Is Your Store Locator Hiding?

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?“

Store location pages fill a need much larger than the physical address of a store close to the individual user. Many customers already know where a store is based on their everyday routines. What they don’t know and are seeking are the hours, holidays that the store is closed, services offered, manager’s name, phone number to call for questions about items, etc. The store locator, then, needs to answer these individual store questions.

Now consider searchers: For all intents and purposes they can drop out of the sky from Google or Bing and land on any page on the site. That makes every page on the site a potential landing page that needs to be able to command customers’ confidence and convert searchers to some next step.

The ideal would be to search Google for a store location, like [northbrook furniture store], and get the exact store locator pages for the relevant stores. This rarely happens, however. Read on to discover why and what you can do about it.

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »