Optimizing for local search should be at the top of the list for all businesses that serve local consumers – local search is a proven consumer channel. Of the 40-60 billion searches taking place on Google in the US every month, nearly half are being made with local intent. Local search drives action and engagement, and the numbers continue to back that up with 72% of local searches resulting in a store visit within 5 miles of the searcher’s location, 18% of which lead to a local sale within a day. source
Optimizing Voice Search Results for Shopping
Voice searches take place across a variety of mobile and desktop devices. A growing segment of search devices are screenless – that means smart speakers, wearable devices, TV remotes, and car navigation systems. Voice search is here to stay and its adoption is only growing – 71% of consumers say that they would rather use a voice search to search for something online instead of physically searching for something – users like the convenience and reliability.
As a result, voice shopping is a growing consumer channel and experts estimate that it will be a $40bn market by 2022. Over half of voice searches are made with local intent and nearly a third of voice searches for local businesses result in a phone call to the business, and approximately 20% of voice searches result in a visit to a local business. Voice search performance is quite similar to traditional searches made with local intent
Voice Shopping Optimization for Brands and Businesses
Optimizing for voice shopping is similar to optimizing for search results – the content needs to be relevant, engaging, and discoverable. For multi-location businesses and brands that want to harness the power of local search intent/voice search at scale, structured data is a requirement.
The challenging part? Implementing at scale so that local business and product details are being communicated accurately. Global and national brands share content and assets across markets – and when that content isn’t optimized for local search, that content becomes invisible to local consumers. The goal is to become easy to find online and accurately surfaced in relevant search results on devices with and without screens.
Implement Voice Optimization for Local Intent Searches
It’s already challenging for businesses and brands to maintain the different hours, services, unique offers for each location from one central place and manage that effectively. Manually keeping information current for every location or outlet is tough to scale, unreliable, and can risk brand safety – as the number of locations and outlets goes up, not centralizing location details for the web can become unwieldy fast, not to mention the missed opportunity.
Brickwork Store Locators – Voice Optimization Built-In
Fortunately, search crawlers (like Google’s) look for structured data. enabling businesses to pick the most crucial information relating to their business, highlight that content, and give that content better visibility to their intended audience. The same is true for voice search, except instead of displaying the content on the screen, the voice assistant plays the relevant content for searchers. Brickwork store locators and local pages are built with structured data in mind – title tags, meta descriptions, and keyword enhanced URLs are dynamically created with your brand’s data, automating the technical SEO for voice and screen search results – so you don’t have to.
Brickwork’s solution ensures brand safety and provides the flexibility to update local business web pages with custom information (location, hours, directions, phone numbers, offers) while restricting users to pre-set parameters. Corporate branding, look, and feel automatically sync with the brand’s website.
Brickwork enables brands to give control to retailers and distributors in local markets to keep their vendors competitive. Brands are able to control the accuracy of their product information, secure the integrity of their brand standards, and create brand awareness of their products via their network of local resellers and retailers – taking advantage of local search intent regardless of device or medium.
All locators and pages are managed from a central database that is easy to use and can’t be misused because access to the corporate website’s CMS is not required.
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Explore the possibilities and leverage our expertise to develop the branded path between online browsing and in-store purchasing which seamlessly facilitates your customer’s natural shopping behavior.