How to boost store traffic by 150%

The ‘first found advantage’ is critical in today’s hyper-competitive market. Location Bank makes that possible for franchisors and franchisees

As a franchisor, one of your key challenges is ensuring visibility so that your customers know where to find you. The Internet is a great help here: it’s reassuring to know that someone who’s in the mood for, say, a burger will be directed to your franchise when they Google ‘burgers near me’.

That’s where Location Bank comes in. As a location data management platform, Location Bank plugs your information into 98 per cent of online mapping platforms such as Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Facebook and TripAdvisor, ensuring that anyone searching for your brand online finds you first and in the right place.

Location Bank can also ensure an SEO boost for you, which means that your business will be among the first listed on any Internet search. This is done through tools like Reputation Management, which gathers all reviews about your business from Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor and more into a single online dashboard, making it easier for you to respond. This positively impacts search engine algorithms, which tend to favour brands that are seen to have an active online presence.

Location Bank also ensures that all of your online data matches Google’s best practice guidelines. This means that anyone searching for your brand can be confident that wherever they find you online, your details – from your physical address to your website, phone number, opening hours and social media pages – are all correct. Accurate data is crucial, as incorrect details can cost your business – an issue that is very common among multi-location brands.

Importantly, Location Bank is the only platform to offer this data cleansing service.

How does Location Bank’s Service work?

To ensure that all data is correct, Location Bank runs your details through a four-tier cleansing system that forensically cleans your data to the highest standards within search.

Next, Location Bank applies its SEO solution to ensure that your brand starts to track for specific keywords. Over time, Location Bank aims to get its clients into the hallowed ‘Map Pack’. Ranking within the ‘Map Pack’ is the holy grail of any search result as 75 per cent of all users choose to go no further than the first results returned.

Location Bank uses keystroke strategies and backend optimisation to push your brand forward during searches so that you are front and centre within relevant searches – and all those extra clicks and views online translate into more people coming into your store.

Consolidating your online presence

Think about what you do when searching for a product: whether it’s a shoe shop or a pizza restaurant, you probably include the words ‘near me’ in your search. When you allow Location Bank to create a single digital presence for your business, you enhance the likelihood that it turns up during those ‘near me’ searches.

But consumers don’t just use the Internet to find out where to go shopping: research shows that 90 per cent read reviews about products and services before purchasing, making reputation management mission-critical for any business owner. Simply put, maintaining a single digital presence makes it easier for customers to find you while at the same time establishing your credibility as a brand.

But the benefits go beyond this: as a multi-location brand, making changes to information such as opening hours can be difficult if you don’t have a single digital presence. Location Bank could make the change for you in minutes, with the changes appearing across 98 per cent of the world’s mapping platforms – saving you time and money and ensuring consistency.

Working towards future success

As a franchisor, you’re probably curious about your customer base – where do they come from and how did they find you online - did they specifically Google your brand, or did it come up as part of another search? Knowing this information is vital because it helps you target your audience more precisely.

Location Bank helps you gather these insights through online analytics tools that reveal your brand’s views, actions, searches and post metrics, translating these into ROI. Location Bank even lets you see how your competitors are tracking, compared to your performance – and makes all this information available from a single dashboard for easy access.

These insights give you a 360-degree view of your online reputation and performance across multiple platforms, regions and locations – plus, you’ll receive this information monthly, delivered straight to your inbox or through Location Bank’s Gauge feature. All reports are generated in seconds in a ready-to-share format. You can even access the dashboard as a mobile app to find the information you need wherever you are.

The most common mistakes

The first and most damaging mistake is completely ignoring your online presence, assuming that your business’s reputation will take care of itself. Unfortunately, most people do this out of ignorance as they don’t realise how accuracy and consistency affect their ranking in online searches.

These attributes are critical because most Google searches are conducted on mobile devices whilst on the move. Therefore, Google looks to rank and display businesses in your local proximity according to how relevant they are to your search – and how active those listings are.

Businesses also suffer when they don’t have an SEO-friendly store locator. The store locator is the first port of call for Google when searching for the most accurate location information – so if your details are not in the correct format, Google may skip over you when it returns the top search results. Many businesses shy away from rectifying this because they believe implementing an integrated store locator will be costly, but Location Bank offers affordable solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Finally, many businesses neglect to harvest information from their digital engagements. This is a huge mistake because the clicks, views and impressions can give rich insights into who uses your product, when and why, allowing you to speak to them more directly. Businesses in service-oriented industries have even more to gain by tracking customer sentiment, trends and engagement. Location Bank can easily follow these interactions through its reputation management suite.

Many businesses fall into the trap of analysis paralysis because the vast amounts of data available can be intimidating – but Location Bank makes it easy to cut through the noise to what matters. This is why it is a must-have tool for the franchise community.

At a glance

Established:

2007

- Manage 50k locations globally

- Work with 130 leading global brands

- Manage locations in 57 countries

- Offices in London, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Singapore, Mumbai

Contact:

jamesh@location.expert