If you own a physical store or a restaurant, you don’t need to hear from us how difficult the past few years have been in terms of foot traffic.

The rise of smartphones has brought a radical shift in consumer shopping behavior. While online retail continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

The pandemic made things even worse for physical stores, which were already reeling under the relentless march of online retailers. The result? Many of the iconic retailers have now become a distant memory.

Not all is bad though. So many physical stores are surviving and thriving. These local community stores are giving the online retailers of their region a run for their money! Outperforming all their rivals by a long shot.

So, what are they doing right that the rest aren’t?

For one, they have built a strong online visibility in the geographical area that they are serving.

How, you may ask? By using local SEO.

As unbelievable as it may sound, local SEO is something that can make all the difference when it comes to helping a physical store increase its foot traffic.

Local SEO highlights your physical store in local searches, making it easier for audiences located nearby to find information about your store.

Here’s how local SEO can increase foot traffic and grow sales in your store:

Makes it easy to find your store – both online and offline!

Indexing your retail shop’s address and location on Google Maps is an important part of local SEO strategy. It goes a long way when it comes to helping your customers find your store.

Similarly, listing your physical store on Google Business Profile (GMB) increases the online visibility of your store. Moreover, it increases your chances of being listed in Google’s Local Pack, which is a list of three highest-rated local businesses that the users see first in search results. When the information about your physical store is prominently displayed on Google at the top, customer footfall in your store is bound to increase.

Makes your website rank higher

Just like traditional SEO, one of the primary objectives of local SEO is to make your website rank higher on search engines. However, there is a key difference. In local SEO, the focus is more on location-specific keywords such as sneakers near me, pizza shops near Regent Street etc.

When customers search for a product along with the location, most likely they are in or around that area and are close to the moment of purchase. If they find your store or restaurant in those searches, the chances of them visiting your store and making a purchase are significantly high. So local SEO puts your business in front of your potential customers exactly when they are ready to make a purchase.

Try Obenan’s ultimate Web Optimizer for an intensive approach to view the best keywords working out for you, competitor alert, and full-blown backlink overview and make your business work better.

Makes your business look credible

For a moment, forget about all the algorithms and crawlers that search engines use to rank websites. Instead, let us ask you what is the basic goal of a search engine? It’s to deliver high-quality search results to their users, right? While making a query on Google or any other search engine, the website that ranks higher is automatically considered more credible and trustworthy.

Due to a number of factors, higher rankings have come to be associated with quality. So, when the ranking of your website improves with local SEO, your business is perceived by the users as more credible. It creates a favorable impression in their minds. Moreover, if your business has positive reviews, it further makes it look more reliable to search engine users. As a result, the likelihood of them visiting your store goes up.

Makes your business discoverable for mobile phone users

Making a website mobile-friendly is a key component of local SEO strategy. These days, an overwhelming majority of Google searches are performed on smartphones. Right from finding directions to your store or looking for contact information, a significant percentage of smartphone users are looking for the location of your physical store.

Therefore, while optimizing your website for mobile phone users, make sure to make location information easily accessible to them. You should also submit your business information to local directories. The key is to make it easy for smartphone users to find you.

However, while doing so, make sure that your listings are accurate and the same everywhere. Submitting inconsistent information may prove to be counterproductive as search engines may not be able to determine which information about your business is correct and, therefore, may not show it in search results.

Obenan’s local listing management software guarantees success as it fixes all your listings automatically, optimizes visibility for all brand locations, and more at a very nominal price. Check it out, now!

Conclusion

Amid the onslaught of online retail, if your physical store is struggling to attract customers, local SEO can turn things around for you. It’s the most viable and cost-effective way to put your business out there. By formulating a strong local SEO strategy, you can improve the visibility of your brick-and-mortar store, make it easily discoverable to search engine users, improve footfall and, ultimately, increase your sales.