How much does online visibility impact offline foot traffic? SOCi has calculated a .72 correlation between the two. In other words, the strength of local presence for brick-and-mortar retailers correlates to their volume of foot traffic at an average rate of 72 percent. This meaningfully links the two factors.
To put this into perspective, 100 percent (or a decimal value of 1.0) would indicate a direct one-to-one correlation between these two factors. And a zero value would obviously represent no correlation at all. So at .72, there’s a strong correlation that buttresses SOCi’s claims on the importance of online visibility.
These figures also support our recent coverage of a livestream hosted by SOCi and Placer.ai. To level set, that discussion focused on the same link between online visibility (calculated by SOCi’s Local Visibility Index) and offline foot traffic (calculated by Placer.ai’s platform). Together, they close the loop.
Now we can back that up with a number – to the tune of 72 percent. This not only supports SOCi’s ongoing narrative around the importance of online visibility – and the benchmarks to achieve and optimize it – but it quantifies a longstanding thesis that has orbited the Localogyverse for decades.
“Retailers that lose visibility tend to lose visits,” said SOCi Sr. Director of Market Insights, Damian Rollison. “For marketing leaders accountable for store performance, this closes a longstanding measurement gap. Local visibility is not a brand metric. It is a demand signal that shows up at the door, and it can now be benchmarked, managed, and tied to revenue.”
Tactical Mechanics
So what does all of this mean strategically? As we teased in last week’s webinar coverage, there are tactics to elevate online visibility and thus offline conversions. Following the evolving ways that search engines and AI engines operate, these tactics include accuracy and specificity in online presence.
But to go deeper into those tactics and structure them more formally, let’s dive into each. This is how SOCi explains the main tactical mechanics of online local visibility today (including some paraphrasing and editorializing from us). These targets should be at the top of the list for multi-location brands.
1. Accuracy
Updated, complete and accurate business details are table stakes, or the”price of entry” says SOCi. This includes everything from hours of operation to locations to services offered. If these elements are wrong or missing, search and AI engines won’t route customers to your door, SOCi asserts.
As for action items, SOCi recommends auditing listing accuracy across Google, Yelp, and Facebook for every location, not a sample. It also says that multi-location brands should close coverage gaps. Unclaimed profiles forfeit both search placement and AI inclusion. So do this early and often.
2. Differentiation
Because AI engines synthesize and summarize the information they find, the emerging art of AIO and GEO require specificity and differentiation. Be explicit and granular about the features or products that make a brand worth choosing. Brands that neglect these tactics will be left out.
As for action items, SOCi advises multi-location brands to publish location-level content that names names. Call out the brands’ differentiators. That can include unique services, product-level specificity, community presence, awards won, or anything else that signals uniqueness.
3. Reputation
Ratings and reviews were always important in SEO. But in a world increasingly colonized by AI engines, they’re more of a survival imperative. They now stand as more of a gating factor than an opportunity to get ahead, or a “threshold for inclusion in AI recommendations,” as SOCi puts it.
As noted last week, businesses can only do so much in marketing efforts to raise star ratings. But focusing on the things they can do, SOCi says actively solicit and respond to reviews at the location level. Monitor rating distribution by store; one weak market can suppress visibility across a region.
So there you have it. Though this is a well defined and rigorous endeavor by SOCi, it inherently tracks a dynamic and quickly-evolving technology. So we (and SOCi, we presume) will continue tracking these visibility dynamics closely as they evolve and adapt. Stay tuned as that story continues to unfold.
Here more from SOCi’s Kaci McBride, at StreetFight Live.
