Think Globally, Buy Locally

When I buy stuff off the internet, and I buy things off the net very rarely - well, actually, most of the stuff I buy is groceries and gasoline, the occasional movie ticket, and going out to eat/drink with friends - but I digress.

When I buy stuff off the internet, I'm looking for a good deal - whether it's a DVD box set, renewing my Xbox Live membership, or buying a new lens for my digital camera - on a product I don't need immediately (I haven't even watched all the DVDs I already own).

When I buy something in person, I'm looking for instant gratification. I want it now. I need new running shoes, probably 100 miles ago, so I want them now because I don't want to break my routine.

Of course, having lived in the same area for the past 8-9 years - I'm pretty familiar with where I should go to buy new running shoes. So let's pretend I move somewhere random, like Lemon Grove, California or somewhere a little less random, like Houston. Now I have no idea.

Rather than search for 'running shoes' (where I am going to get a bunch of national results - which would be fine if I knew exactly what pair/size shoe to buy) I'll search for a term like, 'running shoes houston' - which will pull up a list of local stores with the local business results map and some other websites (usually for stores selling running shoes in Houston).

However, let's take this one step further. If I'm a national chain (with at least one store in Houston) I want to be on that list. But I also want to be on the list for Las Vegas as well. Now, depending on the number of stores I have - I may be able to do this on a city by city basis - but that's going to end up becoming a very tedious process if I have say, more than 1,000 stores (which a lot of chains do).

How do I approach the task then? Should I buy 1,000 domains? (eg - houstonstore.com, lasvegasstore.com, chicagostore.com, etc)? Or maybe I should just make sure that each store location has it's own page on my corporate website and is listed in all the pertinent local directories (yellowpages, etc.) so that we should up in the Google LBC?

The answer is, there is no single strategy that's best. You have to consider what you're trying to rank for, how strong your brand (and website) is nationally, and how tough the competition is locally. Good luck ranking for 'coffee shop' in New York City - but ranking for 'coffee shop' in Rural, Ohio should be a bit easier.