local business getting online internet traffic

How to Drive Online Traffic To Your Local Store

Transcript Below

Hey it's Gary from 3Bug Media, and today I'm going to give you four tips on how to drive online Internet traffic to your offline retail store. Now, I think most of us will agree that the majority of people use the Internet to find just about everything. And local businesses are one of the fastest growing segments in search, according to Google. So I want to give you a couple of tips on how to leverage Internet traffic to get more foot traffic into your retail store.

 

And the first thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you're leveraging your two most important Web properties and that your website and Google my business there are both equally important and for local businesses, in a lot of instances, Google My Business is actually more important than your website because it gets a lot more visibility and traffic. So location plus business type searches are up 80 percent year over year, according to Google. Google says that local searches are the majority of the searches that are currently happening inside Google.

 

So you as a local business want to make sure that you're leveraging that opportunity. So when I say location plus business, it would be searches like Charlotte Plumbers, Denver pizzerias, Toronto contractors, things like that. People will type in a location and the type of business that they're looking for. So you want to make sure that you're keeping both of these properties updated with as much content as possible. So Google My Business over the years has given you an enormous opportunity to add information on products you sell, services, images, video.

 

You want to make sure that you're leveraging all of those things and at the same time updating your website as well, because you never know, some people will go to your Google My Business listing and some people will go to your website. So you want to make sure that your content is up to date on both properties.

 

The next one are product videos. And if you don't sell products, then service videos or whatever kind of offerings that you have. But product videos are really, really important and it's growing really fast as far as online ecommerce or even people figuring out what they want to purchase and then going offline to actually make that purchase.

 

By the time somebody actually comes into your retail store 90 percent of the time they've  already made a purchase decision. They've already done the research online before coming to your store. So when we talk about product videos, we want to we're talking about our website, YouTube. If you're doing a lot of video, start a YouTube channel as well as Google My Business, which you can now post videos, though, typically under a minute in length.

 

But if you're doing product videos, you don't want to go over minute anyway. 50 percent of people watch videos before buying a product, according to Google. So videos are really important. And if you've never done video, it's actually pretty easy once you get started, especially product videos, all you need to do is have a dedicated space and have some sort of format and system that you use to create these videos. But they're easy to create.

 

Videos are a lot of fun and people value them a lot when making purchase decisions.

 

The next one are images and we talk about images we're talking about on your website, Google My Business and social media.  According to Google, images, increase engagement by over 40 percent. And they were talking about Google My Business listings. So Google My Business listings that had a lot of images on their listing, had over 40 percent more engagement than listings that did not have frequently updated images.

 

So images are really important. People like visuals. It tells you can tell a story without a lot of words or any words. So images, you know, people tend to really enjoy images. And the types of images you can create are product images, images of your showroom, your menu. If you're a restaurant,  team photos, new inventory, that's coming in. Anything of note that you think people will want to see. You want to be able to paint a picture because you have to remember somebody is looking at your business online.

 

They may not want to spend fifteen or twenty minutes driving to your store if it's going to be a subpar experience. So if you have a nice showroom, make sure you have a lot of good pictures or even in Google My Business, you can do a 360 image tour as well, but have a lot of good pictures of your showroom, of your inventory of your products, things like that, and create a good visual experience. People will want to jump in a car and come down to your retail location.

 

And the last one is Google AdWords. So buy what you can't rank for. So if you don't have a strong organic presence online, you can use Google AdWords to supplement that. So terms like who has “____ ion stock near me” actually, according to Google, has grown over 8000 percent, so people are getting in the habit of who has Nintendo Switch near me, who has organic tea near me, things like that.

 

That's a great opportunity. If you have items that may be hard to find online, then that's a great opportunity to create an AdWords campaign and say, you know, organic tea in stock in Denver or something like that. And that will help you pick up on the explosion of new searches for in stock item searches locally. Also, business service near me type searches, so plumbers and dentists near me, landscapers near me, pizzerias near me, things like that.

 

That is one of the most popular types of searches on Google, and those are easy to run a Google AdWords campaign for. So like I said, if you're not ranking organically for these search terms, Google AdWords lets you in as little as an hour, get set up and start getting found online and start capturing some of that online traffic.

 

So these are four quick tips. Leverage your Web properties, your website, Google My Business product videos, use lots of images and consider Google AdWords to plug into gaps where you're not getting found organically.

 

So hopefully this helps. And if you want to learn more, you can go to 3BugMedia.com. Thank you very much and have a good day.

 

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.