Imagine capturing the attention of nearly 9 out of 10 smartphone users searching for businesses like yours. With 88% of individuals who use a smartphone for a local search actually visiting a related store within a week, the stakes are high.
Ensuring you manage your local business listings effectively can make all the difference in driving these potential customers to your door. This article will explore how to manage local business listings and their impact on local SEO for your business’s success.
In this article:
- Ensuring Consistent NAP Information
- How to Audit Your NAP Data
- How Do NAP Citations Affect Rankings?
- Improving Visibility Across Multiple Platforms
- Niche and Industry-Specific Directories
- Boosting Local SEO with Citations
- Enhancing User Experience
- Making the Most of Reviews and Ratings
- What Makes a Good Review?
- Engaging With Your Community
- Do Not Underestimate Listings Management!
Ensuring Consistent NAP Information
Consistent NAP (Name, Address, Business Phone Number) information across all online listings is important for local SEO.
Inconsistent NAP details can mislead search engines and customers, negatively impacting your local search rankings. Even small inconsistencies like a missing digit or spelling error can cause problems. Along with this, incorrect business information creates a bad user experience for potential customers, and that bad experience could have a lasting impact on their view of your business.
That’s why regular audits of your NAP data across social media, business directories, and review platforms are mandatory.
When you manage local business listings effectively, you ensure that this crucial information, including hours of operation and business locations, remains consistent everywhere your business appears online.
How to Audit Your NAP Data
You can manually check your NAP citations by tracking down all your business listings and reviewing each one. It’s best to keep track of all your listings in a spreadsheet so you don’t have to start from scratch every time. Your spreadsheet should contain information such as:
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- Date it was created
- Date it was last checked
- Listing URL
- Whether the citation is confirmed as accurate
It’s also a good idea to have a column to track if and when citations are lost and a note of the corrective action taken.
Manual checks can be tedious and time-consuming, especially if you have numerous listings to manage. Instead, consider using a tool like Locl Directory Sync, which automates this process, saving you valuable time by highlighting which listings need attention.
Did You Know? Incorporating regular NAP audits into your local SEO strategy helps you catch inconsistencies and make corrections before they affect your search rankings.
How Do NAP Citations Affect Rankings?
NAP data may seem trivial, so it’s easy to think of citation management as a low priority. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. NAP citations are actually one of the top five ranking factors for both local pack and organic search results.
But why is NAP data so important? Because it gives search engines the information they need to rank you for local searches.
When somebody in your local area enters a search query such as “furniture store near me,” your NAP data tells the search engine just how much distance is between your business and the searcher. If your NAP data is inaccurate, your local business may not appear in those relevant searches.
Search engines also want to know that the information they are serving users is accurate and reliable. When they see inconsistencies in your NAP data, that indicates the information is unreliable, and they will be less likely to share that information with searchers.
Improving Visibility Across Multiple Platforms
Your business’s online visibility depends heavily on its presence across various platforms. Claiming and optimizing your profiles on major directories like Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Bing Places are essential steps.
Locl simplifies this process by allowing you to manage local business listings in one place, ensuring consistency and improving your local SEO efforts. Enhanced visibility across these platforms not only boosts your prominence but also builds customer trust.
Higher ratings and positive reviews in these directories increase your chances of being featured prominently. So, in addition to adding your contact info, you should have as much content as possible. Here are some tips:
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- Add high-quality photos and encourage customers to do so
- Encourage customers to leave five-star reviews
- Respond to negative reviews and even positive ones when possible
- Fill out your business description using relevant search terms
- Select accurate business categories
- Add links to your website and social media profiles
Niche and Industry-Specific Directories
Adding your business to industry-specific directories like TripAdvisor for travel or Healthgrades for healthcare can also improve your local SEO. Locl helps you identify and manage these niche directories, ensuring your business is well-represented where it matters most.
Here are a few examples to give you a better idea of what niche directories are:
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- Healthcare – Healthgrades, Wellness
- Travel – TripAdvisor, Expedia, Orbitz
- Real estate – Zillow, Homefinder, Realtor
- Legal services – FinLaw, Legal Zoom, Justia
- Furniture – Houzz, Wayfair, Overstock, Furniture.com, HomeAdvisor, Yelp, Yellow Pages
These are just a few examples, but there are dozens of niche directories for almost every industry vertical and location.
The value of niche directories is in their ability to provide highly targeted results for searchers. Getting listed on these sites not only increases your credibility but also gives you a way to increase your search visibility within your niche.
These kinds of directories are often highly optimized for search engines. That makes it easy for your business to show up for niche-specific search terms like “best furniture stores” or “top furniture brands near me.”
As an added bonus, niche directories can help your search presence in the following ways:
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- Improving local reputation – Online directories often have filters that allow users to search for businesses in a specific location. Getting listed in these results can also improve your search engine visibility in major search engines like Google or Bing.
- Building backlinks – Online directories help you build valuable backlinks to your main website. These backlinks are valuable because they come from websites with a high domain authority.
Getting your business listed on multiple platforms allows you to benefit from the increased search visibility they offer. It can also boost the authority of your main website, providing dual visibility in search results.
Boosting Local SEO with Citations
Citations are important for building your business’s online credibility. Structured citations on platforms like Yelp, Google Business Profile, and your local chamber of Commerce highly contribute to your search engine rankings. Locl assists in creating and maintaining these citations, ensuring your business remains prominent in local search results.
A local citation is basically any mention of your business on a third-party website. There are two main types of citations:
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- Structured Citations – these are mentions of your business on specific platforms and directories that are designed to list business information. Examples include Yelp, Facebook, or your local chamber of commerce.
- Unstructured Citations – these are mentions of your business in blogs, news articles, or websites that are not designed to list business information.
Building citations helps search engines see your business as credible and trustworthy, which helps you rank higher. As search engines crawl the internet and see that various reputable sites are listing the same information about your business, they will begin to see you as a legitimate business and treat you as such — and that means increasing your search visibility.
While there is no exact number of citations required, having a substantial number of quality citations is beneficial. Locl helps you track and manage local business listings and citations, making sure your business information is consistent and credible across the web.
Quality is also a factor. You will need to do some research to determine which sites you want to be listed on, but some good examples can include the following:
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- Local chamber of commerce
- Yellow Pages
- Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn
- Google Business Profile
- Bing Places
- Yelp
- Apple Maps
- Google Maps
- Foursquare
Pro Tip: Always check that your business name is spelled correctly and your NAP data, including hours of operation and business address, is complete and uniform across the board.
Enhancing User Experience
While pleasing search engines is obviously an important consideration for local SEO, let’s not forget about pleasing the humans who are using the search engines.
User experience is an important component of local SEO. When your business listings provide accurate, engaging, and up-to-date information, customers are more likely to interact with your business, leading to higher search visibility. Locl helps you keep your listings current and customer-friendly, ensuring a positive customer experience that translates into better local SEO performance.
You can do this by taking actions like:
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- Providing a clear and in-depth description of what your business does and who it serves. Do not go overboard with keywords.
- Selecting only the most relevant business categories. Including too many will confuse potential customers.
- Including high-quality photos of your storefront and the interior. Product photos are also good.
- Make sure your NAP data is accurate and up to date. If you change your hours or move to a new location, be sure to update your listings.
- Responding to customer reviews in a professional and courteous manner. Always attempt to resolve complaints that surface in negative reviews.
- Including relevant local keywords and user interaction features like Q&A sections can further improve the relevance and usefulness of your business listing.
Making the Most of Reviews and Ratings
You’ve probably noticed by now that “trust” is a major theme when it comes to SEO. Search engines want to serve users the highest quality results possible, and if you want to make it to the top, you need to show that your business is trustworthy.
Positive reviews and high ratings are key to building trust with both customers and search engines. Encouraging satisfied customers to leave detailed reviews and engaging with them online can boost your local SEO.
The best way to collect positive reviews is to simply provide exceptional customer service and encourage your customers to leave positive feedback. If you have their email address, you can send a follow-up email after they visit with a link to the listing site.
Locl’s review management tools make it easier to monitor and respond to reviews, helping you maintain a strong online reputation.
What Makes a Good Review?
Not all positive reviews are treated equally. Unfortunately, satisfying the minimum word count is not helpful enough, in Google’s opinion. We now know that Google places greater value on longer, more descriptive reviews with 200+ characters.
Customer reviews should highlight specific examples of what made the experience memorable. Whether it was outstanding customer service, a great atmosphere, or simply an excellent selection of products. You can also get bonus points if your customers upload their own photos.
The more detailed a review is, the more value it will have to search engines. It all comes down to providing content that is helpful to users. Simple comments like “This is my favorite place!” just don’t give enough detailed information about what makes your business unique.
Engaging With Your Community
Collecting detailed, positive reviews is just the first step. Google and your customers also want to see you being active on your listing sites. So make sure you are engaging with your customers by responding to reviews.
You don’t need to respond to every single review, but you should respond to the negative ones at a minimum. Acknowledging the issue and attempting to resolve it in a professional manner shows potential customers — and Google — that you care. Even a simple ‘thank you!’ in response to five-star reviews can significantly boost your visibility.
Do Not Underestimate Listings Management!
Effectively managing your local business listings is crucial for improving local SEO and driving foot traffic to your store. Factors like consistent NAP information, the strategic use of niche directories and regular citation audits help ensure your business is visible in search results and trusted by both customers and search engines.
By optimizing your online presence across multiple platforms and maintaining active engagement with customer reviews, you build credibility and strengthen your local reputation which help improve local SEO. Tools like Locl streamline this process, allowing you to stay ahead without the time-consuming manual tasks.
Take control of your local SEO by making business listings management a priority, and watch your search rankings and customer engagement soar.
