People often see your local listing before they see your website. That means you should optimize how people come across your listings. Putting your business name on every listing place available can ensure your audience will find it. There are a lot of places to list your business out there! Keeping them all up to date and consistent can become time-consuming. A way to check out how your business ranks is by looking at your local listing score.
Table of Contents
How to Check Your Local Listing Scores
Sorting through all the listings you have posted to ensure everything is correct is one way to see if you meet all the criteria for an optimized listing. Your business could also select a listing management software to do the work for you. This is a system that will make sure you are listing in the right places, your information is correct, and that everything a user could want to know about your business is easily accessible.
What Should be Included in a Local Business Listing?
A local business listing lets the user know information about your company beyond just your name, location, hours of operations. They also can include:
- Categories
- Descriptions
- Social Media Accounts
- Images
- Certifications
- Payment Accepted
- Other Attributes (free wifi, outdoor dining, etc.)
This is a place to tell the people you want to reach about your business and what you can offer them. It can get people to act by clicking on your website or mapping to your location, hopefully to become a customer.
What is a Local Listing Score?
A local listing score allows your business to see where listings are inconsistent or incomplete across the internet. It will help make sure your listings are being optimized to get in front of the user. If your local listing score isn’t great, there are ways to improve it. You want this score to be optimized because it can affect your local SEO.
Why Use a Local Listing for a Small Business?
If you are a small business trying to decide if you should use local listings, the short answer is yes. Every business, even fully online stores, should be using local listings. This is how people find where to spend their money. If someone wants coffee, they look up “coffee shops near me” on their mobile device. If you are an online store and someone searches “scrunchies for sale” you want your business to be seen. Have local listings allow for your business to reach a client. Having a local listing can improve your visibility, increase website traffic, and help optimize your business SEO, also known as search engine optimization.
How do Local SEO and Local Listing Score Relate?
Local SEO allows small businesses to be able to compete with big corporations. Local SEO uses three main things to determine if a listing will show up for a user.
Relevance
Does the business match the search? If it does then your business will make the list. By adding keywords and categories to your business, it can help ensure that your business will pop up alongside the competitors. To further increase your credibility with Google and establish that your business fits the search, you can reinforce the idea by adding content and links from other credible sources.
Prominence
This is establishing your credibility. Your credibility to Google affects the way you are ranked in listings. This is why you want all your listings to be accurate. If Google sees any inaccuracies in your ranking, listings can take a decline.
Proximity
After establishing that your business matches the user’s search and your business has credibility, it considers location. This is the physical location of your business. This one is pretty much out of your control, but you can have other things to help your business stand out. You can try to make sure you have good Google reviews and high-quality pictures to help with that.
How to Manage Your Local Listings?
Managing your local listings can become extremely time-consuming. There are thousands of listings websites that your business should be on if you want to optimize your business fully. Doing all of it yourself will take away a lot of time from focusing on the main objective of your business. By using listing management software you can save time by adding all your business information only one time, then sending it to multiple listing places. These local listing places include Google My Business (GMB), Facebook, Bing, Yelp, etc. Another perk of having management software to help with listings is that you can update all your listings in real-time. If you update a location or operating hours, you can do it in one centralized location rather than having to individually go on every website to alter your information.
Using Moz Citation Checker
Moz is a listing management software that scans the internet for your business’s citations and gives your feedback on what you can improve on. Using Moz can also help you automatically delete multiple listings on the same website. It helps audit your citations to make sure only the correct listings are out for your potential customers to see. Moz citation checker makes sure your business is optimizing its listings by being everywhere your business should be listed. An important thing to remember when using any listing management software is that just because it helps you figure out where you should be, it doesn’t do the work for you. Your business is still held accountable to respond to reviews, update changes, and complete other tasks involved. If you aren’t an expert, you should think about hiring an SEO agency to help keep your company’s information relevant.
Other List Management Software
Moz is a very popular software that can help any size of business with what they need, but it isn’t the only management software out there to help organize your listings. There are tons of free and paid-for options that your business can use to help control listings. Below is a list of a few other management systems businesses use:
- Moz Local
- Yext
- Whitespark
- BrightLocal
- Local FX
All of these listing management software comes with different price ranges, business sizes, and capabilities. Taking time to talk to an SEO specialist or doing your research will be worth the outcome of having a central place to manage your business’s local listings.
SEO Citation Checker Benefits
Enhancing your local listings and improving your score benefits your SEO. If you don’t have any local listings or citations for your business, you are falling behind in the digital world. Setting up a Google My Business account can be the first step if you aren’t ready to fully dive into setting up your local listings. A Google My Business account will get you on the number one search engine and its map. It is also pretty quick to set up and gives your business a clear listing.
Improve Your Local Listing Score
Improving your local listing score is done through optimizing your citations. Making sure everywhere your business name is listed has accurate information. Improving your local listing score improves your local SEO as well. Listing is one of the biggest factors in local SEO. Local listings are important because you can establish credibility through your listings.
Be Credible and Accurate
If Google sees information about your business in multiple areas that don’t match, your credibility will decrease. Google wants to give its users the best experience, so it wouldn’t have your business show up at the top of the list. Make sure you keep that in mind as you begin creating your listings.
Respond to Reviews
When people leave comments about your business, good or bad, you should respond. This shows that you care about the customer. It can also keep engagement levels up on your business if people know you respond quickly. Most people also like to see businesses that have a lot of reviews.
Focus on Your Audience
Making sure your listings are where your audience will search will help make conversions from your listings. If you are putting your listings on industry-specific places, you could see a great increase of traffic. Doing listings on your own can be a lot of work. Starting to create listings by yourself will involve a lot of time and research. To find your audience, you can research to see where local listing websites are for your area of interest. After making a list of industry-specific listing sites, you can also add the most popular listing websites.
Improve Your Local Listing Score Today!
Improving your business’s listing score doesn’t need to be time-consuming. Allow SEO Design Chicago to guide you along the process of optimizing your business’s local SEO. We can help your listing score increase and make sure your business is on the right listing websites. We can also help get conversions and create SEO campaigns for your business. In the end, we want to guide your business to utilize all the benefits SEO has to offer.
FAQs
- How do local websites rank?
- What is an important ranking factor for local search?
- How do I get local search results?
- How to get on the first page of Google?
- What is the best listing management software?
Contact Us Today!