You have your website setup, its designed to your liking and is already bring in a few new customers. Whats next?
Business Listings - An Important Part of your Online Strategy
Many small businesses rarely believe that building out listings on multiple platforms will help them. In fact, there are a lot of businesses out there that don't put any effort into this area of online marketing. To be honest, this is the most tedious part of establishing your business online. It can require the greatest amount of effort for what seems to be very little benefit.
The reason this tedious process is so important relies on something we in SEO call NAP consistency. NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone [number]. Being consistent online tells Google and other search engines your true business name, your true location and the best way for people to contact you. Managing these sources and keeping them accurate can help a lot in terms of digital marketing for a local business.
Google My Business
One of the first areas you need to focus on is Google My Business. Depending on how late to the game you are, you may notice that there is already a listing for your business. Surprise. In fact, there may be many Google business listings for your business.
What is important here is that you claim, manage, and fix all versions of your Google My Business listing. Really you want to have ONLY one listing for your business. Having different variations of your name or anything that looks like spam will hurt your performance. Before you can go about this, you will need to claim your listings.
Most of the time, an unmanaged listing will have the option to claim it. You should see a claim this business icon in the map result for you. If you don't see this, its possible your business is already managed. See if you created a listing before or try to contact the GMB team to claim this listing. If you don't see a listing for your business, its time to start from scratch and create one.
Once you have navigated your way through the Google My Business claiming process and updating your business to show updated information, you will need to hurry and work on your other listings.
Additional Listings
There are many listings that are important for your business. It is important you check on Bing and Yahoo to claim and update these listings. After this, you will be faced with a difficult question; where should I look next?
Finding the business listings you should go after next could be a very challenging task. There are industry specific listings, high value listing aggregators and more. You could do this manually or you could use a service to get yourself started on the right path.
One very helpful service you could consider is Moz Local. https://moz.com/local
Moz Local can help you with checking your listing online, finding duplicates and fixing issues.
Now its time to get started!