Doing Words

Businesses: just tell me where you are!

// October 30th, 2009 // Ecommerce, Marketing

This Friday afternoon finds me googling for coffee machine retailers, and cursing at small business websites that bury their location information deep on an About or a Contact page. Each time, I’m reduced to shouting, “Just tell me where you are!” in frustration at discovering each promising-looking supplier is located a thousand, two thousand, even three thousand kilometers away. ARGH!

I’m googling because our Baby Gaggia coffee machine has been back for repairs once too many times and my caffeine levels are critically low, but mainly it’s because my searching highlights how crazy small business owners are if they don’t make their store location front-and-centre on their website.

Newsflash: just because you now have a website and might in theory be able to sell your product or service to customers worldwide, in practice, 98% of the time, you won’t. Building global sales was an early promise of the interweb that turned out to not be true, most of the time, for most businesses.

Your market is the people who can be bothered driving to your store. Your web presence is an important part of convincing them (a) that the drive will be worth it; and (b) your store is the only one they need drive to. No more than one in a hundred thousand online businesses will be the next Zappos.

Even large corporations selling intangible services (such as Yahoo! and Google) can confirm that selling is still best conducted face-to-face. Certainly, both Google and Yahoo! are often able to sell a global audience to marketers, but both companies must maintain local sales teams in each major market to service their advertising customers. They mostly sell their audiences to advertising customers within a taxi ride of their office.

So this afternoon, I’m yelling at the nine browser tabs I have open, each displaying a very nicely designed coffee retailer’s website. My local, Forsyth Coffee, would be the logical choice, and they sell a very nice Expobar Minore III at a good price. But they don’t keep it in stock and owner Rob is more than a little hazy when it comes to delivery and installation. It was meant to be here today, and when I rang him this afternoon he said he’d call them Monday. This could drag on another week. And. I. Need. A. Coffee. Machine. Like. Now. Rob has until end of Monday and then I’m cancelling my order. He’s an all-star roaster and he has my bean business for life but this machine thing just can’t go on.

Mind wandering. Let’s finish this blog post and then see if I can control this with a beer. Where was I? Yes: the supreme importance of LOCATION.

Here’s a beautiful website design for fivesensescoffee.com.au. Great visual elements, lots of personality and interest. They’re so cool they’re even offering free tickets to the most excellent Edge Of The Web conference as prizes to customers. And their SEO work has been good enough for them to appear in my first three Google search results.

But guess what? They’re in Western Australia. I could buy a coffee machine in Singapore and it would be closer and cost less to ship here. All of the machines they sell are available from other retailers in Sydney (if I go to the trouble of establishing which-of-the-bastards are located in Sydney, that is.)

How to help me find you

If you accept (and you better, because I’m scary right now) that most of your customers will be local and not global, there’s one very important thing you must, at a minimum, do: include your suburb and postal code (preferably your entire address) somewhere prominent on your homepage. You might also consider including it in the title and metatags of your home and other pages (though these days that makes somewhere between less-to-no of a difference.) You should definitely take the time to ensure your business and its location are listed on Google Local and any other online yellow/whitepages directories service your area (many of which will be free.)Google Local has a way to go in most markets before it really kicks butt, and Google needs to maintain an uneasy truce between it and its own competing paid search ads, but it’s well worth using, since it’s free, only takes a minute to create a listing, and even comes with some tidy reporting that associates impressions and clickthrus with the search terms used.

Added bonus: better conversion rates!

Wondering why your web business gets so many visitors and so few customers? Well, could that be because you’re attracting site visitors located several thousand kilometers away from your shop? Want to improve your visitor-to-customer conversion rates? I bet you could make a big dent in that just by including more location information on your homepage and making sure it appears in your business information on all the major search engines.

Enough rational thought. SOMEBODY BRING ME A BEER!