Driving foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar store can be a challenge. With 72% of customers searching online for local businesses, optimizing your business’ listing on Google helps connect with people that are already searching for you in search and on Google Maps. If you’re searching for ways to increase foot traffic and drive sales for your business, this guide will help you get started.
RELATED: 5 Ways to Rank Higher on Google Maps in 2021
What is foot traffic for businesses?
Foot traffic, or customer traffic, refers to the total number of customers that visit your physical store or location. Foot traffic is the go-to metric for retail stores and brick-and-mortar businesses to evaluate the success of marketing campaigns and measure overall business performance.
How do I increase walk-ins to my retail store?
An optimized Google listing for every business location ensures that potential customers can find you when they’re searching for your business on Google Search or Maps. The better your Google Business Profile is, the more foot traffic your business will get.
Unfortunately, Google’s tool to manage your business listing can be confusing and time-consuming, especially for businesses with more than one location to manage. With Google business listing software like Locl, updating listings has never been faster or easier (whether you’ve got one location or one thousand!)
Why should I make a Google Business Listing?
While businesses of every size have thrived before Google ever hit the scene, the way that people shop has changed. Potential customers are spending time doing their research online, checking out websites, reading reviews, and getting directions before they even leave their homes. With this new way of shopping in mind, here are some reasons why updating your Google Business Profile is more important than ever before.
Update Business Listing Information
Keeping up-to-date info on your Google business listing is an important factor in local SEO and increasing visitors to your store – how can people visit when they don’t know when you’re open? Misinformation leads to bad customer experiences, negative reviews, and missed opportunities to make a sale (and a positive first impression.)
Locl lets you easily update business hours by location, edit your business description and Attributes, and keep potential visitors in the loop on what’s happening at your business. Owners can even lock their profile so that competitors or disgruntled customers can’t suggest unauthorized changes to your account. In short, you’ve got complete control over your listings.
Add Credibility for Your Business
Building trust with your customers is a core part of creating a successful business. The more confident someone feels in your business, the more likely they are to come and buy. According to Hootsuite, customers are 70% more likely to visit stores that are verified on Google.
Reviews lend credibility, too. 88% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from a friend. Keeping up with every review across every location can be tough to keep up with; even worse, a question from a potential customer could go unanswered. Locl’s Review Management tab lets you know when a new review comes in for any location, giving you custom reply templates to get your response started in a matter of seconds. Locl helps you stay in touch with your customers and make review management easier than ever before.
Get Better Analytics to Measure Success
Data, statistics, and analytics help shape decisions for marketers and owners to help grow their business. While it helps spread the word, Google also captures data that can provide valuable insights into your business performance to ensure you’re connecting with customers.
While Google provides a 90-day data history, Locl takes analytics to the next level with 18 months of data history. This lets you more easily track long-term trends, see improvements over time, and create projections for the future.
Optimizing your Google business listing is an easy way to drive more visitors to your business and increase foot traffic to ultimately drive sales! Locl’s Google listing management cuts the hassle from managing Google Business Profiles, no matter how many locations you may have. Take the guesswork out of Google and get started with a 7-day free trial of Locl – no credit card required.
Click here to start using Locl for free.
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