Yellow Pages - Fingers may still be “doing the walking” on smartphone screens, but searchers no longer need to thumb through a heavy print directory or even to be at home. A consumer located anywhere is connected with any business in town instantly via local listings on major platforms like Google Business Profile, Facebook, or Yelp. While some business models still see good ROI from print Yellow Pages directories, it is costly, whereas inclusion in most of the online local business data indexes is free. Plus, the online audience is vast, with two-thirds of the world being online and about 70% percent of US residents owning smartphones. The basic data within your local business listing is a dominant driver of traffic and revenue.
Print Marketing - The taglines, descriptions, attributes, driving directions, coupons, menus, reviews, and owner responses included on many top-tier local business listings do all of the heavy lifting of traditional print marketing. From a single complete listing, a consumer can discover a business, learn where it is, what it does, what special offers it runs, who likes it, and how well the company takes care of its customers. It’s everything you could fit into a brochure but in an accessible, digital format.
Radio/TV Advertising - On local listings that support images, video, virtual tours, call buttons, and links to social media profiles, a consumer can both see and hear a business from the comfort of their cell phone. What’s more, they can click to call, chat, or follow social media links to interact with the business directly — something a radio ad can’t really provide, and for which TV still needs to catch up. A robust local listing provides a thorough experience in the blink of an eye.
Make sure customers find you with the power of Moz Local, our local SEO & reputation management tool. See how accurate your local listings are online with your free listing score:
No competitive local business would give up the powerful — and largely free — advertising potential of online listings, but it’s important to maximize your ROI by allocating staff hours efficiently. There are two considerations here:
You should determine which platforms it makes sense to be listed on. It’s not a best practice to devote hundreds of hours to getting listed on every possible search engine, index, or app, just because they exist. Instead, hit the majors (Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, Apple Maps, etc.) and then hand-select other platforms that are highly relevant to your company’s industry or geography. By getting listed only in quality places, you won’t squander sweat equity.
Creating local business listings can be toilsome and boring. It’s exciting to get your best data together in a spreadsheet, but it isn’t all that fun to enter that data over and over again into the forms of the various platforms. This has led to the rise of automated solutions for active location data management like Moz Local. These solutions allow you to fill out a single form, distributing your data to high-quality platforms and continuously monitoring it for progress and any changes. You can always supplement your automated push to the majors with a small investment of time in building listings on geo/industry-specific platforms, but the fact is that automation lightens the load, reduces human error, and leaves your team free to focus on more creative projects.
Whether you decide to take a fully manual approach or a semi- or fully automated one, the most important thing to remember is that local business listings are extremely powerful.
You’ve heard the horror stories of residential numbers getting accidentally published on print Yellow Pages ads, resulting in a whole year of unwanted phone calls for the homeowner and none for the business. Online business listings are no different, and inconsistent or bad data can misdirect consumers and negatively impact transactions in just the same way.
Because of this, no local business owner can afford to neglect the data published about his company on the Internet. The most sensible thing is to take control of that data and manage it on an ongoing basis to ensure both its consistency and its spread across the web.
In Real Life: Local SEO Tactics - In this course, local business owners learn how to get the most out of their SEO strategy using skills and knowledge they already have.
“Supersize your business profits with Local SEO”. That’s the buzz words these days, and you will struggle to find a business, irrespective of its size, not using local SEO to drive visitors to its physical location/s, as well as, increase online traffic. The reason why your neighborhood mom and pop store comes up in your SERPs while searching for grocery stores in your neighborhood is local SEO.
With local SEO, your business has better chances of being found by 85% of consumers who use the internet to search for local goods and services. Nobody, in their right minds, will want to miss out on these customers and you will find most businesses set aside a substantial budget for local SEO.
Your local SEO campaign cannot survive without local business listings. One can even go so far as to say that it can’t exist without business listings.
This is important for businesses who cannot hope to compete against the marketing muscle of big players in their niche. These ‘big boys’ have the resources to leverage any and all tactics to come up trumps on SERPs, while small businesses usually walk a tightrope between their SEO budget and SEO strategy. Many times, it is the budget that wins hands down.
For these businesses, a local business listing is like a gift that keeps giving. Unfortunately, people (read internet marketers) see these listings as just another SEO tactic that needs to be implemented; but it’s time we change the way we look at local business listings. They are not an important part of local SEO; they by and large are THE lifeline of a solid SEO strategy.
Before we get deep into the workings of local business listings, it is important to see them through the prism of local SEO.
If you want local customers to find your business, huge helpings of local SEO are a must. Local SEO is for everybody. You could be a local restaurant, dentist, plumber, electrician, mom and pop store, web design firm, law firm, home based business or something else. If you have a physical address at a particular location and you want people to go there, local SEO acts like a “transport” that gets people to this location.
So you are a tattoo store owner in the SF Bay Area….lots of competition….don’t fret…with local SEO you can own your geographical niche.
Yellow Pages RawalpindiA mom and pop store in Anaheim, CA….. Can’t attract enough customers… Local SEO will help you attract more customers than Disneyland… just kidding…. but it will work.
A rock band in New York….. the locals will queue up to hire you for “gigs”… courtesy local SEO (provided you are actually good)
Local SEO takes customers closer to your brand. Remember the six degrees of separation? Well those degrees all but disappear with local SEO.
The search for ‘burger places in Manhattan’ yields the following results (when I wrote this piece, results may be different now, but I trust Shake Shack’s ability to stay at the top of SERPs):
You get those directions and you can’t miss Shake Shack for the world, yes, even if you are really bad at following directions.
When it comes to a local business nobody really wants to know who’s running the place; they want to know its operation times, the reviews it’s received, price and any other relevant info to make sure they’ve hit upon the right local business for their needs.
I am sure this has piqued your interest in business listings. Great! Now we can begin exploring this facet of Local SEO in earnest.
I am sure this has piqued your interest in business listings. Great! Now we can begin exploring this facet of Local SEO in earnest.
The phrase ‘local business listing’ is self-explanatory. It is your business’s listing on a range of online directories that contains every bit of information relevant for your business.
Through the course of a consumer’s search for locally available products and services, if a search engine finds your listing appropriate, it will be displayed on SERPs showing the physical location of your business on a map along with other critical information that will help this consumer get in touch with your business such as website URL, information about products and/or services, phone number etc.
Google wants to make search results even more relevant and wants to satisfy the requirements of users who want to find and compare local businesses and their services offerings from standard SERPs. The data on your business listings tells Google whether your business, its offerings and its location is in sync with the users’ search query. If it is, the listing will be displayed on SERPs showing the physical location of your business on a map accompanied by all relevant business information.
Who decides whether your business listing is the first thing that a user sees when they get results for their search query? Google Algorithm of course, but it’s the quantity and quality of your local business listing that determine, in large part, 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.
But for this to happen, you must know how Google Business Listings work. No don’t go elsewhere to look for an answer, just read on.
For most businesses, the journey towards high ranking on local search results begins with Google, to put it more specifically, Google Places and Google+. They tell Google about their business, for example if you are running a pizza place, you’ll tell Google about your business, the kind of pizzas you offer, location of your restaurant, hours of operation, post pictures and offer any and every information to help the search engine get a better idea about your business.
But, there’s a surprise in store for you. Even before you start entering business information, you’ll find Google is already aware about your business. It’s not magic.
The truth is, Google is not just getting information straight from the horse’s mouth, which is the business owner; it is also finding business information from business data aggregator sites such as Infogroup, Neustar and Acxiom (US); The Local Data Company, Market Location and 118 information (UK) and others. Google will either buy or lease data from these companies and this goes into a massive server cluster.