Building Your Online Presence Through Business Listings
We build great websites – that’s our business. And we need to promote the fact that we build great websites.
To misquote from Field of Dreams “Build it and they will come.”
Well, not exactly. Build it and they might come, if they know you exist. Of course there are plenty of ways you can do this, via paid marketing, social media presence, public relations etc. But we’re not going to delve into those today. We’re going to talk about something which is within your gift to control - business listings.
You need to pay attention to your complete online presence via business listings and that means a bit of spring cleaning.
We’re going to look at 4 things:
Why listings are beneficial
What to list
Where to list
Once listed – what next and getting reviews
Why listings are beneficial for your business
Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy
A consistent listing sends the right signals to Google (and other search engines) as they gather information from billions of websites across the world. If you are listed consistently 50 times, then you are feeding Google information which means you’re likely to get higher up the listings.
Keeping listings up-to-date and accurate is important
There are multiple places you can list your website. One thing is absolutely crucial here – you need to list your ‘NAP’, that is company:
Name
Address
Phone number
Plus, anything else you can list – website, email address etc. consistently.
Customers may not be able to contact you with an out-of-date name, phone number or address. It also looks unprofessional to have inconsistent listings.
Let’s look at an example using a fictional company, Joe Bloggs Cleaning in London. The name alone here could be presented in a few ways:
Joe Bloggs Cleaning – London
J Bloggs Cleaning – London
J. Bloggs Cleaning (London)
Joe Bloggs Cleaning
J. Bloggs Cleaning
Joe Bloggs – London
Joe Bloggs Cleaning Services – London
That’s just the name. The address could be incorrect or the telephone number listed with and without international dialling code.
And crucially, make sure that you point to your website home page and list a contact email address consistently.
What to list
You need to take advantage and complete every available field on the website directory listings. Make sure you include a description of the business which covers your main services / products, where you operate (local / national / international) and some general information about the company.
Where to list
If you can only spare a short time checking and updating your listing online, make sure you start with the Domain Authority big hitters such as Facebook, Google my Business, LinkedIn, Yelp and Bing.
What’s a Domain Authority?
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
There are many business directories out there – check out this blog from Hubspot on The Ultimate List: 57 Online Local Business Directories.
Do you know where your company is listed? We can help audit your online presence to ensure you are accurately listed and suggest other directories.
Once listed – what next and getting reviews
Once you are listed, you will need to keep on top of this. We have a tool that can help so you do not need to manually check your listings all the time, contact us for more details.
Why would you need to do this?
Well, things change, you move address, you change telephone number, you update a contact email address. We’d suggest running checks quarterly to ensure you keep on top of this.
Reviews
Reviews are critical for your business success and a lot of directory listing sites also offer review facilities.
Review sites are big business, easy for anyone to access, add their own commentary and really critical for your online presence.
At the simplest level, you need to pay attention to what customers are posting on review sites and respond to them – whether the review is good or bad.
If someone posts a review then you should aim to always respond within 24 hours. It will give that customer a feel-good factor and also show other potential customers that you have your finger on the pulse.
As always, we hope this has been useful. The team at Manage My Website are available for a chat about your online presence, how we can help you review where you are now and provide a plan for doing that all important spring clean.
Get in touch by emailing info@managemywebsite.com or contact us via our online form.