We found that local business listings are one of the most misunderstood and therefore underutilized tools in the marketing tool belt for any local
business. When you understand the role that local business listings play for prospective customers as well as for search engines seeing to a businesses online listings becomes high-priority! To understand the power local business listings it’s helpful to look at them through the lens of an age-old success formula, that’s worked since the beginning of time.
Visibility + Credibility = Profitability
Watch this Episode of Secret Sauce, To get the details!
https://youtu.be/HdC5uyZjnkg
Off-line the formula looks like this.
A business owner joins the Chamber of Commerce, a BNI chapter or goes to local meet up groups.
- Showing up regularly accomplishes visibility.
- Presenting yourself in a professional and consistent manner begins to build credibility
- Eventually, as the relationships develop, you begin to experience the profitability.
The Same Formula Online
It’s a little more complicated!
Local business listings, like Bing, yelp, Yellow Pages, Yahoo, Superpages etc. have two things in common;
- Millions of consumers use them worldwide to find products and services they need in their life and for their businesses
- Their popularity gives them authority in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Visibility is achieved by using them properly in two different ways. The first is obvious the second not so much!
- Obviously, a consumer that uses a particular listing to find products and services won’t find a business that isn’t there, so visibility is achieved by being listed there.
- What isn’t so obvious, is how Google uses those local listings to decide which competitor in any market has the most credibility. In search, the business with the most credibility gets referred more often by search engines like Google.
Here’s where credibility comes in an unexpected way. What many business owners don’t realize is that Google is the source of their own data. This puts them at risk as a trusted provider of credible information for being wrong if the data they have is wrong. Google uses these other local business listings to verify the accuracy of the business information in a Google my business page. Every time it finds an exact match, that is more credibility for that business.
Here’s an example:
- Business A goes and makes the top 50 local listings an exact match to their Google my business page
- Business B ignores their local listings which are inconsistently presenting the business name address and phone number.
Business A Has More Credibility the Business B in the Eyes of Google Ranks Higher in Search Results
Is your business like Business A or Business B?
Which business do you want to be?Â
We can help. just ask!