If you do a search on “local business listing hijacking” you will
find information related to situations in which a competitor hijacked
another businesses local listing to their benefit.
It’s becoming a popular subject that Smart Company wrote an article about hijacking prevention this past December.
In New
Zealand a florist is facing seven years for hijacking local listings of
competitors.
This is a real situation that can and does have an impact upon a business that is not paying attention to their local business listings.
If your business relies on the local consumer market for its primary
revenue and you are not clear about local business listings, then you
need to get caught up real quick.
For one thing local business listings are the demise of the
traditional yellow pages. If the traditional yellow pages have not
already seen their coffin and at minimum a door stop, then free local
business listings are the nails in the coffin. Certainly you will find
that you can save money in this space.
Local business listings give a local business the ability to not
only have their general information available, but photos, videos,
coupons, offers, discounts, promotions to name a few items.
Additionally these can be updated 24×7×365. Certainly none of these are
features of the traditional yellow pages.
The process gets even better. Not only do these listings show up on
the first page of Google for a search result in which a local listing
is appropriate, but they show up on mobile devices while local
consumers are driving around town. Studies have shown that there is an
increase in local search and local search via mobile applications on
mobile devices. We won’t get into all that detail here, but you can
certainly read one of our previous articles about the statistics. 
As you can imagine local listings have been evolving in the past few
years and so have mobile devices and mobile applications. Starting in
2010 the two industries are merging even closer.
Just in case you’re still not convinced that you need to pay
attention to your local business listing, think about the consumers
walking through your store and writing reviews about their experience,
products or services. If they don’t like something they can twitter or
write a review in any local listing website before they even make it
back to the car.
These consumer reviews are very important because in part they
determine your ranking amongst other local listing websites for a web
search (vs. mobile search). They also have a tremendous value to the
search engines, which is one of the reasons Google wanted to acquire
Yelp recently.
So, let’s get back to the issue of local business listing
hijackings. To prevent this process the first action is to claim your
business listing at multiple local listing websites. Certainly Google
Local Business Listing will be your first stop, followed by Yahoo,
Bing, Local.com, Ask.com and Yelp. You will find that there are many
more locations, this is only a start.
Aside from getting involved in local business listings around the
web here are a couple of other items to consider. Always be sure to
have consistent and as much detailed information about your business as
possible, particularly your address. Be sure your information is
consistent amongst all locations on the web including your website.
Claiming, updating and managing the ongoing updates and reviews to
your local business listing can become a time consuming process. It may
at some point require more time than your website. Certainly the local
business listings can become your website too.
Because there are multiple locations that have to be updated you may
need to consider a service that will help you maintain and manage your
local listing at multiple local listing websites. When it comes to the
web, Google may be the 800lb gorilla, but in the mobile marketing
space, the mobile application developer will ultimately decide what
database they will use. Furthermore, the local consumer will be the one
to decide which local listing they will use to write their reviews.
Therefore, for both of these reasons, you will want to manage your
local listing at multiple local listing websites.
Waiting to consider your local business listing is not really an
option. You will want to be an early adopter as quickly as possible.
SmartFinds Internet Marketing provides Local Business Listing Management Services
and can not only help you claim your local business listing, but also,
manage the ongoing maintenance at multiple local listing websites. Not
only to help you update the listings with your information, but also
with promotions, coupons, QR-Codes, offers, videos and photos.
