Here is what you can do if you want to use listings to improve online presence for your small business.
Get Your Business on the Heavy Hitters
It is always advisable for small business owners to target the most popular directories right from the outset. These are the “heavy hitters.” They tend to dominate the top 10 on the SERPs of most search engines. For this reason, many of the smaller directories out there usually aggregate information from these big directories. The big directories get tens of millions of visits per month and your business can benefit from this huge traffic to improve its online presence. Just try out big hitters like, Google-My-Business, GMB (the star-boy of the lot), Facebook, Yelp and Bing. You may also consider Foursquare if you want to take advantage of being included in thousands of local apps and services.
Maintain and Monitor your Listings
Thousands of directories across the web do pull information from one another. That can lead to inconsistencies or inaccuracies over time on your listings. You must take deliberate steps to check this because it spells a very bad omen for your online presence. You know why? Most consumers easily lose trust in local businesses if they find out incorrect or inconsistent information in their listings. And you know why? Every business thrives on trust. As much as practicable, you must make out valuable time to maintain and monitor all your listings from time to me. Alternatively, you can use the services of a listing service provider to help you out.
Populate Every Listing Field with Accurate Information
You must be very meticulous about this for obvious reasons. Just like social media feeds and search engine results pages, listing results are determined by algorithms. This means that the quality and consistency of your listing matters a great deal for you to get noticed. All vital information about your business must be listed accurately in the correct boxes or spaces provided. Vital information like your website, business niche/category, hours of business, business address, and contact info and so on are hugely important in your listings. As much as possible, make sure the information you provide is identical across all the listing sites you are using.
Make your Review Strategy Proactive
Strategically, reviews have perhaps the most powerful influence over how high you show up in directory results. That is in addition to the fact that they are one of the top ranking factors for Google local search. These are hugely important factors for your online presence. For this reason, there is a need for you to have a proactive strategy in place to keep a steady stream of reviews coming in. The more reviews you get, the higher your business is ranked by search engines and the stronger your online presence becomes. Constantly monitoring your reviews is very crucial because of how important the reviews are for your online presence.
