Most manufacturers have websites to showcase their products, and because search engines usually rank vendor web sites high for searches related to the vendor brand, consumers often find the vendor's website when they look for the brand. But unless the vendor has an e-commerce website, it is not sufficient for consumers to find the vendor website; consumers need to find a retailer that sells the products.
There are several ways that apparel vendors and retailers can help consumers find retail stores that sell their products:
- Install store locator software.
- List retailers on the vendor website.
- Ensure your retailers get found in local searches.
Using Store Locator Software
A store locator is a feature of a website that helps visitors find physical locations of stores. Store locators are common features, and you have certainly used them at websites you have visited. To get a sense of what kinds of locators are in common use, do a Google search for "store locator" and you will find locators from many top consumer brands:
This software can either be installed on your website, or it can be hosted remotely, with nothing to install on your website computers. Either system involves some maintenance to make sure the retailer list is up-to-date.
If you'd like detailed research on how best to implement a store locator, see Jakob Neilson's report on locator usability.
Using Search Engines as Store Locators
Search engines like Google can also be store locators, if retailers and vendors have constructed their websites properly. Many visitors perform web searches using the name of a brand and a city. In fact, Google is probably your most important store locator. In his report on locator usability, Jakob Neilsen writes:
It's still striking that 73% of users went to a search engine (mainly Google) when we asked them to find a nearby location for a specific company. Only 13% went straight to that company's own website, while the remaining 13% went to a dedicated mapping service.
So a visitor looking for True Religion jeans in St. Louis might search for:
True Religion Canoga Park
There are two types of websites that should turn up from this search: 1) a list on the True Religion website of the retailers in Canoga Park, and 2) the individual pages of retailers.
If the retailers that sell True Religion jeans in Canoga Park have optimized their web pages, they will show up in search results for the query.
Vendors can also help retailers by creating one or more web pages that list all of the retailers carrying the vendor's products. It is important that these pages not be hidden behind a form, so search engines can index the pages. And make sure that you have one or more links from other parts of your website to the list of retailers.
Product Locators
Even better than a store locator is a product locator. Your consumers aren't just interested in finding a store; they are usually interested in specific products. A store locator only tells consumers where to find a store.
To make a product locator, you'll want to link to retailers that carry specific products from your product detail pages. As noted earlier, it is important to have a single page for each product. On each of these pages, you can also list retailers that carry that particular product.
A product locator is much more complex than a store locator, but because it is located on the same page as the product consumers are looking at, it satisfies their interest more quickly—consumers don't have to go to a different web page.
You can find a really good example of a product locator at és Footwear.
Get Local with Google and Yahoo
It isn't even necessary to have a website for consumers to find a retailer online—Google, Yahoo, and many other companies run local directories that allow businesses to place references to their physical locations, even for businesses that do not have websites:
For another example, if you try the search for "True Religion Canoga Park" that we described earlier, you will get an interesting result. The True Religion retailers are listed in Google Business Center, but at the time of this writing, the top hits for the search are for the Simply Hired website, which is listing a job posting for the True Religion store in Canoga Park, and for Yelp, which describes the grand opening of the Canoga Park store. True Religion has done some work with search engine marketing, but both Simply Hired and Yelp are more effective, even with brands that are not their own.
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