Business Listings are Mobile Friendly: Business listings are crucial to mobile SEO efforts. You can find two great reads on the subjecthereandhere.
Enables your Business to Show Up on Google Maps: Put your business on the map figuratively and literally. This is one of the best ways for letting people know where your business is located and getting customers to your store.
Because a lot of people search for products online: According to a multichannel survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), more than 80% of respondents said they conduct online research on products before buying them. Wouldn’t you like your business to turn up in their search? That’s why business listings.
Better Deliverables: Local SEO exposes your business to people who have immediate need of your products and services. This immediacy leads to better conversions, sales and profits.
Local Listings Beats Organic Listings in Prominence:Local business listings are displayed firston SERPs followed by organic results. This in itself is huge advantage for businesses.
One of the Easiest Way towards Local Visibility and Business Profitability: Finally, do it because it’s easy. Do it right and you get disproportionate results to the amount of time you spend in creating these business listings. And we are talking positive results here.
Before you begin creating a business listing, you will need to find the right citation sites. How do you go about doing this? No, this activity won’t ask you to invest a lot of time and effort into the proceedings, far from it actually.
Let me first clarify this isn’t a plug for Yext or Moz Local; I just think they are two great services that are simplifying the process of building listings.
Yext: Yext answers a problem that most people have with business listings. If all directories need similar information, why is it necessary to submit to each one of them separately? Good question, Yext thinks so too and offers you services that allow you to submit business information to more than 50 directories at the same time. These include all the big guns out there and the great benefit of Yext is that submissions happen immediately and you can even update information quickly. Just make the update once and see it reflected across all your listings.
Moz Local: With this service, you can submit or update business listings to the biggest data aggregators, Foursquare and 3 business directories. The biggest benefit of Moz Local is that you can run a listing audit to check where you have listings, where you don’t, their completeness, incompleteness and duplication.
Other services along the same lines include BrightLocal, Whitespark and Universal Business Listing (UBL). Yes, I know what you are thinking, why Moz Local and Yext, why not the other three? You are right, compare the various services on offer, and pick the one that suits you best.
Mix the old methods with the new. You’ve already tried the newer methods for finding sources for citation, so how about going back to the good old days of searching for services on Google.
Enter phrases like ‘ local business listings sites’, ‘competitors names and/or address’, ‘a business name, phone, address or anything else that you believe will help you zero in on names of local business directories.
If you have searched for local business listing sites, SERPs will display a list of listing directories; if you have searched for business names or phone numbers, SERPs will display business names which are listed on local business directories.
Say you are a Burger joint in New York, trying to looking for the right citation sources. Who’s your competitor? Burger King is one of them. So enter ‘Burger King, New York’ in Google to find the right listings.
All you need to do is scroll through at least 10-20 pages to get a list of sites that you can add to your citation database.
Something else you can do is take the help of one of the most famous Google operators in the “history of the search engine” – ‘RELATED’. Use this operator before the name of a listing directory and it will show you a list of directories similar to the one that you have entered.
By now you must have found tons of sites for business listing, but if that’s not enough, here are a few links that will complete the job for you:
There are plenty of such lists that you can find on the web and many of them are updated regularly. Keep adding to the directories your business is listed on, the more the merrier. We’ve already talked about how Google fetches data from all high quality listings and uses it to rank your site. Missing out on a reputed directory for local citation is simply not an option.
Yellowpage Pakistan(Important note: Once you are done collecting your business listing resources, arrange these sites in increasing order of importance based on their PR and DA.)
Validate Accuracy of Existing Information: Do you really have all the information about your business? Sounds like a stupid question, doesn’t it? But, bear with me for a bit.
Your business will already have the necessary information up on its website, Google Plus page and various online and offline resources. The information on your business listings must co-relate with information already available about your business. The accuracy and consistency of your Name of Business, Address, and Phone Number (NAP format) is critical for making the most of your business listings. It should be consistent and accurate everywhere that such information is available.
Start Creating an Information Doc: This document will contain all information about your business that most citation sources will ask for including:
Zip Code: This is the five-digit code that marks the geographical location of your business in the U.S. It’s also known as a postal code in other countries.
Preparing a comprehensive document means you don’t have to go looking for the information a directory wants, you have it all worked out in your document.
Now, I know what you are thinking, or at least what some of you are thinking. The process of building a citation is so complex, can it be simplified?
Now, I know what you are thinking, or at least what some of you are thinking. The process of building a citation is so complex, can it be simplified?
One of the tools you can use for simplifying the process of accurately filling information in a business listing is the popular ‘form filling’ tool – RoboForm. It’s an easy-to-use tool that enables you to create an identity for each of the different business locations you have. Spend a few minutes to fill out all the information you want to build citations and use RoboForm to ‘autofill’ this information across plenty of submission sites.
Another tool that you can use is InFormEnter, an add-on for Firefox that does the same job as RoboForm, but the former is free. Get InFormEnter add-on for Firefox here.
InFormEnter adds a small clickable icon next to every input field; you only need to insert the item you want in the field, without typing. Configure it to display business information that you will be required to regularly enter while creating a listing.
While this might not be as comprehensive as RoboForm, it serves the purpose. InFormEnter will appear every time you open a citation site, when you click the field that you need to fill.
Creation of local business listings is made quicker with the use of these tools, especially if you go about it in a well-planned manner. But, as a business owner, it’s your duty to optimize these listings. Optimizing in this case refers to making sure your listings are as accurate and as complete as it is possible to make them.
But this is only if you do what it wants you to do. And, it makes a better friend than an enemy, so make sure you’re always on the right side of this search engine. Yes, even when it comes to business listings.
To understand the need for optimizing your listing, you must understand Google’s need for quality. It wants to make the world of search a better place for users by providing the most accurate results possible. Your job is to offer potential customers (not Google) the most complete, accurate and meaningful information about your local business. When you are doing it for your customers, you are essentially doing it for Google.
You need to make your listing as compelling to searchers as possible so that Google is able to retrieve relevant data and display it to your customers, right when they’re searching for services or products that you are selling.
Make no move before you read the quality guidelines for Google Places. They are quite comprehensive and tell you everything that you need to know about creating a good listing. It makes three important points, namely: