97% of the businesses in the USA are small businesses. The vast majority of those are a local business where people do business with them in their office or within their city or town.
As we all know, the online world changes constantly. New social media platforms pop up every day. Google keeps changing the rules on search engine optimization. Did you know that Google and the other search engines also rely heavily on business databases to know about your business? Your customers are already searching for you, but unfortunately, most businesses don’t have their online listings set up correctly.
There are MANY online business listings out there, as well as business databases that need to have consistent information. Google relies on these sources of information to know whether to serve up your listing or someone else’s when someone is searching for your type of business.
If the data from these sources is inconsistent, then the search engines have a hard time knowing which is correct. Maybe your phone number changed, or you moved your office. Did you go back and fix all the online systems? Probably not, or you missed a few.
Worse, were you even aware that you needed to do this? Did you know that you need to set up your listings on ALL the sites, like Yelp, Google+, Yahoo and Bing, and many other sites that all feed back into the three big business databases (Axciom, Yellow Pages Marketing Association, and InfoUSA)?
It’s a daunting task to hunt all these systems down, create accounts, update them and manage them. What happens if you’re a real estate business with multiple locations? Then the problem gets even worse.
Ugh.
I even had a friend whose competitor went out and created a bogus listing and put some bogus information out there. He couldn’t get control of the listing to change it, and it showed up high in the search engines! You must do this.
Fortunately, there’s an easier way. MUCH easier.
In my classes I always talk about GetListed.org. They had a free tool that allowed you to search on your business and see what’s out in the wild. They no longer exist, but the good thing is that they got acquired by Moz.com, and it’s now called Moz Local. They’ve done a great job of updating the interface and showing you what’s going on with your business listings.
Moz Local Example
Click the “Check My Listing Score” button, type in your business name and zip code. (I’m not sure if it works in countries outside the USA – please let me know in the comments below.)
They then give you a dashboard so you can see what listings you’ve claimed, which ones are missing, and which have inconsistent information. The listings include:
- Google+
- Foursquare
- Yelp
- Superpages
- Infogroup (database)
- Localeze (now Neustar)
- YP
- Factual
- Citysearch
- Best of the Web
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Hotfrog
- Acxiom (database)
It’s a hefty list. How did your business score? Leave us a comment below and tell us.
Moz is also offering a way to get your listings consistent across all systems with one button. For $49/year per listing, they’ll do the heavy lifting and post all your data into all systems. Is it worth the 49 bucks? I don’t know. I haven’t tested it yet (and I’m not trying to sell you on their services either – you can do it all by hand for free, and I like free!) To me, though, that’s a reasonable price to save you the aggravation of several hours of create account/copy/paste/save, so I may just give it a try.
Have you tried it?
I will give it a try. $49 is nothing if you think about it, just one sell covers it.
Thank you Thomas for pointing it out.
Christopher
To be clear to everyone who reads this, I am NOT endorsing Moz nor suggesting that people purchase the $49 tool. That is not the point of the article. The point is that business owners must manage their online business listings which exist in many places they may not have thought about. All of it can be done for no cost, and the Moz Local tool is just a free tool that can help facilitate that. I’m not a fan of paying for position on the business listing services.
I think you’re absolutely right about focusing on online listings. There’s a lot of value in completing your profile in just about every business listing site you can think of. Like some people have mentioned, just a few sales cover the cost of adding your listing to a site. That’s a really good way to think about it. I also like the graphs provided in the article showing what your potential increase in traffic/sales could look like with business listings.
For anyone who runs a business, it is important to get your business out there. Like you said, business owners must be able to manage their listings which occur in many different places. Getting those listings out should be done by a professional or someone who knows what they are doing. You wouldn’t want to put your business out there and see no increases.
Thanks for sharing this! It really would be nice if there were businesses meant to manage the online functions of an existing company. There are a lot of businesses out there that aren’t too familiar with common Internet practices, such as posting on business listings. However, all of these little actions are so important in making your business successful, so they need to be done!
Yes, I agree with you that online listings set up correctly in Business listing sites help to grow business. You have shared nice business listing sites in your post; you can also visit this new website http://www.bestofconcierge.com for listing your local business information.