Customers are looking for businesses in ways they never could before: on-the-go and on foot. Making sure your business information is accurate online is the key to making sure your customers can find you.
These business listings are often referred to as “citations” and which Google uses as a top 5 ranking factor according to MOZ:
Localized Organic Ranking Factors
Putting SEO aside for the moment, today’s mobile revolution is about more than the newest smartphone and the next big app. It’s about leveraging these technologies to make it easy for your customers to find you online and visit your location(s).
The Importance of Managing Location Data
Take a look at these off-line, brick and mortar storefronts:
Funny or confusing?
Offline problems can and might be funny, but online problems cause you to lose customers which is NOT funny. The data compilation process that search engines rely on lack human touch. If a customer were to see these signs outside any one of these businesses, they would still be able to make an educated guess on what it actually reads. Search engines, however, are unable to do so. This makes 100% accuracy massively important, given how consumers are searching today. Other data sources, such as tax records, social media check-ins, aggregators, etc. are the mischief-makers that change online business listings and create confusion that negatively effects your search engine rankings.
Imagine asking 10 random people where a particular restaurant is and receiving the following answers:
Example of good citation listings
Consistency results in high confidence (and higher ranking) for consumers and search engine crawlers.
[bctt tweet=”Consistent online listings = high confidence & rankings for people & search engines. #seo ” username=”samsonmedia”]
Now imagine asking 10 random people where a particular restaurant is and receiving the following answers:
Bad Citations/business listings
Inconsistency results in low confidence, which decreases search ranking and risks lost business. Taking control of how your customers view you online helps you build your businesses brand, and drives more traffic to your location, online AND offline! Double the goodness!
[bctt tweet=”Taking control of how your people see you online helps drive more traffic to your business.” username=”samsonmedia”]
Other reasons why you want to take control of your
Why Citations Are Important to the Success of Your Local Business
“Citations are defined as mentions of your business name and address on other webpages—even if there is no link to your website. An example of a citation might be an online yellow pages directory where your business is listed, but not linked to. Citations can also be found on local chamber of commerce pages, or on a local business association page that includes your business information, even if they are not linking at all to your website.
Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in Google and Bing. Other factors being equal, businesses with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations.
[bctt tweet=”All things being equal, a biz with more citations will rank higher than a biz with fewer citations.” username=”samsonmedia”]
Citations from well-established and well-indexed portals (i.e., Superpages.com) help increase the degree of certainty the search engines have about your business’s contact information and categorization. To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals’ coach Dennis Green, citations help search engines confirm that businesses “are who we thought they were!”
Citations are particularly important in less-competitive niches, like plumbing or electrical, where many service providers don’t have websites themselves. Without much other information, the search engines rely heavily on whatever information they can find.
Citations also validate that a business is part of a community. It’s hard for someone to fake membership in a chamber of commerce or a city or county business index, or being written about in a local online newspaper or popular blog.
Citations and links from these kinds of websites can dramatically improve your local search engine rankings.”
OUR SOLUTION
Your business combined with our solution provides full control of how your customers view you online. Using our Power Listings Service, Powered by Yext, you can:
- Manage your digital presence and make updates in real-time
- Access our network that has the most direct integrations with publishers available
- Suppress duplicate listings effortlessly via our technology
- Benefit from this service even if you work from a home address and don’t want to list it (you just need to use city and state)
- Have complete control of the information displayed to your customers online. What we put into the platform is exactly what your customers see and cannot be overwritten by anyone but you.
- Easily implement duplicate suppression and solve SEO-damaging duplicate listings and keep them from reappearing
- Be 100% up-to-date all time time – no delays
OUR NETWORK – YOUR REACH
Get Your Business Listed On All These Directories
In today’s online world, consumers want to spend their money with businesses they trust. That’s why it’s more important than ever that you not only take control of your business information online, but build brand awareness too. Make your business stand out from the rest with help from our enhanced listings features and fields. Tout your in-store promotions and seasonal coupons with our patented Featured Message. Generate and publish more content for your business like photos, videos, menus, and more, across sites like Facebook, Foursquare, and Menupages. Share your story with your customers with business descriptions and staff bios.
With help from our review monitoring capability, you can listen in on what your customers are saying about you, all in one place. And with our reporting features, you can create custom reports so that you can analyze the performance metrics that matter most to your business. With fully optimized listings, you can engage your customers more than ever before and drive more of them right to your doorstep.
Sample Listing
Listings can include some or all of the following information:
- URL and link to your website
- Twitter profile
- Facebook page
- Contact email
- Events calendar
- Photo gallery
- Menu (for restaurants)
- Product list
- Business logo
- Videos
- Business descriptions
- Business hours
- Payment options
- More!
And the beauty of our solution is that you can add and manage all your info in one place and those sites that allow various components will add it. Those that don’t will just automatically omit it.
NUMBERS DON’T LIE
Your customers are ready and looking to buy. And if they can’t find you online to begin with, you’re not going to sell anything. You already work so hard on driving what makes your business special, day in and day out. With our solution, you’ll worry less about how your customers are viewing your business online and instead, spend more time propelling the unique value your business brings to them. The more you can focus on doing what you do best, the more you can transform your customers into local and loyal buyers.
- Correct digital presence is critical for customers – new and old – to find your business.
Rest assured that no matter what, your business information is pointing your customers to the right location every time.
PLEASE NOTE: even if you are a professional services business like a medical practice, law firm, executive coach, etc, this still provides tremendous SEO benefits for your website!