Optimizing local business listings is at the core of any successful SEO strategy, ensuring that all major online directories display accurate listings for your business – such as name, address, phone number and URL of website – along with reviews and photos that may be relevant.
Local listings management is essential to increasing visibility for any business and helping it compete more successfully against its rivals by building trust and credibility. Listing in multiple credible directories can build brand authority while positive reviews across platforms increase consumer trust and conversions.
Include Google My Business, Bing Places, Yahoo! Business, Yelp, Acxiom and Localeze among your local SEO strategies for maximum exposure and ranking success. Also consider listing in industry-specific directories owned by professional organizations or magazines to enhance local search visibility and optimize local SEO performance.
Maintaining consistent NAP (name, address and phone number) citations across all of your local listings is an essential aspect of local SEO efforts. Google will gain more confidence that the details provided about your business are accurate as more citations appear on authoritative sites that feature them.
Build a website that contains high-quality, optimized content about your products or services and use this to attract links from other websites – this will boost organic search rankings!
Your business can also leverage paid search advertisements such as Google AdWords to increase the chances of your ads appearing in search results for product/service searches related to what you offer. This form of promotion can be cost-effective while still giving potential customers notice of your company.
If your physical locations span multiple cities or states, be sure to list each contact info for each on its own dedicated local directory page to avoid confusion from both search engines and consumers alike. Duplicate listings could damage both your SEO ranking and consumer perception of your business – potentially even leading to it being removed from search results altogether!
Though there are various local listing tools available, Google My Business Manager stands out as being among the best options for all businesses and is regularly updated by Google with new features. Other useful local SEO tools are Nifty which tracks keywords on Google Maps using location modifiers; and Search Console which is a free tool designed to track and manage Google search traffic – giving insights such as how many searches your site receives, from what geographic areas or devices users access it, what devices are being used, as well as which keywords work or don’t. It even shows which keywords work or don’t!
