We Play in Traffic

The Internet has proven to be a never-ending source of information on any imaginable topic.  Or has it?  In searches for products sold locally, the Internet is failing. The problem may not lie in the inability of Google to find results or searchers unrealistic requests, but in retailers’ not providing the right information for the user.

On the occasion that a regularly-visited local retailer doesn’t carry a desired good, consumers turn to the Internet. And too often, those searches come up null, even though the product being searched is available at several local retailers.  Search “lace tights” sometimes (our intern chose that).  See if anyone local comes up.  Or “red shoelaces” or “fluted lamp shades.”  I know for a fact that local retailers carry all of these, but the local searches come up blank.

What we’re talking about here is the so called “long-tail-of-the-web.”  For retailers: items that consumers are less likely to find at the stores they shop every day that they turn to search on the web to find, locally.

Here are two ways a local retailer can take advantage of this phenomenon:

1. Add this type of content to your web site.  Literally the names and descriptions of everything you sell, including variations. You can make this list as presentable as possible, but its real purpose is for search engines to know that your store(s) carry what people are looking for.  No matter how obscure and arcane.
2. Use the text space allowed by many Internet yellow page sites to describe your business. In most cases adding this information is free (there may be limits to the number of characters that can be typed in).  Yellow page listings often show up in the top returns on local searches because of the nature of their geographic content.  All you need to do is make sure that the yellow page sites have information for the spiders to use in searches.

It seems like there are often too many returns on web searches.  But, for many items sold locally, there are actually no returns. You just need to figure out what are your lace tights and red shoelaces.  Then utilize them, because there a good chance no one else is.