Local Listing Overview – A Wise Investment of Your Marketing Dollars

There are literally thousands of websites and online applications that are used to help us locate and identify companies to do business with. Find out about these different sites, why investing in adding content on these many applications can be a smart investment of your marketing funds, and how it will help you grow your local presence.

So Many Advertising Options, So Little Money To Do It With

If you own a business that focuses on a local market, especially a small business, then I’m sure that you get calls every day from a million different salespeople trying to get you to spend money on a plethora of ways to advertise and market your business. You can try billboards, TV commercials, advertising on moving cars, hiring someone to wave a sign out in front of your store, flyers, email, pay-per-click, etc., etc, etc.

What’s a Small Business to Do?

So which do you choose when the dollars available to the market are always limited? You only want to spend money on a strategy that’s going to work, right?

Small Local Businesses Actually Have an Advantage, If They Take It

One of the most effective and least expensive strategies that exist today for marketing small local businesses is a local listing campaign.

The Internet has made it enormously advantageous for local businesses to beat out the big guys in search results if they do it right. Google wants to be able to offer the most value to their customers. Giving users local results is one way that they try to do that. So if you play your cards right, investing a small portion of your funds into a local listing campaign, you can see some really great results!

So how does it work?

Google – The First and Most Important Consideration for Local Listing

The first and most obvious site to emerge in the last 15 years for helping us make buying choices is Google. They have made a concerted effort to determine whether a user has a local intent, and give that user search results that reflect that, giving them very different results depending on their location.

They’ve created a local listing system, which has changed names a few times but is now called Google My Business. Companies can create a profile in this application. When consumers are looking for keywords that relate to certain business categories, Google will show them a selection of businesses known as the local pack.

Bing, Yahoo, and the Other Players

But Google isn’t the only player on the block. Bing has emerged in recent years as an alternative search engine and functions in a very similar manner to Google. Creating a listing for Bing is a very similar process. There’s also Yahoo, which used to have a much bigger share of the search industry but has shrunk in recent years. Today all non-Google sites equate to about 33% of search results, so they should be considered in a local listing strategy.

Yelp—One of the Most Important Sites For Online Reviews

Then there is the important listing site, Yelp, which has become one of the most popular sites for users to leave online reviews. Getting positive reviews from active yelpers can be a huge boon for businesses.

People who use Yelp trust the site and the reputation that companies have on the site. Yelp listings for companies also have a strong tendency to rank in search results for a company’s name and even for keyword phrases.

The Sites Formerly Known as Phone Books

Then there are the major directories that were known for their paper form—Yellow Pages, White Pages, Dex, etc. These phone book directories have converted to key online sources of information. A lot of potential customers still use these directories to search for businesses. And people leave reviews here as well. These listings can also show up in search results, so creating robust listings on each of these sites should be a big priority.

Better Business Bureau

Non-profit organizations like Better Business Bureau can also be a great place to have a listing. This organization acts as a consumer advocate group, giving potential customers information about a company’s local reputation. It’s probably a good idea to make sure that your rep with BBB.org is positive, as this is a highly regarded organization in a lot of communities.

Literally Thousands of Places to List—Why Do You Need Them?

There are many, many other places to list. There are literally thousands. There are GPS units in cars and cell phone services. There are industry-specific sites like Avvo.com for lawyers and Houzz.com for construction companies. There are listing sites that are specific for cities, like newspaper or news network sites. Many of these are valuable places to get online citations.

Why have listings on so many of them?

Google is the Focus

The reason to list on the thousands of sites is to strengthen your placement with the single most important listing—Google. With more than 67% of the searches conducted on Google, you want your local site to be found here. And you want to be found on the map pack for your business categories. You want keyword searches to show enhanced Google listings of your business. So what does that have to do with the other listings you might ask?

Google Verifies Their Listing by Looking at Others

If Google sees that hundreds of sites have consistent information on them about your company they know you’re legit. This information on other listing profiles suggests to the Google algorithm that your company is a valuable business. They’re looking for a consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) across the various listing profiles. This gives your listing on Google a huge bump. An average user may not see information about your company on page 30 of a search result, but the Google algorithm does, and it affects what happens on page 1.

This is why investing in a local listing campaign, where a steady addition of information to these hundreds and thousands of local listing sites and applications is a very worthwhile investment.

Local Listing Campaigns are Smart Investments

In fact, as Moz.com, a site that specializes in Internet Marketing training and tools, points out—a local listing campaign is one of the most cost-effective uses of your investment dollars.

So if you have a business that’s seeking to be found in a local marketplace, investing a small budget into a local listing campaign is a very clever move. Talk to us today about how we can help get this started.