How to check your business is listed in all the right online directories
In previous installments, we’ve talked about how important is is to have your business listed on Google, and how to make sure the correct information is listed for your business when potential customers do a Google Search. Now, we’ll look at the next step to making sure your customers can find you.
In this series, we will show you how to make sure your business is listed – and listed correctly – across the internet on a variety of websites, such as local directories, event sites or review sites. This is vital to your business because it covers all search engines and local directories, which means the information most important to finding your business (location, hours, contact info) is available and accurate whenever someone searches for you.
They’re called Citations – aka Directory Listings – and they are an integral piece to your business and how customers find you through local searches online.
A citation is a mention of your business on a third-party website – typically a local directory, event site or review site. These mentions contain your business name, address and phone number, but they can (and should) also contain much more detail, such as a description of services, working hours, images of your business, etc.
Having lots of citations that all display the same, accurate info about your business helps to improve your ranking in local search results, particularly in the Local Stack where your Google My Business listing shows, but also in organic search for your website. Accuracy and the “quality” of your listings are considered the most important factors – sheer quantity of citations has value, but quality is king.
New Plains MediaMedia claims your citations manually, the most difficult way to do it, but the process the delivers the best, long term results. A critical part of search engine optimization, we make sure that your citations (directory listings) are exactly how they should be, and are included on the most important citation websites.
We take care of the busy work of cleaning up inaccurate data, merging duplicate listings and creating new listings, which is a critical part of local search optimization. We also take the time and commitment and hassle out of updating listings.
We use several listing management tools to take quick snapshots of the most important citations for your business. Over the next three weeks, we’ll look at three of the leading platforms and how we use them to make sure your business is listed correctly across the internet. This week, in our first installment, we’ll focus on Moz Local.
Moz is THE thought leader in search engine optimization. When New Plains Media started in digital services in 2008, we used search guru David Mihm’s GetListed.org as our starting guide for the free steps our clients could take to improve their rankings in Google searches. Mihm joined the Moz team several years later and GetListed.org was rebranded as Moz Local. When you enter your business name and zip code at Moz Local, it automatically checks your business information on all of the major data aggregators and several top-tier online directories.
First, you will choose the most accurate Moz.com/local result for your business information. You might see several results for your business. Check each one. The conflict in accurate business information starts here.
Clicking on a result will give you more detail on how it appears across the web. You will see percentage scores for the following:
Complete
How complete is your information on each search engine? Moz measures Primary Sources like Google and Facebook, Direct Networks like the major data aggregrators, Bing, Foursqaure and some others and Indirect Networks like Yelp, YP.com and HotFrog.
Incomplete
See more details where your business listing is not complete which can “negatively impact your ability to rank well in search engine results,” according to Moz. Oftentimes, listings are incomplete because they don’t have enough images.
Inconsistent
The most minor variations in how your basic business information is entered into citations and directories can hurt, from how “Street” is spelled in your address to an LLC at the end of your business name. Exactly “consistent information across the web is critical to ranking well on local search engines,” states Moz.
Duplicates
Minor variations in basic business information often makes computers see two different business listings, a big reason we manually clean up listings. Duplicate listings will also hurt your search rankings.
Moz does offer an annual service to submit your basic business information to the top data aggregators. If you do nothing else around citations or directories, this is well worth the investment.
If you really want to win in local search, however, you should consider a handcrafted solution with New Plains MediaMedia or another Local SEO expert.
Find out more about why, with the latest research from BrightLocal.
