For most businesses, the better you rank on Google, the more money you will make. What many business owners don’t realize is there are really several different ways you can rank, even on Google. Many times what you actually want … no, what you actually NEED is to get your LOCAL DIRECTORY LISTINGS optimized properly so you rank at the top for local searches. This article explains these important local directory listings in greater detail.
What Are Local Searches?
Local searches are the search results for searches relating to more local interests. There are a few different ways that search engine recognizes a search as a LOCAL SEARCH.
- One way is a search that you either explicitly type in the name of a specific town as part of your search, like: “Somers Point Website Design” instead of just “website design”.
- If you add “near me” to your search like: “website design companies near me”. If you happen to be within a few miles of our office, you would see our listing in the search results.
- If you are using your cell phone and Google (or the app you are using) recognizes this search as one that usually requires a “local” result. An example of this would be “pizza shop”. In most cases, you will get results of pizza shops close to you. Search engines are smart enough to understand your “search intent”.
A Quick look at Google Search Results Pages
When you get the SEARCH RESULTS for a local search, you will typically see a page that looks a little bit like this:
As you can see, there is a map with several business listings displayed right near the top of the page. These listings are actually quite different than the ORGANIC SEARCH RESULTS listed lower on the page.
These are actually 2 completely different sets of results shown together on the same page. It is possible for companies to appear at the top of organic search results but not show at all in the directory list (and vice versa).
Errors in Your Local Business Listing
Your local business listing is your online entry that contains your business Name, Address and phone number (NAP) along with other details. There are services that can help you manage this information (for a fee) to make sure your business information is listed properly. Believe me, if this information is not managed, it will contain a tremendous amount of inaccurate information. These directory services scour the web attempting to fill-in their missing information. They have no idea whether the information they “captured” is accurate or not. In fact, the most common error we see is that some of your competitor information is in your listing. This happens because your competitors are usually listed “near” your online listings. This causes information to get mixed up at times.
Where Do These Local Business Listings Appear?
There are hundreds of places where these listing appear, which is why it is so important to make sure they are optimized. The main place you will see these directory listings is in Google search results. These listings also appear on hundreds of other websites and in hundreds of apps. Here are a few examples of where you might find your business listing: Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Yahoo, uber directions, bing, yp.com, eLocal, map quest, and hundreds of other places.
How Can I Optimize My Local Directory Listings?
This is actually a very difficult thing to do on your own. There are so many different directories to manage. What’s worse, is that some of these directories make you jump through (seemingly) endless hoops to verify that you are actually authorized to manage the listing in the first place. There are 3rd party subscription services that can handle this for you. For about $100/mo. you can subscribe to a service that will let you manage these listings more easily.
We actually have an amazing offer for you. If you go directly to these services, you will see it runs about $100/mo. If you hire us to manage it, we will also charge you $100/mo. but we will do all the work for you – saving you time and stress. We also, of course, have a ton of experience so we can get your listing optimized much better than you could, in most cases.
Give us a call!
