customer statistical data (demographic and behavioural) with the customer voice, their feedback and friction points. When this is done, it is possible to improve the parts of the business that matter most to customers.

- by Fabrice Martin