Today is Groundhog Day in the USA. Will the groundhog see his shadow? We there be 6 more weeks of winter or will spring come early? It's been a mild winter so far at the jWAG HQ in New Jersey.
This is also the 399th Daily Golden Nugget!
Today we're going to review an SEO tactic that will help rank you locally.
The most common search phrase we see every month is "jewelry stores." But the phrase by itself shows up far less frequently than when used in a sentence, for example, like "jewelry stores in Chicago."
Whenever Google detects a proper town name or city name in the search phrase it will display results in the local format. That usually includes a list of locations pulled from Google Places along with a map showing pointers for each place. Regular search results appear below the local results.
Google uses many different factors to determine the listings on the local SERP. We know that the physical location of the person searching is a big factor. The next biggest factor we know is whether or not you have your address and phone number on every page.
Some jewelers only list their physical store address on their contact page, or their directions page. This seems to make perfect logical sense because a website user will naturally look for that specific page. Since the contact and directions pages have specific purposes they usually do not include jewelry information.
Google reads every page of your site and figured out ways to relate one piece of information to another. As are as Google is concerned it will not associate jewelry with your address based only on your contact page. You have to give it more.
We suggest putting your store's physical address and telephone number in the footer of every page. This gives Google plenty of chances to properly associate all your engagement rings, all your yellow gold wedding bands, and all your gemstone jewelry with your address. It also makes for good consistency with an actual viewer of the site as address and legal information is traditionally in the footer of a website.
Returning back to our suggested search for "jewelry stores in Chicago" we find several listings for several local stores on Wabash Avenue and Madison Avenue, but we'd like to specifically point out a local chain store in the Chicago area that is obviously missing.
Rogers & Hollands Jewelers has 20 stores in and around Chicago, Illinois. Their website has a few good and bad points, and it's also blazing fast. Actually, the speed of their website might be their best quality.
We just stumbled across this store while doing other research and realized their website would lend itself nicely for today's Nugget. We have no business relations with them whatsoever.
Except for the zip code search at the top of every page, their entire website is devoid of store locations and addresses. The zip code search leads you to an interactive Google powered map showing the 20 locations. Unfortunately for them, Google search is unable to relate that fancy Google Map to jewelry.
Rogers & Hollands appears buried on page 4 of the Google SERP for the phrase "jewelry stores in Chicago." From what we can tell, the only reason Google figured out how to relate R&H to Chicago was through the dropdown box at the bottom of screen. That dropdown allows someone to sign up on their email list and select "Chicago Ridge Mall" as their local store.
They probably generate a lot of online business, but from this quick local SERP analysis it looks like their website doesn't help bring new customers to their store. In other words, unless you already know where they are or stumble into them during your day, you'd never know about them.
The lesson for you today: Put your store's physical address and phone number at the bottom of all your web pages.
