Business listings add additional channels to bring in visitors to your website. There are tons of business listings on the Internet. Each business listing has a different type of audience.
For example, you may want to target Yelp. Yelp can help you gain reviews about your services. Foursquare and Facebook offers visitors a chance to “check-in” at your business location. “Checking in” can be used to spread awareness of your location to friends or followers. This works especially well if you’re able to catch the attention of a “viral spreader” who has a following of loyal persons. Business listings can help you gain a reputation, gauge popularity, or provide an ability to collect images from customers.
But if your business listings are incorrect and inconsistent, you could be potentially losing customers and affecting your ability to rank well in search engines.
Reason #1
Incomplete business listings can negatively impact your ability to rank well in search engine results
According to MOZ.com’s 2015 Search Ranking Factors, both the quality and authority of “Structured Citations” (business listings) are crucial to both Localized Organic Factors and Mobile Search Ranking Factors (see figure 1.1). Therefore, incomplete and inconsistent business listings can affect your website SEO in a negative way. Also, incorrect business listings are potentially preventing customers from finding your business online.
Reason #2
Consistent business listing information across the web is critical to ranking well on local search engines
There are two important reasons why your business listings should appear correct on the web:
- Positive affects on website SEO
- Misinformation can drive customers away from your business and over to your competitors
Positive affects on website SEO
Once again, according to MOZ.com’s 2015 Search Ranking Factors, the “consistency of structured citations” is crucial to both Localized Organic Factors and Mobile Search Ranking Factors.
Misinformation can drive website traffic to your competitors
You don’t want to start driving customers to your competitor’s website. If there are mistakes on your business listings such as an incorrect phone number or address, this could cost you a customer! Make sure your business listings have consistent and correct information.
Reason #3
Duplicate listings can negatively impact your ability to rank well in search engine results
Duplicate business listings are like presenting two business cards. One card has correct information, and another that has incorrect or missing business listing info. If you have more than two duplicates out there, this could affect your website SEO in a negative way.
According to MOZ Local, the following directories are considered the most relevant database hubs and database aggregators on the Internet:
- Google Plus
- Foursquare
- Facebook Pages
- Yelp
- Superpages
- Infogroup
- Neustar
- YP (Yellowpages)
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Hotfrog
- Localeze
- Best of Web Local
- CitySearch
- Acxiom
- MerchantCircle
- urbanspoon
- openlist
- Local.com
Sprout Digital can help your business identify and correct your business listing information. Correct business listing information will influence your website SEO in a positive way. It will keep potential customers from encountering incorrect business info about your business.