A business directory competes against the marketing muscle of big players among the competitors. Always the budget business is the winner which usually walks on a tightrope between the SEO budget and its strategy.
Business listings are boosters of SEO ranking.
A local business listing is an important part of local SEO, however, it's the lifeline of a solid SEO strategy.
What is Local Search?
If you want local customers to find your business, May it be a restaurant or a plumber, Local search gives you results which will drop you to the exact location of your needs.
Local search drives you closer to your brand and that holds the local SEO together.
Get more eyeballs in your search results
The search for restaurants gives you a variety of choices to pick and choose from the business you would like to visit after checking the reviews.
Get Directions to your business
You are always curious to know where the business is located and Google will rescue you and show you the directions to hit the right business location through its directions feature from the map.
What is a Business Listing?
The term business listing explains every bit of information that is relevant to your business in an array of business directories.
Fewer details are required for a business listing to help your customer to get in touch with your business website URL or connect directly over message or Whatsapp the owner of the business.
Just Google it
Google plays a vital role in displaying the best search results of a business listing. The Google algorithm is responsible to display your business first. Google decides, whether your local listing is top of the heap or bottom of the barrel. Irrespective of the fact whether you are a local business or a multinational corporation that wants a local footprint, in order to rank on Google’s local search results, you need to maximize the use of local listing.
How do Business Listings work?
Business listings are high ranked in Google search engines especially Google Places and Google+. You get a better idea of the business with the detailing of the business with hours of operations, reviews, photos, and more.
Google not only gets information straight from the horse’s mouth, which is the business owner; but also finds business info from sites such as Infogroup, Neustar, The LocalData Company, and others.
Google can also pull data from various sources including industry-specific sites, business directories, internet yellow pages, government entities/institutions (local, state, and federal), etc.
Your business name, address, phone number, etc. on an online source like Yelp, Ask Local Pages, etc. is called a citation. The idea is to gather as many citations as you can to boost your business’s visibility on local search engines. Google indexes the data with the citations you get and the business is listed at the top.
How do you create a business listing?
Here’s what you need to do to create a business listing on all the sites you have found:
Basic information of a business to create a doc: This listing will contain all information about your business that most citation sources will ask for including:
- Business Name: Name of Business Owner.
- Email Address: The business email address that helps customers get in touch with the business.
- Company/Business Name: Exact name of the company, especially as it appears on Google Plus.
- Address: Complete address of the company.
- State: The name of the ‘State’ that the company resides in.
- 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.
- Phone Number: The local phone number of your business as per the location.
- Category/Sub Category: The category your business belongs to; get into the specifics — work out your subcategory as well.
- Services or Products: The service industry your business belongs to/ products it is selling.
- Offers and Coupons: The business offerings and coupons to redeem at discounts.
- Description: Information about your business that describes your business in detail.
Additional information,
- Toll-Free Number: Also known as the ‘800’ number, if your business offers toll-free services.
- Website URL: Some business directories ask for the URL of the company’s website.
- Facebook URL: The URL of your company’s Facebook page.
- Twitter Handle: Information about the company’s Twitter handle.
- Instagram Handle: Posts and pictures of the business page.
- Whatsapp number: Get information directly on your mobile.
What Google expects you to Optimize your Business Listings?
Google is your friend and never think that Google doesn’t help you in search.
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.
This boosts traffic and sales, both online and in-store.
So, how do you optimize your listings? It’s not rocket science, and that’s precisely why people take it easy.
Here are a few points which you should consider:
#1 — Follow the Guidelines
Read the quality guidelines for Google Places before you take the next step. They are quite comprehensive and tell you everything that you need to know about creating a good listing. It makes three important points, namely:
- You must be authorized to manage the listing.
- Make sure your business information is accurate both online and offline.
- Location information is the hero of your business listing — Make sure it’s precise.
#2 — Add as much Information as Possible
More information on the places page means a better experience for the user ergo, a pat on your back from Google; so go ahead and fill up all required text fields.
Google and its search algorithm will compare your listing with a similar place listing; if your listing contains more information, it will be ranked higher in SERPs.
So make sure your website URL, physical address, hours of operation, business description, and every piece of information that makes your business more appealing to the shoppers is mentioned in the listing.
#3 — Categorize your Business
The reality is businesses actually fail to choose the right category that describes their business best. This damages the relevance of their listing, which drives home the importance of picking the right category for your business. Don’t take the easy way out and pick a general category, zeroing in on specific categories will serve your needs best.
#4 — Describe Your Business
Your business description is the single most important factor that can determine CTR, so don’t give it short shrift. Your business description is your opportunity to talk directly to your customers and its products/services are best suited for their needs.
#5 — Presence on High-Quality Listing Sites
Google Places is good but so is Yelp and so is Yahoo Local and so are all sites in this list. The key is to get local search citations from all relevant high-quality sites out there. Google will aggregate information about your business from all over the web, so making sure your business is listed on as many listing websites as possible makes sense.
And yes all those tips about optimizing your listings, you need to follow these tips on all sites. Think of them as listing best practices.
So, that’s it then. That’s local business listings defanged, totally anatomized, and hopefully, simplified for everybody who wants to leverage their immense, and quite often, the hidden potential for business benefit.
The wait is over…
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