Written by Location, Location, Location is the regularly quoted mantra for calculating the value of a retail position. A straightforward premise states that the better the location of your premises then the more sales you will achieve. What defines location? Simply put it is the amount of people, potential buyers, who will see the shop and be in a position to purchase from it. In business this is businesses with the maximum footfall produce the biggest revenue and therefore demand the largest rents and so on.
Although there are obviously some exceptions to this where the products or services on offer are very specialist and then the unit in question becomes a destination store – but even in these cases there is a case to argue that destination visitors are more likely to call in to a shop if the district around it has other opportunities ( i.e. more places to shop or browse).
So, the budding retail model is the Internet where location is immaterial, or is it ? No doubt you cannot actually move to a healthier cyber area, but you can by Improving Search Engine Ranking ensure that the people who visit your site ( and for site read “shop”) increases. In essence you are improving your footfall, which will have precisely the same outcome in cyber space as it does on the High Street as we know it.
There are yet more parallels. Retail Agents cost retail units by working out the most important area of the unit – the window. They work out the amount of frontage a unit has and call it Zone A. When describing the value of that unit it is described “in terms of Zone A” (ITZA).
Zone A in cyber space is the Google Frontpage, let us call it “in terms of Google Frontpage” ( ITGF). In the cyber retail world if you have a Guaranteed Top 10 Search Engine Ranking then you have a site with high worth generating high visitor numbers, you are “on pitch”.
In order to get a site with a high ITGF rating then most people will employ a reputable Search Engine Placement Service who in effect are the web versions of the high streets retail agencies. The responsibility of a Search Engine Placement Service is to ensure that the “location” of your site has a high ITGF value. They do this by a variety of marketing strategies but basically they recognise the market, recognise the competition and the technology and direct the buyers to your shop. They are able to “virtually” alter the location of the unit to make the most of the footfall and selling opportunities and they do all that without the need for a removal truck.