We all know the advantages of being present in different business listings. It helps us increase our visibility. It encourages people to leave reviews to help us with our lead generation efforts and improve our online reputations. However, you must manage it appropriately and make sure that it will appear on the relevant searches of your prospects. You want to guarantee that your potential leads can discover you. Therefore, simply adding your sites on local listings will never be enough.
What Are Some of the Common Issues on Local Business Listings
Local listings, especially those found in directories and review sites, have now transformed into a potent tool for consumers. If you don’t manage your listing correctly, you could be losing a lot of business opportunities. Some local business listings services are offering to fix the standard issue. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.
Incomplete Business Listing Information
The more information you provide online, the higher the possibility that the consumers will trust you. There’s a likelihood that they will visit your website or the location of your store. Therefore, you need to be very detailed when providing your information. Be sure to add your name, phone number, website URL, address, etc. You should also add any relevant information that you can think of. Some free business listings will enable you to provide extra information like the photos of your product, your facilities, hours of operation, direction to get to your store, and other additional details that the customer may find interesting.
Inaccurate NAP
There are instances that even if the business listings include NAP, it can still have some inaccuracies. There are several reasons behind this. For example, your business may decide to acquire a new phone number or change your company’s email address. There’s also a chance that you can move your business to a new location. Changes can also happen during an acquisition or a merger. There are just too many reasons why the NAP can become outdated. Ignoring this problem can encourage insufficient data from spreading. Therefore, it will have a severe impact on your company’s reputation. For instance, if a customer can’t reach you on the contact information they found, they may think you have substandard customer support. If you are hiring the service of an agency, be sure to provide them with accurate and up-to-date information.
Duplicate Business Listings
We’ve mentioned above that it is better to provide your customers with more information; however, that is not always the case. Duplicate listings have become a significant problem for most businesses who want to control their online presence and reputation. It is crucial that only one business location is listed in every directory. How do these issues happen? As mentioned above, there’s a chance that the business will change its location or name. Instead of just updating their local business listings, some companies will choose to create a new citation.
Poor Visual Content
Several free business listings will allow you to upload images on the company profile. Your customers can also upload their pictures when leaving reviews to authenticate that they are your verified customers. However, if you choose to upload low-resolution images, it may affect your reputation and presence. If you are running a dealership, you could be uploading an unflattering area of your showroom. Perhaps the low-quality images of your car prevent your prospects from analyzing the picture. It could even be more damaging to restaurant businesses. For instance, if they took a picture of their menu in dim light, the food may look dark and unappetizing. It could reduce the number of reservations. To address this, you need to identify a popular product and take a flattering yet realistic photo of it. You should also take a picture of your storefront and your people while happily doing their job.
Unclaimed Business Listings
Another significant issue you may face is the unclaimed business profile in several directories. Your business name can appear on various listing sites without you being aware of them. For instance, the information you will find in Google My Business is often auto-generated from the data gathered online; this means that you will not be aware that your business name already exists on this platform. It causes problems due to an array of reasons. One of the leading issues would be inaccurate and unverified information. While Google may be fantastic in piecing the information together, it may collect outdated data and display them. The best solution for this is hiring a company that offers local business listings services and claiming the profile.
One Listing for Several Business Locations
If you have several businesses with multiple locations, a single listing may not be enough for them. Regardless of whether you have two or 200 stores, you need to list them separately. There should be one listing for each location since they also have different addresses and contact information. The local customers are looking for details that will provide them with the most convenient service, including your business hours, driving direction, and other impertinent details. Different businesses are still unaware of the various benefits offered by unique business listings for every store location. Apart from keeping the accuracy of the information, multiple business listing for each site will also drive traffic.
How to Fix Problems on Your Business Listings
A lot of people rely on the information they get from business listings. However, if they receive outdated or inaccurate information about the company, the customers will end up getting disappointed. It will become less likely that these people will do business with you. According to the latest report, at least 52% of the customers have ended up visiting a closed store. About 44% of customers claimed that their satisfaction had been affected due to outdated information on business citations. To avoid that, we will list some ways to fix it.
Find Your Business Citations
It is too impossible for you to fix inaccuracies in your business listings if you are unaware of their existence. Luckily, there are several tools that you can use to look for these citations. You can even hire a company that offers local business listings services and have them find it on your behalf. There are thousands of online directories and finding them manually can be a daunting experience. For starters, we have Facebook, Google My Business, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Microsoft Bing Maps, etc. Once the search engine site index the citation, it will act as a link that will help you improve your domain authority. However, if you are not aware of them, Google can interpret them as a separate business entity. Here are some of the different citations that you must find.
- Structured Citation- This is the most common listing that you will encounter. It contains the business name, company address, and contact information listed next to one another. General business listings will usually have this format, such as Better Business Bureau, Trip Advisor, and Yelp.
- Unstructured Citation- This kind of listing is not as common, but they are equally valuable. You will notice that the vital information in this listing are not organized in a particular field. Instead, the data can be found in different areas. It will include press releases, blogs, or online news sites.
Identify the Problems
We’ve already listed the different issues above; all you have to do is identify them. Before you can fix the wrong data, you will need to identify the different variations of their NAP. It would be better to record it first on the spreadsheet so you can track it easily later. Find out if the inconsistencies are in the name, contact information, or address. After this, determine how you want the information to appear on the free business listings site. Be sure that it will reflect the same information found on your website.
Essential Tips When Finding the Bad Data
- Using the ‘site:’ function- Google has a specific function to help you locate a particular business listing. For instance, if you want to find your business listing in Yelp, you can use site:yelp.com “business name”.
- Use Different NAP Variations- Use different variations of your business name, old phone number, and previous company address to locate any inconsistencies and duplicates.
Prioritize The Primary Sources
To ensure that you will be using your time efficiently, start by fixing the erroneous data found on the major business listing sites. You can use data aggregators to provide updated information to search engines and directories. Consider Localeze, InfoGroup, and Factual to treat the problem on the root by fixing the data on the primary source. Understand that the online ecosystem can be complex, and it will take a bit of time before the changes will appear. Therefore, it is best to fix the primary source before moving to the less prominent business citations.
Building Quality Business Citations
After you have fixed the erroneous data on the different free business listings sites, it is now time for your to build new and quality citations. Be sure that the information you will add will be identical to the information provided on the existing business citations, social media, websites, and review sites. You can also use aggregators to streamline the process, but you can do this manually.
If you are still unsure if you have duplicate or inaccurate business listings, you may have to seek the advice of an online reputation agency. They have tools to comb the entire web to locate different issues on your business citations.