Local Listing Management

As your business expands to include new locations, areas, or franchises, managing your local business listings can become more challenging. You must understand best practices for creating multi-location business listings and maintain a consistent, targeted message across all local citations.

That’s where our services can help.

REINFORCE CREDIBILITY & AUTHORITY ONLINE

What are Local Business Listings?

Local citations, or local business listings, are online profiles of your business, including all basic contact information, your address, operating hours, business description, and other relevant information. Google, Facebook, Yelp, Angie’s List, and Bing are among the top local business listing providers. While the service is free, business owners must manually claim the business and upload all relevant information. When combined, all local listings create an online portfolio for your business.

In order to have a strong local search presence, you need multiple business listings across a variety of platforms. By creating many business listings, search engines have additional context and users are exposed to your business across a broader network. The more listing information available about your business, the more you will dominate local search results and rankings.

Benefits of Local Listing Management and Optimization

Effective local business listing management and optimization is a key component in local visibility campaigns. Search engines often give ranking benefits to businesses with an established, fully built-out digital presence, including your Yelp page, Google My Business Page, and other business listings. This can be an important advantage in boosting your local visibility, so it’s imperative to address all aspects of local citations and business listings.

For an impactful local search strategy, it is crucial to create multiple, optimized local business listings. While it may seem daunting to create and manage several listings, we provide local business listing services that make it easy.

Easily Claim & Verify Your Listings

First, you must claim your already published business listings by proving you are the business owner. The method of verification depends on the listing service, but can range from a postcard to email or phone call. Once your ownership is verified, you will be able to edit any information.

You also want to ensure there are no duplicate listings. These can confuse search engines and negatively affect your rankings and online visibility. If you use our local listing services, we take care of ownership verification, listing checks, listing submission, management, and optimization.

Regularly Update Business Information

Providing potential customers with accurate, updated information is crucial to growing your business. You don’t want customers to show up while you are closed because your operating hours are incorrectly listed, or lose business because your address is incorrect. It is also helpful for consumers to easily find positive reviews about your business to further build credibility.

While each listing service features different information, the basic business information must be consistent, including address, phone number, business description, and business category. Whether you plan to hire local business listing management services or manage your own, you must ensure all listings about your business are accurate and up-to-date.

Achieve Higher Rankings

Effective management of your local business listings supports a fully built-out digital presence and thus, higher rankings. The more information and context available to search engines, the higher your business will rank in local searches.

Build Credibility with Ratings and Reviews

In addition to the basic information provided, local listings also feature customer reviews, which are commonly read prior to purchasing. These serve as trusted recommendations from previous customers and can make or break your business’s reputation online. If reviews are consistent, easily accessible, and positive, they can build credibility. It is also important to consider negative reviews can dramatically hurt your business.

Reviews can Affect Purchasing Decisions & Search Rankings Value Reviews and Ratings

Most local business listings sites feature business ratings and reviews alongside your business profile. These online reviews can make or break any business reputation because potential online consumers trust it with their buying decision. Establishing a good route or instructions for your customers to leave a review is another way of improving your ranking and rating. Consider having an incentive scheme or giving certain discounts in exchange for an honest review.

Let Us Help You with Consistency & Optimization

Because there is a common habit of reading reviews prior to purchasing, high-quality reviews are paramount to success. Many potential customers will base their decisions on what past customers had to say, affecting your bottom line.

The number of reviews and recommendations posted by previous customers is also a strong ranking factor for local business listings. Therefore, it’s important to take steps to ensure consistent, quality reviews. Consider offering a discount in exchange for customer reviews or providing instructions on how to leave reviews on your preferred platforms. These are local listing strategies our team can develop and implement for your business.

Reply to Negative Reviews

In addition to building up positive reviews, you must also practice good customer service when negative reviews arise. It is rare for a business to never have a bad review, so be prepared with a strategy for handling negative feedback.

Every local listing site offers some sort of reply feature to respond to reviews. While it is best practice to respond to all reviews, we recommend responding to negative reviews as quickly as possible. Our business listing management services can handle responding to reviews for you, so you don’t have to worry about keeping up.