By Bradley Fagan, Senior market insights expert, Uberall
The age of ‘Near Me’ is here to stay. The Covid pandemic has seen a dramatic increase in customers performing ‘Near Me’ searches for products and services close by as government regulations urge people to ‘stay local’. In fact, Google found that ‘Near Me’ searches saw a 40% growth in the past year and local engagement has never been stronger. Accenture, for example, found that 80% of people feel more connected to their communities than before the pandemic, while 88% believe it will stay that way post-Covid.
This new behaviour is seeing consumers directly engaging with neighbourhood businesses – which include accounting, banking, insurance, investment and other financial services firms – and seeking information at a local level when they search online. According to Google, searches with the intent of supporting local businesses increased 20,000% in 2020 as people searched for services and products in the surrounding area.
With this in mind, it’s vital that financial service brands ensure that their local online visibility and data is accurate and optimised for local intent, especially in times of crisis when consumers are looking for certainty.
Accurate data and listings management supercharge visibility
At the heart of local optimisation is ensuring that local online listings or citations on directories such as GMB, Apple Maps and Bing are up-to-date and correct. These listings or citations consist of all the digital mentions of a brand locations’ name, address, phone number, store hours and other details on websites, mobile apps, store locators, search engines, maps, social media. The accuracy and completeness of these listings is crucial to local visibility and an improved customer experience.
While SMBs tend to have a better track record for accurate listings, Uberall research found that only 4% of the 50,000 business locations analysed had perfect citations on Google, Bing and Yelp – three of the most important online directories for ensuring online visibility. The problem is that most businesses don’t know the value of having accurate data on their online listings or how to use this information to get results locally.
Indeed, there is a big link between data accuracy and local search visibility. With accurate data, such as when all fields in a listing citation are correctly filled out, businesses see a 90% increase in being discovered in unbranded search, as well as a 71% increase in driving direction and an 85% increase in website clicks, per Uberall research.
It’s also important to ensure this correct information appears across multiple directories. When listed on 30-39 directories for example, SMBs in Europe increased visibility by 198%. As well as the Big 4 – GMB, Apple Maps, Bing and Facebook – enterprise financial services firms and SMBs must look to secure listings across a larger number of customer touchpoints, from search engines and social media to review sites and navigation apps.
Don’t forget about reviews
It’s not too complicated to connect the dots between accurate listings and an increase in visibility, but engagement is slightly less tangible. This is where online reviews and star ratings play a crucial part.
Similar to visibility, not all financial services businesses have recognised the importance of replying to reviews or engaging with customers online, whether that be on Twitter, GMB or TripAdvisor. It’s not just financial advisers who need to manage their online reviews and reputation. Online reviews are equally important to banks, insurance companies and any other customer-facing financial services firms. Again, SMBs are better at review management thanks to their smaller size, but global brands are trailing behind in online engagement. This needs to change as it’s important to remember that it isn’t just the customer who left the review who’s waiting for a response, but also every other person who’s looking at the listing, review platform or social outlet – and not replying is bad for a brand’s reputation.
If enterprise locations reply to just 30% of reviews, they achieve 80% higher conversion rates than businesses that reply to 10% of reviews. When a business has a 4 star rating or higher, they will start ranking for qualitative searches such as ‘best coffee near me”. With 88% of consumers trusting reviews as much as personal recommendations, managing them correctly is key.
Variations of a ‘Near Me’ search
Key to improving visibility and engagement is also taking into consideration the different types of ‘Near Me’ searches customers might perform when searching for a local financial service. There are 940 billion local searches performed each year, per Uberall research, and these are dominated by variations in local intent and consumer behaviour.
Indeed, local search has become a lot more fragmented as customer questions grow ever more specific. For example, a search for ‘mortgage broker near me’ could now be ‘best mortgage broker near me’ or ‘best mortgage broker near me open now’.
There are also branded and unbranded searches to consider. A ‘branded’ search means a customer will be searching for a business by name, such as ‘HSBC near me’. Unbranded on the other hand is a discovery search for a product or service, such as ‘bank near me’. While most searches are unbranded – 4 out of 5 are unbranded for SMBs, and nearly 6 out of 10 for global brands, per Uberall customer data analysis – the spread of branded and unbranded searches depends on both the industry and the business type. Insurance and financial services SMBs, for example, are mostly branded.
This is because, at a local level, SMBs that have fewer physical locations tend to have better optimisation of their GMB listings and are more likely to respond to reviews than global brands with thousands of locations. This optimisation means SMBs will appear in searches alongside global brands who often struggle to optimise all of their listings.
In short, there are a multitude of qualifiers that make local search more fragmented, and financial services businesses need to truly understand this in order to optimise their listings and review management.
Tips for creating a better ‘Near Me’ customer experience
In today’s Covid-driven, digital-first landscape, providing a better experience for customers online is a key factor in bringing them into physical locations. Providing accurate listings information and proactively engaging with them online is the first step, but there are many more measures that can be taken.
For example, ensure that a brand or business feels the same online as it does offline. If a customer’s online ‘near me’ search experience is top-notch, they’ll also be expecting the same high quality when they step into that local bank branch. What’s more, if they enjoy their ‘in-store’ experience, they’re more likely to search for that branch by name in their next local search.
Financial services providers can also use reviews to listen to customer feedback and improve their customer experience, both online and offline. This level of customer engagement also increases trust and loyalty – and in the Covid era, knowing that they can count on a brand or business has never been more important to customers.
The more businesses engage with customers online at a local level and the better, more informed local customer experience they provide, the more trust, engagement and repeat customers they will see in return.
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