Local business listings management is essential for business owners that want to reach their target customers. Having accurate and up-to-date information about your business across the web can help you get more customers and higher search rankings. With this guide to local online business listings management, you can ensure that your data is consistent and accurate across all major search engines, directories, review sites, and social media platforms.
Our comprehensive online listings guide covers everything from setting up a local listing to managing it over time. You’ll learn how to create optimized business profiles for each listing, how to monitor customer reviews and respond to them quickly, as well as tips on how to use local SEO tactics such as keyword optimization and link building which are all essential in a solid SEO strategy. Additionally, MARA can provide you with a tool that makes it easier than ever to respond to your reviews. With these resources at your disposal, you can be sure that your online listings are always up-to-date and accurately reflect the current state of your business.
What is local business listing?
Local business listings are online business profiles that appear with Google Maps and contain information about a business, such as its business locations or address, phone number, website URL, hours of operation, and other details.
Local listings provide potential customers with the information they need to find and contact your business. The core components of local listings are known as NAP, which stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. This is the basic information that should be included in all local listings, regardless of the website or platform.
In addition to NAP, there are other important pieces of information that should be included in your local listing. This includes
- a website URL,
- hours of operation,
- and a business category that accurately describes what type of business you have.
- Photos and videos of your business.
- A brief overview of your business
- Payment options available
Here’s an example of an optimized Google business profile containing essential critical information.
By providing this additional information in your local listing and ensuring your GMB profile is well-optimized, you can help ensure that customers can contact your business when they need it and easily find it with the help of Google Maps.
What is Local Listing Management?
Local listing management is the process of creating, maintaining, and optimizing online business listings across the web. This includes ensuring that all of your business’s information is accurate and up-to-date on major search engines like Google. It also involves monitoring online reviews and responding to them quickly, as well as optimizing your listings for local search engine optimization (SEO).
Why is Local Listing Management Important?
Local business listings are an important part of any online marketing strategy. They help customers find your business quickly and easily, and they also help Google recognize your business as a legitimate entity. When customers search for businesses in their area, having multiple local listings that are consistent across different sites helps Google know that your business information is trustworthy. This increases the chances of your business appearing in search results, which means better search performance, and a higher search rank that can lead to more customers and increased revenue.
According to research, 22.6% of website traffic actually come from local potential customer searches. 76% of consumers check out a business’s online listing before physically visiting. More importantly, Brightlocal also found that 63% of consumers say that inaccurate information on local listings would discourage them from choosing a business. This is why keeping your local listings up-to-date is essential for success. If you have incorrect or outdated information on any of the listing sites, it could lead to confusion among potential customers and even cause them to choose another business instead. Additionally, if your local listings are not updated regularly, Google may not recognize them as reliable sources of information and may not include them in its search results at all. By ensuring that all of your local listings are accurate and up-to-date, you can ensure that all potential customers searches will lead to your online business profile.
Benefits of Optimizing Local Business Listings
Local business listings are a great way to get your business noticed and make it easier for customers to find you. They serve as an online directory, helping consumers locate the businesses that will fit their needs. Not only do online business listings provide customers with reliable information, they also offer other benefits.
According to Safari Digital, 70% customers will visit a business based on what they find online – whether it be an ad, review, or marketing campaign. Alongside this, they also found that consumers are increasingly favoring businesses with an online presence, which is reflected in the 62% of consumers who said they refuse to try a business if they can’t find the company’s information on the web.
One of the main advantages of local business listings is that they kickstart the customer journey to you and overall provide a better customer experience . When your business is listed across the web, it makes it easier for customers to find your contact information and other details about your company. This ensures that customers have a positive experience from the start.
Additionally, many listing sites offer reviews that can help improve your reputation and build trust with potential customers. By having positive customer reviews on these sites and having the capability to track reviews even negative ones, you can show potential customers that you are reliable and trustworthy. Local business listings are an invaluable tool for any business looking to increase search visibility and reach more customers.
What to include in your local business listing
1. Business name/title
Always use your real-world business name in this field. Google can read street-level signage, so be sure the way you format your name matches the sign on your business, your print marketing, your website logo, and the way your phone is answered. Do not add additional keywords, geographic terms, or other modifiers to your business name.
For multi-location businesses (like chains or franchises), do not add city names or other modifiers to the business name in Google or any other local business listing, with the exception of Facebook.* Don’t be Whole Foods San Diego on one listing and Whole Foods San Francisco on another. Just be Whole Foods on all listings, unless your legal business name includes city words or other modifiers.
For multi-practitioner businesses (like legal or real estate firms), follow Google’s rule and only put the name of the practitioner in the business name field, without including the name of the practice. In other words, an insurance agent at a multi-practitioner agency should be Joe Jones and not Allstate: Joe Jones. It’s a local SEO best practice to be sure each practitioner has their own phone number. The only time you can include the business name in this field is if Joe Jones is the sole practitioner at the business.
For businesses in container locations (like a McDonald’s restaurant inside a Walmart), just list the name of your own business and do not mention the container store. In other words, just be McDonald’s rather than McDonald’s in Walmart.
For co-located businesses (like a Taco Bell/KFC restaurant), don’t combine the names of the two businesses. Create a separate listing for each brand at that location, with only its own name in the business name field. In other words, create one listing for Taco Bell and another listing for KFC.
For multi-department businesses (like an auto center, hospital, or college campus), you have the option to create a unique listing for each forward-facing department. Google stipulates that these departments should typically have their own entrance and their own business categories. It’s also a local SEO best practice to ensure that they each have their own phone number. In naming these departments, you are allowed to mention the main business name, as in Walmart Pharmacy or Community Hospital Radiology Department.
2. Address
Always list your real-world address, with no additions or alterations (such as fictitious suite numbers). PO boxes and unstaffed virtual offices are not considered real-world addresses and you should not build local business listings for them.
On Google, put your street address in line one and any suite or mailbox numbers in line two of the address section of the form. This is a good practice to follow for nearly all citations, to avoid strange formatting.
3. Phone number
While Google’s guidelines express a preference for local area code phone numbers, they’ve supported toll-free numbers for some years. This is particularly important for businesses like hotels: they’re local, but most of their customers come from out of town and find a toll-free number especially convenient. If you use a toll-free number instead of a local one on your Google Business Profile listing, make sure your website and all of your citations consistently use this number.
4. Website URL
Google specifically stipulates that your listed website URL goes directly to a page owned by the business, rather than referring them to a third party, a social profile, or anywhere else.
For multi-location, multi-department, and multi-practitioner businesses, it’s common to point the listing for the business to the website homepage, while the listings for the branches, departments, or practitioners point to their respective landing pages on the site. This helps keep the entities separate. If you follow this model, be consistent and link all citations for a given entity to their respective page on the website. You don’t want some of a practitioner’s listings to point to the main homepage while others point to their landing page.
5. Categories
Most local business data platforms have a set of categories you’ll be choosing from to define what your business is. You’ll typically select 1–10 of these categories; when it comes to Google in particular, proper categorization can have a profound impact on rank. Google’s guidelines encourage you to choose categories which define your business at the most refined level (e.g. Federal Credit Union is a more refined category than just Bank) and avoid category repetition (not using both Restaurant and Mexican Restaurant). For an in-depth look at perfecting your Google My Business category strategy, please read Why Local Business Categories Matter.
6. Description
Good things to highlight in the description field could include awards, guarantees, proximity to major landmarks, or famous brands carried.
Some descriptions allow for the use of rich text (including hyperlinks), but you should avoid spamminess. Make your description read in a natural voice, like an elevator pitch, rather than a string of disjointed keywords. Descriptions are not believed to have any impact on local search rankings, but they can influence click-through rates (CTR).
7. Tagline
Some local business platforms have a field for entering a tagline or slogan. There’s no need to create one if you don’t have one, but for brands whose taglines have become locally famous due to radio, tv, or social promotion, this field can help with consumer recognition. An example of a well-known tagline would be Nike: Just Do It.
8. Other Options
Platforms are always adding new fields and functionalities for your consideration. Google, in particular, is quickly developing functionality around communications and transactions. All competitive local businesses should consider use of newer amenities like the bookings button, messaging capabilities, and integration of merchandise and product listings into the profile.
How to Claim and Verify Your Listings
Claiming your local business listings is the first step in managing your online presence. Google creates profiles for existing businesses, so if you see that Google has made a profile for your business, all you’ll have to do is claim it! Otherwise, you can sign up to create your own business profile. Nonetheless, if you see a listing on another site, chances are it was collected by a data aggregator or added by a user. Data aggregators such as Infogroup or Acxiom compile and distribute this information to listing sites by looking at both offline and online resources.
By claiming your local business listings, you can ensure that the information about your business is accurate and up-to-date. This will help potential customers find the right information about your business quickly and easily. Additionally, claiming these listings will also help improve your search visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). By taking control of how your business appears online, you can make sure that customers get the best possible impression of your company.
Summing up
The quality, consistency, and spread of your local business data has a direct impact on your local search engine rankings, which leads to web traffic, foot traffic, and transactions. Given the importance of this foundational piece of the local search marketing puzzle, it’s well worth the time to be sure that your listings are accurate, complete, and discoverable on the most important platforms.
