See How to Easily Manage your Local Business Listings
One critical yet sometimes unappetizing part of running a local business is managing your local listings. The hours involved may not be exactly what you had in mind, nevertheless, making sure your listings are not only correct but aiding your business are many times the difference between local success or failure.
In some ways managing your local listings is more work than a site serving globally. You need to make sure all your data is correct for each location and this can be problematic. Let’s examine some of the essentials necessary for good local listing management.
The basics: getting your local listings in order
Here are some of the basics you need to take care of before trying to be a local superstar.
- Make sure your business information is consistent across and all platforms you presently have in existence. One mistake here can damage everything. This means business names, addresses, phone number, websites and social media.
- Be sure you are reachable. A phone number is a must-have for a local business, even if it only leads to a voicemail. (please don’t)
- Completely fill out any profiles you have on sites that have your local listings. There is very little that engenders mistrust more than a business who doesn’t want to tell you anything about themselves.
Taking local listings a step beyond
After you’ve got your business listings on your sites and local directories finished, it’s time to look into what you can reap from the many and varied local business sites created to help you get noticed. Many of these won’t charge a fee, but there are a few that are worth spending a few dollars on. What follows is a few ideas to get you going.
- Ensure that you have a local presence in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- Look at local directories like Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze, and Factual as aggregators like these provide data to mobile companies and search engines alike.
- Look into listings with properties like Yelp, Yext, Foursquare, Facebook. You’ll find that their local packages can be less than you might have thought, and can make a huge difference.
- Use tools like Bright Local, Moz Local or Whitespark to monitor your citations and track your progress. This is going to be an ongoing process, as you’ll want to keep getting more and more citations that will give your business even greater reputation.