Search Engines certainly are not able to make things too easy for
the local business. I don’t blame them entirely, because spammers can
get advantage of search engines very quickly and easily. Spammers and
other fraudulent websites tend to be the terrorist of the Internet.
Needless to say, the actions of a few tend to make it difficult for
everyone else.
You would think that all you need to do is claim, update and manage
your local listing with the search engine and other local listing
websites. That certainly would be the easy thing to do, however,
whether your local business listing will be ranked on search results or
within other local business listing search results is dependent upon a
few other factors.
The good news is that it is not as complicated as search engine
optimization (SEO) and understanding the technical and non-technical
intricacies of getting your website ranked organically within the top
ten search results. There are five items on the to do list.
1. Claim your local business listing at the various local listing websites.
2. Update your local business listing with information about your
business, product and services. Include photos, videos, coupons,
discounts, offers, promotions.
3. Maintain and manage your local business listing regularly with
changes within your business, products and services (If anyone thinks
that this is not an issue today, they may be right, but you can bet
this will be added soon enough).
4. Get customers to post reviews about your business, products and
services on your local business listing. You can suggest they post
their review at one or multiple local listing websites, however, the
local consumer will ultimately be the one to decide which and how many
of the local listing websites they are will to submit their reviews.
5. Get citations about your business around the web, outside of your local business listing.
The first four items I’m sure are easy enough to understand,
however, the last one introduces a new terminology to “optimizing” your
local business listing.
If you are familiar with the concept of link popularity and inbound
links, then you will understand citations. The only difference is that
there isn’t an actual link coming back to your local listing. Citations
(may also be called “web references”) are publicly available “mentions”
of your business name and address on other websites. This information
helps search engines validate your business.
For example, Google will seek out a citation about your business on
InfoUSA, Yellow Pages, and Yelp to mention a few. You local chamber of
commerce directory that they make available on their website with your
business information would also count.
Citations help validate your business is part of a local community.
It’s difficult to fake membership in a chamber of commerce, or a
business index, or be written about in a local online newspaper or
popular blog. Citations help your local business listing become ranked
among other local listings in a search result.
Part of this process is to be sure your business name and address
information is consistent from one website to another. After all we are
talking about computers and computers need data to be exactly alike in
order to identify the information to be the same. The consistency would
need to include your business description, name, address, phone number,
website, and email address. Get into the habit of keeping this
information handy so that you can copy and paste easily enough from one
website to another or from one directory to another.
If you feel that maintaining your local business listing is time
consuming or outside of your expertise to manage at all the various
local listing websites, there is help out there. As with most local and
small businesses, your time resources are limited and your expertise
does not lie in the management of Internet marketing of your business.
For this reason low cost local listing management services
are provided by SmartFinds Internet Marketing through their SmartFinds
Local Listing service is your choice. You will find this to be of great
benefit and the low cost will help you potentially eliminate your
yellow page ad costs. Let the experts of 15 years Internet marketing
experience help you.
