Think of the last time you went to a retail store – let’s call it a hardware store – to purchase something you needed – let’s say a wrench. You likely did a quick online search for hardware stores nearby and determined where to go based on store hours, distance from your location and whether or not the product you wanted was in stock. Imagine doing that research and driving to the store just to discover that the store isn’t located there anymore, the hours have changed and it’s currently closed, or they don’t have the product in stock. These situations are understandably frustrating for consumers who expect up-to-date, accurate location information and can have negative effects on consumers’ overall opinion of a brand.
As exemplified above, ensuring information accuracy at the local level is an important part of multi-location brands’ local marketing strategy to drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores. That being said, data management has historically been a time-consuming and manual-intensive process for local managers and franchisees that completely cuts corporate out of the picture, leaving room for brand-wide incompletions and inaccuracies.
Empowering multi-location brands to maintain accurate information across all locations
Rio SEO is the leading local marketing platform provider for enterprise brands, agencies and retailers, whose Open Local Platform provides multi-location organizations with a comprehensive, seamlessly integrated suite of turnkey local marketing solutions, including: Local Listings, Local Reporting, Local Pages, Local Reviews and Local Manager.
As part of its Local Manager solution, Rio SEO recently announced a new feature, the Suggestion Engine, which adds an additional layer of functionality to support corporate governance and ensure data-entry efficiency, consistency and control – helpful for franchisees and local managers who continuously add, remove, edit and amend local information data to their respective listings. The easy-to-use Suggestion Engine interface provides brand managers with the ability to assign collaborators data sections to update as well as set minimum field requirements for publishing.
Additional benefits of Rio SEO’s Suggestion Engine include:
- Real-Time Alerts – Get notified when there are new local listing updates to review as well as monitor and track locations with pending updates in real-time.
- Collaborative Review – View side-by-side comparisons and share deep links with local managers and other collaborators to streamline discussions regarding location-specific updates.
- Personalized Content – Customize local information with unlimited image and URL uploads, open-text fields and crowdsourced industry data to meet the diverse needs of individual locations.
- Advanced Search Filters – Search for various location information and data via status, type, name, ID or address for instant results.
With Rio SEO’s Suggestion Engine, corporate brand managers and local collaborators can seamlessly eliminate the spread of misinformation. It also empowers brands to maintain accurate local information across the enterprise. Now, with the intuitive capabilities of Rio SEO’s Suggestion Engine, enterprise brands around the globe will have direct access to unprecedented, holistic insights and controls over brand identity and integrity across hundreds or thousands of locations.
John Toth, Senior Product Manager at Rio SEO
Local SEO Best Practices
In today’s digital economy, consumers are performing on-the-go mobile searches to find immediate solutions to their needs at exponential rates. It is typical for modern-day consumers to read brand reviews, look at company Facebook pages and browse photos on Google and Yelp to better understand and evaluate a brand and/or the brand experience ahead of interacting with it. This increase in consumer search activities illustrates the growing need for brands to invest in local marketing solutions and follow local SEO best practices to help optimize brands’ websites for both organic and local search results, drive performance improvements and increase online-to-offline traffic. Below are three tips to optimize a brand’s local marketing efforts to remain at the forefront of the competition.
- Optimize brands’ websites for both organic and local search results. This is the best way to drive performance improvements and online-to-offline traffic. For organic search, Google needs to be able to understand a site’s content and how it relates to the query at hand. Rankings are driven by traditional SEO best practices, including the use of schema markup and structured data, an optimized website structure and logical crawl paths. Google then looks at quality and engagement signals in an effort to choose the ‘best’ answer for each individual query.
- As for organic SEO, there are a few key areas of focus to move the needle in Map Pack rankings. First, verify the brand has clean, consistent data across all locations to build and keep search engine trust, as well as enhance the consumer experience. Then, implement a local listings management tool to eliminate duplicate listings, quickly correct errors and flag listings issues that need manual intervention to further ensure the correct information proliferates. The more places a businesses’ location information can be found, the greater confidence search engines have in that business, which results in improved local rankings.
- Implement and promote a proactive consumer reviews strategy to empower local managers to actively seek out and engage with their consumers in real-time. Without a constant influx of positive consumer feedback, a brand’s location may not appear in the Google Map Pack as often as it would like. Reputation management has become increasingly important for a brand’s local presence and rankings. In fact, 72 percent of consumers will not act, complete a purchase or visit a store until they have read reviews. In addition to consumers, Google reviews are equally as important for local ranking signals.
Rio SEO’s enterprise local marketing platform is proven to drive online visibility, engage consumers throughout the local search ecosystem and win local business at scale. Its comprehensive, seamlessly integrated suite of turnkey local marketing solutions and reputation management tools are proven to increase brand visibility across search engines, social networks, maps applications and more.
Rio SEO ranks among the largest global providers of local search automation solutions and patented SEO reporting tools, driving business from search to sale for corporate brands worldwide. Over 150 enterprise brands and retailers rely on the innovative technology and Rio SEO’s local marketing expertise to drive motivated, measurable online traffic to its local websites and into physical stores. Rio SEO currently serves Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries including retail, finance, insurance, hospitality and more.
Local SEO Case Study – Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts
Luxury hotel guests on the search for their next great stay want to know what kind of experience they can expect at each brand’s location. In fact, 70% of hotel searchers on mobile devices aren’t looking for brand names or even hotel locations, they’re on the hunt for specific amenities such as an indoor pool, on-site restaurant or a full-service spa.
In working with Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Rio SEO leveraged its powerful search technology and managed services regimen to achieve measurable gains in search visibility and bookings for Four Seasons’ spas. Rio SEO effectively marketed Four Seasons’ spa services and supported its organic listings with accurate, up-to-date information that built and protected search engine trust in the brand.
Rio SEO’s enhanced location-based search performance drove positive year-over-year business results for the Four Seasons brand, including:
- 98.9% lift in local listings accuracy
- 84% more phone calls
- 30% more spa bookings for one of the world’s leading luxury hospitality brands.
