Why DBAs, service categories, social media and competition matter
Last installment we looked at how your business phone number is at the heart of your digital presence, 1/4 of your core digital presence — NAP+W — Name, Address, Phone + Website (or NAPU to some, where URL replaces website, same thing). By entering your phone number in our Snapshot Report Request button, we can start exploring your online presence, but there’s some additional information that could be useful.
Common Name and DBAs (Doing Business As)
These are names that this business is sometimes referenced as, but is not the official business name. We will use these Common Names to create a set of pre-populated mention searches once the account create process has been kicked off. A mention is simply a place on the web where a business appears. This can include anything from a detailed article on a popular website to an offhand comment on Twitter. Our online monitoring tool scans far and wide to pull in every mention from every corner of the web. These results are collected on a single page where the data can be explored, sorted, and assigned a sentiment, from positive to negative. That’s machines reading sentiment, so always give these a second look. “So bad, it’s cool” would be read as negative, when it’s actually very positive.
Service Category
Previously we discussed the importance of Business Category, often known as Standard Industrial Code (SIC), so your business is identified correctly by the type of business you offer. For instance, restaurant is a broad Business Category, but Italian Restaurant is more specific and useful Business Category definition that covers both “restaurant” and “Italian restaurant” searches.
Service Categories often overlap but can go deeper, listing what your business sells to – these can be very specific (i.e. teeth whitening) to broad (i.e. dentist). In our restaurant example, both restaurant and Italian restaurant would overlap, but catering or banquets would go deeper into services. Often these are the words most used in searches as customers search more specifically for a product or service. Our online monitoring tool uses service category to create a separate pie chart in the Competition tab of the online monitoring tool to help monitor your business against your competitors in search engine share of voice. We recommend listing the top 3 online searches you’re most interested in capturing the most attention.
Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Google Plus
In addition to Google searches, the most common way customers will bump into you online is through social media. Facebook owns the lion’s share of time spent online and is key for every business. Twitter dominates breaking news online and fits with most businesses. Foursquare set the standard for geographic based social media, so while it’s adoption isn’t the highest locally, it’s a key element of identifying your business geography-based searches, which is basically every search. Finally, Google Plus has seen a lot of changes in the last year as Google appears to retreat from the social media space, but it does serve as the one identity that links your Google My Business with YouTube — covering the top 2 search engines — and all other Google properties.
If you have these pages set-up, even if they are not active, include those URLs in the detailed information request scene
Competitors
Anyone who’s ever attended one of our free seminars or lunch-and-learns knows one of our favorite analogies to online success — the story of the two hikers that run into the bear in the woods. You don’t have to outrun the bear, just the other hiker!
Almost everything is relative online and your online presence in broader business and service category research is relative to the strength of your competitor’s online presence. One of the most important things we do with our advanced SEO packages is reverse engineer their success to identify the opportunities that will help your business beat them.
By sharing one or more Competitors Names, the online monitoring tool will compare their share of voice in search engine your online share of voice.
With this information we can dig deeper into your online presence beyond the information we can learn from your core identity we discussed in the last installment — NAP+W and business category. Next installment we go through the results of the Snapshot Report.
