Local business listings are a powerful tool for promoting your local business
Perhaps you remember the days when it was the norm to flick to the back section of your Sunday newspaper, or to comb your way through the phonebook. This is where businesses used to invest their time and money to be, paying more money for bigger spots.
Today, however, you’re more likely to pull out your phone and search. In fact, 46% of all searches on Google are seeking local information. This is where the money is now.
The local business listings returned by a search for ‘Bristol Bike Shops’
Say you Google ‘Bristol Bike Shops’.
Immediately, you will be presented with local business listings, pulled from major platforms like Google My Business or Yelp.
You’ll likely scroll through the first few, select one based on factors that matter to you: distance, opening hours and/or Google review ratings.
From there, it’s an easy process to ring the store or go and visit it, as you’re provided with the phone numbers and addresses of the businesses that Google thinks will best suit your needs.
Local Business Listings: A powerful tool
Local business listings are therefore a powerful tool. 88% of consumers who conduct a local search online will go on to call or visit a business within a day.
Your local business listings will allow customers in your immediate vicinity to give you their custom.
This means two things for your business:
- You can’t afford not to be utilising local business listings
- You can’t afford your local listings to be wrong on any of these sites
Issues you may face
The more platforms your information is on (Google Maps, Bing, Yelp, Facebook etc.), the better your chances of Google ranking you higher. The higher up Google’s rankings you are, the greater the number of potential customers viewing your details.
However, the more platforms your information is spread across, the greater the chance of inaccuracies.
If your work phone is +44123456789 on some platforms, but +44 123456789 on others, those listings are useless to your ranking.
Google may even assume from listings that are recorded slightly differently that these are different businesses.
This means that your want local business listings aren’t acting as the powerful tool you want them to be.
You will of course want to fix them, but going through and checking each one is correct can be an arduous and not always accurate process.
(We go into greater detail in this in our free Google My Business for Trades course)
We offer a free scan tool to help you make the most of your local business listings
Our free scan tool exists to help you easily check that a) your local business listings exist on as many sites as possible and b) they’re all correct
If you input your details, our tool will compare your listings across 21 different sites.
It will then tell you whether your listings are accurate and whether it could find you on all the sites it crawled.
0% of your listings incorrect? Amazing! You’re likely well on your way to ranking high.
Some of your listings incorrect? Some of them missing? That’s alright. Our tool will allow you to identify which.
After which – you have two options:
- You can go in and fix them yourself. (This option may be a little monotonous and require more man power than feasible).
- We can fix them for you!
As well as fixing all your listings to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date, for potential customers to find you as easily as possible, we can also audit your website (for free!).
There are many elements of your website that we know we can perform search engine optimisation on, to help you get to the first page of Google.
So shoot us a message and lets work together!
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