See How to Easily Manage your Local Business Listings

See How to Easily Manage your Local Business Listings

One critical yet sometimes unappetizing part of running a local business is managing your local listings. The hours involved are probably not exactly what you had in mind, nevertheless, making sure your listings are not only correct but aiding your business are many times the difference between local success or failure.
If you have multiple locations for your business this work might be even more unsavory, but steel yourself with the fact that getting this part right can unlock the door to a better business in numerous ways. Let's check out some of what you need to do to achieve good local listing management.

The basics: getting your local listings in order

Here are some of the things you'll need to get in order from the beginning.

• Make sure your business information is consistent across and all platforms you presently have. One mistake here can ruin everything. This means business names, addresses, phone number, websites and social media.
• Be sure you are reachable. A phone number is a must-have for a local business, even if it only leads to a voicemail. (please don't)
• Completely fill out any profiles you have on sites that have your local listings. There is very little that creates mistrust more than a business who doesn't want to tell you anything about themselves.

Taking local listings a step beyond

After you've got your business listings on your sites and local directories finished, it's time to look into what you can reap from the many and varied local business sites designed to help you get noticed. Many of these won't charge a fee, but there are a few that are worth spending a few bucks on. What follows is a few ideas to get you moving.

• Make sure you are indexed in the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Take a peek at sites like Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze, and Factual. These aggregators provide data to mobile companies and search engines alike, and are very useful in extending your reach and visibility.
• Yelp, Yext, Foursquare, Facebook have a lot of authority when it comes to local business. Good reviews on these can boost your business in a short time.
• Tools like Bright Local, Moz Local, Whitespark or Local Buzz are extremely handy when it comes to monitoring citations and tracking your progress. You'll need to enlist one of these to help garner more and better citations that will give your business a boost.