SEO is all the rage in the business world right now, but it doesn’t guarantee you success. Customers need to be able to both find your company easily online and find what they’re looking for on a straightforward, attractive template. The true key to increasing your conversions is company-to-consumer connection.
Recent studies show that appearing local to your customers is the best way to connect with them. Landing pages, social media accounts, and local business associations have proven themselves to be effective in upping the amount of customer interaction a business receives. Furthermore, 83% of consumers will typically only travel to shop at stores 15 minutes away or less. Most consumers value location over product price, a surprising find considering how much emphasis is put on SEO for marketers. Most buyers do, however, value quality over location, meaning they’re often willing to travel further distances if the quality of a product is outstanding.
If your business sells something that people buy consistently, such as food, gasoline, cigarettes, or bus tickets, consumers will seek out the location closest to them to make frequent purchasing easy. Customers prefer gas stations situated no further than 6 minutes away from their homes, grocery stores 9 minutes away, home, garden, and auto stores 14 minutes away, and clothing stores 20 minutes away.
Having this information at your disposal is convenient, but using it is a bit tricky. There exist many dependent factors that determine just how far a customer is willing to go for a product or service, including method of transportation, access to highways, and traffic level. Converting travel times into distances using roadway routes with light traffic comes out to 2.2 miles every 6 minutes, 4.1 miles every 9 minutes, 4.9 miles every 12 minutes, and 9.3 miles every 20 minutes.
Studies provided by Google and Access are too broad to use, citing that 80% of customer purchases are made within a 20 mile radius of home, and 72% of customers looking in their area choose a store no more than 5 miles away. With these newfound results, businesses can be confident that consumers visit grocery stores, cafes, pharmacies, post offices, and laundry service locations that are situated no more than 4 miles from their homes.
Now that we know how powerful location is, how do we use it to turn consumers into customers? You’ll first have to make the location information of your business very accessible. It may seem more beneficial to advertise your products on every inch of your website that’s free, but this may end up driving your website’s visitors away, especially if it takes up an entire mobile phone screen. Include a Contact or Location section in your website’s tab collection and fill it with location photos, interactive maps, and nearby addresses to clearly highlight where your business is.
If your company has more than one location, you’ve probably already taken the time to create a page on your website with the addresses and hours of each store. Although this is useful, don’t stop there; create a landing page for each store as well. If you don’t think that’s worth the effort, at the very least, create a Facebook page, Yelp listing, or Google My Business profile for every location. Your audience will then have all the information about your stores at their fingertips, more easily turning casual site visitors into loyal customers.
Your store’s address may be all your customers need, but if your location is unusual or hidden away, descriptions of the space around the store are extremely useful for newcomers looking for it. Add information about nearby buildings, stores, and intersections to make the process of locating your store easier. A collection of photos from different angles can also help consumers coming from a different direction recognize your store.
To accommodate customers traveling to your store from more than 10 minutes away, mention well-known landmarks that the building is near. Describing your store’s location in relation to a popular plaza, highway, or department store will almost guarantee that no consumer seeking out your store will get lost on the way there. People from out of town will especially appreciate your efforts. Even though your location doesn’t move, change its description depending on who you’re targeting, using words each audience will recognize.
Location plays an unexpectedly big role in customer acquisition, and should therefore never be neglected. Give your audience the location information they need, and they’ll give you the conversions you want.
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