If national brands had a local website, they would 'be available' in search results when their prospective customers searched locally. Instead—except for a few exceptions including auto retailers—I do not see reseller results associated with the national brands they sell.

My son likes DC Shoes and is in need of some new shoes, so I did a quick search on Google Maps for DC Shoes. Yes. I could buy these online, but I'm not sure of my kid's shoe size or ultimate size, so I want to  This was my result:


First of all, it is interesting to note that Zumiez—listed on the DC Shoes national site as there retailer in my local area—doesn’t even show up in my results.

Second, the DC Shoes national site doesn’t show up as a local organic result, and likely won’t based on Google’s introduction of Google Places, a strategy to make local search results more relevant surely based on sites listing local addresses.

Immediately I notice "DC" is listed in the Journey description, so I click on that store. In this instance, I see a rotating DC Shoes ad on their home page. Good for DC Shoes. If I am determined to buy DC Shoes. I’ll go to their store and pick up some shoes.

However, if I am on the fence, Journeys gives me a variety of other shoe options to consider, and I might be persuaded, which would be a shame for DC Shoes who had my attention.

Now consider this. If DC Shoes employed Balihoo Microsites, they could have a 4-5 page web site for every one of their thousands of resellers. This sounds like a great undertaking, but in reality, it would be straight forward. Using Balihoo, they set up the master site template, decide what content is locked down and what is editable by their resellers and then push the template out to resellers with step-by-step instructions.

Next, they would inform their local resellers how to add their store location and web site to Google Places. Alternatively, if they were corporate owned stores, they would use Google Places Bulk Upload to load up to 10,000 locations at once.

In summary, a microsite strategy does several things for the DC Shoes brand:

1. Gives brands a local presence that will show up in local searches.
2. Allows brands to continue their influence further into the buyer consideration stages.
3. Through powerful web analytics, brands would have insight insight into consumer search behavior for individual stores, regions and in a variety of aggregates regionally, nationally and internationally.
4. Becomes a platform for a variety of interesting things (local consumer loyalty efforts, local promotions, lead generation).

Brands that adopt this strategy have a first mover’s advantage against competitors. As an example, consider Old Navy’s advantage jumping on with Groupon. Similarly, a brand that jumps on board with Balihoo Microsites, could roll out this strategy to all their reseller sites and be at the leading edge of increased consumer trends to search locally.