Program Manager, Natural Search
Brad Beiter
Natural Search Drives Store Visits

A successful Natural Search Optimization campaign not only drives online conversions, but also makes sure a retailer is in front of searchers who are looking to find a physical store location.  This is becoming increasingly important as more people use mobile devices to search.  Blended search results are currently playing a major role in helping searches find physical locations.  If you search for your favorite retailer and ZIP code on Google or Yahoo!, you’ll see a local listings box above the fold.  This box includes a map, phone numbers, and addresses that the search engines pull from business directories, yellow pages, and other third-party providers.

However, while a retailer is likely to appear in the local listings for searches containing their brand and a ZIP code, it’s common for the retailer’s own “Store Locator” page to not show up in the first few pages of search results.  In other words, retailers are missing the opportunity to capture more natural search real estate for valuable long-tail keywords that indicate the searcher is looking to visit their physical store.

In theory, a company’s Store Locator page is a very relevant search result for a query containing that company’s name and a ZIP code, indicating that it should be displayed towards the top of the search results page.  This isn’t happening for a large number of retailers because search engine spiders can’t index their Store Locator pages.  These pages are generally behind a function which requires users to type in a ZIP code, something spiders can’t do.  DoubleClick Performics is thinking forward about solving indexation problems like this.  A solution is illustrated by the case study below, which involves a leading car manufacturer who has a “Dealer Locator” application on their Web site.

Challenge:

• Search engine spiders could not index 60,000+ ZIP code Dealer Locator pages because the pages were behind a ZIP code search function.
• The company had 60,000+ pages on its site with valuable information about locating dealers of its vehicles that was essentially hidden from search engines, giving the company no chance to rank at all on Google for these pages.
  

Solution:  

• DoubleClick Performics unlocked the potential of the Dealer Locator pages by methodically generating a search engine Sitemap of the 60,000+ static page URLs to ensure indexation.

• DoubleClick Performics also optimized the title tag of each Dealer Locator page to include the ZIP code (title tags previously just said “Dealer Locator”) in order to influence search engine ranking.
  

• 60,000+ previously unindexed pages now appear in Google’s search results, which contributed to a 125% increase in indexation over a 7 month period.

• 75% of the Dealer Locator pages now rank on page 1 on Google for keywords that contain the car company’s name and a ZIP code, while many rank in the top 3 search results.

Qualified natural search traffic from the long-tail ZIP code keywords is now being driven to the client’s Web site.

It’s critical to be in front of searchers who want to visit your physical store.  Local listings in blended search results can help you do this, but cleaning up indexation problems with your own Store Locator pages will further increase your chance of getting shoppers through your door.

Learn more about DoubleClick Performics Natural Search Optimization