The #3 Reason – Non-Google Local Listing – Profitable Opportunity!

Here’s the next chapter of our series: the 5 Scary and Exciting Reasons Why Local Listings Are Changing the Way People See Search Engine Results! In this update, we will explain the 3^rd reason those business owners should consider investing in local listing campaigns—the fact that Non-Google Local Listings are showing up high in organic search results.

Google Map Pack Not the Only Goal Of Local Listing Campaign

It’s obvious to any business owner and marketer that one would want their business to show up in Google’s “Map Pack,” as it’s commonly described. This list of businesses, which show up prominently in search results for certain keyword phrases, can be the Holy Grail for marketers—Getting a prominent placement on the map pack is the single greatest and most important challenge of a local listing campaign.

Google Algorithm Favors Non-Google Listings in Organic Search

But it’s not the only goal of a local listing campaign. Google favors other local listings like Yelp and Yellow Pages in their organic search results. Getting robust information about your business on key listing sites, popular in your area and industry, can very often show up in the search results and translates into sales! In fact, we’ve noticed how recent updates to the Google algorithm have favored these non-Google listings, and we’ve seen this observation confirmed by other professionals in the industry.

Sometimes the general listing site directory like YellowPages.com will show up in the organic search results for a certain keyword that you’ve looked up. Like let’s say you’ve looked up “lawyers San Antonio” and it suggests YellowPages.com as a search result. This is not very helpful since you, as the user, have to click on the site link and then do another search in that directory for the business category that you’re searching for.

What you want as a searcher are the end results, specific company profiles in the directories to show up in the Google search results. You want to click on the company information and make a choice. You want it easy!

So the question that we have as marketers is can we make company profiles on these directories show up in Google results. The answer is yes.

Keyword Phrase Search Results Shows Your Business Listings

Very often your specific company’s profile on a site like YellowPages.com or Houzz.com can show up in the organic search results for certain keyword phrases.

Here’s an example. if you’re in the Orange County area and you search for these terms: “Custom Wine Cellars” in Google this is one of the organic search results that will show up for one of our clients:

Admittedly, this is a very targeted search term. But it’s also very powerful! Anyone in that area who’s looking to purchase a custom wine cellar is going to find our client, and with one click the user is seeing very specific marketing messages which we’ve chosen to communicate for them.

For example, they will be seeing images of their work. They’ll be seeing marketing information. They will be seeing user reviews. This expands the opportunity for their company’s local exposure online. It expands it beyond their website to the many useful and important listing sites, like the Houzz example below. And it can be targeted for many various keywords related to their industry, across the various listing sites.

Which Sites Are the Most Important to List On?

How do you know which sites are the most important to list your business on? This is where consulting with an expert is helpful. There are so many listing sites out there, getting citations on the thousands of sites can be enormously time-consuming. How do you know which ones are the most important for your area? We have tools that we can use to help us analyze your area and industry, helping us determine the priority sites to spend time on first and foremost.

Consult With an Expert on Aggregators

There are also tools called aggregators, which can be helpful in some circumstances for listing on a lot of sites all at one time. There can be disadvantages to using aggregators, so one has to be careful using them. Once again, consulting with an expert on local listings is paramount.

Local Listing—The Wild West of Online Real Estate

Ultimately, what’s really exciting about these various local listing profile sites is that they are the wild west of the online real estate. Posting information about your business is usually free. All it takes is an expert local marketing company like Holistic Web Presence to help you do it. The cost is usually small to hire an expert to put great branded information on these sites.

And it should be mentioned that the information you put on these sites verifies the information that you’ve posted on Google My Business, which reinforces your Google listing, increasing your position on the Google Map Pack, which as you may remember, is goal #1. So it’s a wonderful virtuous circle.