The Wheels of Reputation Management: Listings Deepdive

Picture this: You’ve just taken over your uncle’s plumbing business after working for him for 10 years.  He has dreams to retire and you took out a small business loan to live the dream. Your uncle taught you everything you know about plumbing and with plenty of aspiration (and perspiration) you work to grow your business.

As you dive into the accounting you notice that for a small, 5-truck plumbing business the phone bill is kind of high. As a matter of fact you see that it is ridiculously high. Your uncle has been paying $100 more per month in phone lines that you know nothing about. So you call your uncle, you can hear the ocean in the background and in between breaths you can hear him suck on the straw to his Mai-tai.

Your uncle explains that it was a marketing necessity. As he has evolved his business, switched telecom companies, moved to new locations, and bought another small one-truck business– keeping all these numbers was necessary so customers’ calls don’t get lost.

This is where business listings come into play.

Welcome back to the second installment of our Wheels of Reputation Management blog series where we cover the three most important aspects of reputation management: listings, review sites and social media.

Today we’ll be doing a deepdive into listings.

What Is A Business Listing?

You’re right, let’s back up a little before we begin.

A business listing is an online entry that includes all of the most important information about your business: your phone number, address, website, hours of operation, etc. Think of business listings as an entry in online phone books.

Business listings can show up when people search for your business online and help people find you via search engines for businesses in your industry.

Listings are not only a powerful tool for the user experience side of things, but even more so for SEO purposes.

There are dozens of listing directories that your business should be a part of, but some are more important than others.

A few of these include:

Depending on your industry and the authority of the directory, certain directories will be more beneficial to your business. For example, Yelp will carry more weight if you are in the restaurant industry, while Angi will be more valuable if your business provides home services.

And let’s be honest here, several of these directories no one uses! Regardless, the more consistent listings you have across all directories, the better. Consistency is crucial when it comes to listings– even the slightest difference can have a large impact on your SEO.

If your business address street has “Avenue” at the end of it, for example, you want to ensure it’s either abbreviated or spelled out fully across all of your listings. If you have multiple phone numbers for your business (main line, call-tracking, etc.), be sure that the main phone number is the same number across the board. Again, the slightest difference can actually create a big impact.

Why Are Business Listings Important?

Aside from the SEO benefits you receive from accurate listings, there are many other benefits that accompany them. They can improve your business’s findability, build trust with your customer and client base, and allow you to attract new customers.

Did you know 71% of users prefer to use voice searches to conduct a search over the traditional method of typing?

Voice search is becoming increasingly popular with smart speakers, so allowing your business to be listed as an answer to a user’s inquiry is incredibly important.

Additionally, business listings can help create authoritative backlinks to your website, aiding in your SEO efforts as well (if you’ve read our SEO blog series, you would know how important these are!).

Local Listings

Listings? Local listings? What’s the difference?

Local listings are pretty much what they sound like: online mention of the name, address, phone number, or website for a local business. These can appear on local directories, websites and blogs, social media, and other apps.

Local listings are especially useful for geo-specific locations. For instance, if someone were to search “plumber near me”, and your business is within that area, you’d want to have your business’s listing appear on their search engine results page (SERP).

Similarly, local listings also play an important role in local SEO– something you should be utilizing if your business services a certain area. Gearing part of your marketing strategy to local SEO will help you appear on SERPs, like we mentioned above.

Listing Management

We’ve convinced you of the importance of establishing your business information across multiple directories to help your SEO, but now you have to keep track of it.

Like we said, consistency is crucial, so having misinformation on your business listing is not a good thing.

How do you manage it all?

I’m glad you asked! This is where your friendly, neighborhood marketing agency steps in.

Torchlight Marketing has just the thing you need: Listing Management.

Through our Listing Management system, we’ll help alleviate the struggle of keeping track of all of your business’s listings all from one, easy place.

Our system also helps submit accurate information to all the three major data providers– Data Axle, Neustar/Localeze, and Foursquare–  to ensure that you can be found online by your customers.

This will help improve the likelihood that potential customers find your business in local search, generate hundreds of online citations and fix inaccurate business info at the root of the problem. Afterall, how will you know if your listings have inaccurate information if you forget to check?

If you are interested in our listing management service or have more questions about it, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Takeaway

Creating and maintaining listings for your business should be a crucial part of your marketing strategy. It will help increase your business’s chance of being found, allow you to connect with potential customers and most importantly, aid in your SEO efforts as well.

As with many things SEO, consistency is key and should not be overlooked with your listings either. A solid management system or plan is incredibly important to ensure that your business’s listing information is correct and up-to-date.

Stay tuned for our next deepdive in our Reputation Management series dedicated to review sites!

If you’re hungry for more, be sure to check out our deep dives in our SEO series, where we examine the depths of website structure, content, backlinks and technology!

To learn even more about our services give us a call at (805) 481-0118.