Brick-and-mortar retailers can struggle to balance local and e-commerce search engine optimization. A brick-and-mortar store wants to target people in a geographic area and drive in-person visits, while an e-commerce website targets buyers anywhere.
However, different goals do not necessarily mean there is a problem.
Imagine a furniture retailer with dozens of stores in California and Florida. The CEO might report to the relevant marketing team that e-commerce accounts for less than 20% of total revenue. The next day, she might dream that a new store in Miami doesn’t show up in a local Google search.
It feels like a conflict to me – from link building to content marketing. But they don’t have to. The marketing team can balance priorities by planning daily 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 SEO and eCommerce SEO.
Technical SEO focuses on site speed, URL structure, microdata and general browsing. The same techniques 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 often work hand-in-hand to ensure a website ranks for key products, categories and locations. There is no reason why local and e-commerce cannot live in harmony.
Off-page SEO includes backlinks, brand mentions, and completing and maintaining business profiles that add to local packages and Google Maps results. Off-page efforts fit naturally into local optimization, even if it’s focused on e-commerce.
In action
Sharing tasks for ecommerce and local SEO helps both. Here are priorities, workflows and automation to streamline your workload.
Prioritize setup and integration. Many SEO tasks require an initial time-consuming effort followed by less intensive maintenance.
For example, optimizing a Google My Business page requires claiming, adding contact information, images and videos, and encouraging reviews—a lot of upfront work. Keeping your My Business page up to date is much easier.
Similarly, a furniture retailer with dozens of stores may want to set up location-specific landing pages on their website. Each page will include local store images, a Google map, store hours, and a greeting from the store manager. Creating a site requires more effort than maintaining it.
So, the marketing team prioritizing the setup builds the SEO infrastructure to drive online product sales and drive physical traffic.
Develop standard operating procedures. Many omnichannel retailers approach SEO by project. The CEO says he will promote the new store in Miami and the team is focused on that effort.
Unfortunately, this kind of project-based approach has three potential problems. It is (i) reactionary rather than strategic; (ii) creates redundancy as each project starts over, and (iii) overlooks critical maintenance.
A better approach is to create a set of standard operating procedures such as (i) how blog articles are optimized, (ii) an SEO process for adding products or pages, and (iii) a maintenance and update plan.
Use AI to create content. Working on e-commerce and local SEO at the same time requires more content on the page.
Developing this extra content may be relatively easy in 2025. Imagine our furniture store. His content team could create a blog post focused on the keyword phrase “top Scandinavian design trends for 2025.”
An initial draft written by a human could be challenged by an AI that would generate regional variations such as “top Scandinavian design trends for South Florida.”
The primary article would serve as a hub connecting and receiving links from each region’s pages.
Automate repetitive tasks. Finally, automation can speed up many aspects of SEO maintenance and improvement. Zapier, generative AI platforms, and similar tools can quickly complete repetitive functions and even run SEO audits.
Basics
My motivation for this article was a real consultation with a furniture chain. Instead of the overall goal, the business focused on the differences between local SEO and eCommerce SEO.
Although attracting online shoppers and driving store traffic may seem different, the fundamentals of SEO are the same.