July 25, 2024

DICK’S Sporting Goods Dominates Local SEO Through Localized Store Pages

DICK’S Sporting Goods, the leading omnichannel retailer with 700 locations across the U.S., had lofty goals to bolster its local SEO efforts to drive more athletes to its stores. However, it’s challenging to optimize each store’s local, digital presence to reach more customers in a customized way. With so many locations, how do you ensure your teams are working as efficiently as possible and can draw meaning from large amounts of data? DICK’S Sporting Goods aims to provide customers with a personalized experience for each location’s webpage, to improve and streamline the digital retail experience for athletes searching for a store. Its team needed a platform with a process to manage consumer interaction data and multiple teams across the organization within localized search operations to make that happen. The answer was SOCi.

DICK’S Sporting Goods partnered with SOCi to develop a strategic, targeted SEO strategy utilizing the SOCi Local Pages product to optimize its stores’ local pages, with the ability to manage each page through a single login and streamline cross-team collaboration. Simultaneously, the retailer uses the SOCi Listings tool to ensure each Google Business Profile listing includes a direct link to a particular store’s local page, which accurately mirrors the listing’s store hours, address, curbside pickup hours, and more.

“Partnering with SOCi has made a difference in how we are showing up in search, increasing the views on our local pages and making them easier to find for local athletes. When we can personalize local store pages at scale with what our athletes in those areas want and need, everyone wins.”

Pat Daley, Vice President of Performance & eComm Marketing, DICK’S Sporting Goods

SOCi is an extension of the retailer’s marketing team and, together with DICK’S Sporting Goods, collaborates with the brand to optimize all things local. Through localized title tags, keyword inclusion, banner testing, and internal linking models, the teams successfully optimized each of the store pages and explored local campaigns around back-to-school and holiday shopping times to drive athletes to stores. In addition, SOCi helped the DICK’S Sporting Goods team bring brand stories to life on local store pages and maximize page templates to showcase the retailer’s initiatives like House of Sport, highlighting various in-store experiences athletes can enjoy, including rock climbing walls, tracks, hockey rinks, and more.

Results

Using SOCi to focus on local SEO has driven organic visibility for high-ticket items at DICK’S Sporting Goods such as kayaks, bikes, and treadmills. Sporting events like March Madness and the NBA Finals were opportunities for local team optimization on store pages to drive in-store traffic for fans to secure their favorite team’s merchandise, providing extra value and authority from the retailer surrounding championships.

The store pages have consistently ranked higher and higher for non-brand keyword searches, or Discovery searches, with pages seeing a 74% increase in 2022 compared to 2021. Further, within the same time, 97% of DICK’S Sporting Goods locations have been included in the Google 3-Pack when searching non-brand keywords like “baseball stores,” “golf stores,” and “sporting goods stores.” Also within the same period, the retailer had a 16% increase in website visits.