When you’re trying to grow your business and attract new customers, even the smallest details matter. The management of listings is one of the many facets of digital marketing. It is typically overlooked but is one of the most influential factors in finding your business online. Have we piqued your interest? Read on to learn how to get found by your target market and establish an online listings presence that will get you noticed.
The Humble Business Listing: What Is It?
A business listing is an online summary of essential information about your business. It’s a priceless tool in helping customers find you online and in person.
What does a business listing consist of? Business listings typically include your business’s name, address, phone number, and website, as well as hours of operation. Your listing provides your customers with the necessary information to research, locate, and contact your business.
Are My Business Listings Effective?
It can be hard to tell if your efforts are paying off, but don’t fret just yet! The effectiveness of your business’s online listings depends on where and how accurate the information is. Listings can be found on a variety of platforms such as search engines, online directories, maps, social media platforms, and more.
If you want your business to be found by customers you need to appear on as many online listing sites as possible, but it only works if every listing is showing consistent information. It is surprising how easy it can be to create duplicate listings by mistake but don’t worry if this happens to you a few times, you will get the hang of things.
Duplicates, errors, and omissions of listings can pose challenges to the visibility of your business. If you want to manually edit all of your business listings, you may have to roll up your sleeves a bit and do some digging, but the effort is worth it in the end when your business traffic soars.
What Are the Benefits of Accurate Listings?
Having an accurate business listing can provide a lot of benefits to your business. Rather than simply hoping potential customers will discover you, widely available listings can help bring them straight to your front door. When consumers encounter a company that has incorrect or missing listings, they are more hesitant to reach out to the company, possibly choosing your competitor instead. When you have accurate listings, you set up a good foundation to build trust with your potential customers and give a powerful boost to your search engine ranking.
Get New Customers
To attract new customers, you need to convince people who are new to your brand to contact you or visit your store to make a purchase.
Make your first impression count. Customers can lose interest in doing business with you if they can’t find the right contact information for your store or can’t find your store location. How would you feel if you called a car dealership and got a confused pizza parlor on the other end instead?
Build Customer Trust
Missing, incorrect or inconsistent business information damages trust between your company and your customers. This can create miscommunications, leading to missed opportunities for your company.
If your business is listed online with multiple phone numbers, customers will be confused and may not try either number. An incorrect listing may send someone to the wrong location when they try to find your business, which could result in them giving up on trying again. You may even lose business because a customer turned up after you’ve already closed. After all, the listing on their phone said you were open an hour later than you are.
Boost Your SEO
Among local search ranking factors studied in 2018, consistency in business listings came in second place for most important. If your business listings are incomplete, it will negatively impact your search rank, making it harder to attract the customers you are after. By maintaining accurate listings across the Internet, you can increase traffic to your website and achieve higher search engine rankings on search engines like Google.
Did you know that an unclaimed listing can be changed multiple times a year, sometimes even by third-party sources not affiliated with your business! Your company must keep up with these changes across all sources so that your clients remain well-informed and so you won’t get punished by search engines for presenting conflicting information.
The devil is in the details when it comes to business listings. Even a slight difference, such as a different street abbreviation in your different listings, can hurt your company’s search engine rankings. You are a passionate small business owner, and for you, it may feel like there are never enough hours in the day. What do you do if you don’t have the time to comb through the entirety of the Internet to keep your SEO in good shape?
We have the solution you are looking for.
Local Online Presence Experts
Main Street MarTech understands the challenges faced by small businesses as they try to market their products or services. With the help of our experts, your business can be found on every corner of the Internet and you can rest assured that your customers will be able to find you, so you can focus on running your business.
In just a few short minutes our team will be able to see how well your company is performing online. We’ll conduct an audit of your current online presence and help you to build a strategy to get your online presence in tip-top shape.
Our full-range of services can be tailored to the unique needs of your business to ensure your target audience only sees you at your best.
With our dedicated team of professionals, we will employ the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices in order to make certain that your website appears highly ranked in searches relevant to your community and industry.
Running your business online requires hundreds of invisible and intimidating steps—we are here to make sure they all work for you! At Main Street Marketing Tech, our team of local marketing experts is here to help you get one-stop website management and strategic tech planning, along with friendly 24/7 support to empower your small team to make big things happen. Contact us today to get started!
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