Brick-and-click retailers can struggle to balance local and ecommerce search engine optimization. A physical store wants to target folks in a geographic area and drive in-person visits, while an ecommerce site aims for buyers anywhere.
Different goals, however, don’t necessarily mean there is a problem.
Imagine a furniture retailer with dozens of stores in California and Florida. The CEO could message the marketing team concerned that ecommerce represents less than 20% of total revenue. Her concern the next day could be a new Miami store not appearing on a local Google search.
It feels like a conflict — from link building to content marketing. But it doesn’t have to be. A brick-and-click marketing team can balance the priorities by planning day-to-day SEO activities and developing processes.
3-Part SEO
Marketers often say that SEO has three areas of focus: technical, on-page, and off-page.
Omnichannel marketing teams balance local and ecommerce SEO.
Technical SEO focuses on site speed, URL structure, microdata, and general crawlability. The same technical practices that work for local SEO also help promote products.
On-page SEO includes keywords, HTML headings, images, content, and internal linking.
Teams of content marketers and on-page optimizers frequently work hand-in-glove to ensure a site ranks for key products, categories, and locations. There is no reason local and ecommerce efforts cannot live in harmony.
Off-page SEO includes backlinks, brand mentions, and filling out and maintaining business profiles, which feed into Google’s local pack and map results. Off-page efforts fit naturally into local optimization even if the focus is ecommerce.
In Action
Sharing tasks for ecommerce and local SEO helps both. Here are priorities, workflows, and automation to streamline the load.
Prioritize setup and integration. Many SEO tasks require initial time-consuming effort followed by less intense maintenance.
For example, optimizing a Google My Business page requires claiming, adding contact info, images, and videos, and encouraging reviews — a lot of upfront work. Keeping the My Business page fresh is much easier.
Similarly, the furniture retailer with dozens of stores might want to set up location-specific landing pages on its website. Each page will have images from the local store, a Google map, store hours, and a greeting from the store manager. Building the pages takes more effort than maintaining them.
Thus a marketing team that prioritizes setup is building the SEO infrastructure to manage selling products online and driving physical foot traffic.
Develop standard operating procedures. Many omnichannel retailers approach SEO by the project. The CEO says to promote the new Miami store, and the team focuses on that effort.
Unfortunately, this sort of project-first approach has three potential problems. It’s (i) reactionary instead of strategic; (ii) creates redundancy, as every project starts anew, and (iii) overlooks critical maintenance.
A better approach is to build a set of standard operating procedures, such as (i) how blog articles are optimized, (ii) the SEO process for adding products or pages, and (iii) a schedule for maintenance and updates.
Use AI to generate content. Working on ecommerce and local SEO simultaneously requires more on-page content.
Developing that extra content may be fairly easy in 2025. Imagine our furniture store. Its content team might produce a blog post targeting the keyword phrase “top Scandinavian design trends for 2025.”
The initial human-written draft could be an AI prompt, generating regional variations like “top Scandinavian design trends for South Florida.”
The primary article would serve as a hub linking to and receiving links from pages of each region.
Automate repetitive tasks. Finally, automation can expedite many aspects of SEO maintenance and improvements. Zapier, generative AI platforms, and similar tools can quickly complete repeat functions and even run SEO audits.
Fundamentals
My impetus for this article was a real-world consultation with a furniture chain. The business focused on the differences between local and ecommerce SEO instead of the overall goal.
Although attracting online buyers and driving in-store traffic may seem different, the SEO fundamentals are the same.