What are local business directories and why should you care?
Local business directories are, for the most part, online resources for consumers looking for companies to do business with. The businesses can be anything from restaurants to t-shirt shops to contractors and anything else you can think of. A couple of the more well-known directories are Google Places and Yelp.
You should care about getting your business listed in these directories for a few main reasons:
- You gain visibility, people actually do use these directories to find businesses.
- You can interact with your customers. Most directories allow customers to review your business and some allow you to create deals, coupons and other specials to help entice your customer into your store or to contact you.
- You have complete control over your information and you can add what services you offer, hours of operation, a paragraph or two on your business and a lot more. Different places allow you to put more or less information but pretty much all of them allow you to add in your basic business information.
- You get quality back-links to your website. This allows you to get better rankings with the search engines.
- You get ‘mentioned’ around the Internet. Google Places takes into consideration the number of times your ‘mentioned’ online into how well your places page ranks in the results. Being mentioned seems to do with the address, phone number and business name being written someplace AND matching what is on your actual Google Places page.
There are two main categories for local business directories: The main search engines’ local pages, i.e. Google, Yahoo! and Bing, and all the rest.
Search Engines’ Local Pages
These are the big three for local directories as it’s via these three search engines that most people do most of their online searching. They are Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local.
It is a fairly straight-forward process to sign up and get listed, although the entire process from signing up to seeing your listing can take a couple months, most of that time is spent waiting. During the listing process, both Bing and Google will send a post-card to your physical address (P.O. Boxes are not allowed, physical business locations allowed only) to verify your existence. Yahoo! will verify your business through their internal system.
Once your local profile has been setup and is live, it takes a bit of work to get ranked higher amongst the other local profiles, i.e. your competition. Here are a few key points in gaining ranking with the local search results:
- Be sure to fill in as much as you possibly can in your business profile, the more information the better.
- Don’t spam or stuff keywords into your profile, in other words, don’t find all the keywords you want to be ranked for and simply slap them all over your profile. This is seen as spam and your listing will suffer or be removed all-together.
- Get reviewed, get reviewed, get reviewed. Getting your customers to go online and review your local profiles helps a great deal in getting better ranking, it can even help your normal website’s search results. Just don’t review your own sites and don’t have people create an account with the search engines simply to write you a review, the engineers who write the code for these search engines know people try to do that, it’s simply a waste of time. Real reviews from real clients is the way to go.
How do you get reviews? First, provide a good service, second, ask for them. Simply asking for the customer to review your site at Google Places can often be enough, just provide them with a link to your local profile. Sometimes you may want to offer an incentive to review your business, such as a discount off your next visit or a free t-shirt or a coupon to Subway, use your imagination! - Ensure the other online business directories and data centers around the net have your current information. How to do this is explained in the next section about other local directories.
Other Local Business Directories
In addition to the big three I just mentioned, there are many, dozens actually, other local business directories online, on of the most well-known is Yelp. These directories are all fairly similar, give or take a bit here and there. They all place your business information into their directory, creating a separate page for each entity. For example, click here to see Homer Web Designs’ Merchant Circle page.
Many of these local business directories will create a basic listing of your business automatically. How? Well, there are a few big data centers for businesses and these directories can get your information from them. This is good, however, the listings they create are very simple with nothing more than your business name, address and phone number and if you’ve changed any of these items within the last year, they could be displaying old information.
It’s important to not only verify that these directories and data centers have your correct information but you should also claim them and add your website, business description, hours of operation and other important information. I’ve put over 50 of the local directories in a spreadsheet (both for Excel and Open Office) that I use for my own reference. If you would like a copy of this file, please either contact me or leave a comment below with your email address and I’ll send it to you.
Claiming and updating your business with these directories can be very time consuming, we can claim and update your business with over 50 directories for just $199.
Tags: business directories, customer interaction, directories, Link Building, local marketing, Marketing, testimonials, Visibility