An online business listing can help lead potential customers to your website, direct them to your agency’s physical location or help them get in contact with you. For example, when you search for a company on Google™, a listing with the company’s contact information appears on the right side of the site. Local people are searching for “insurance near me;” they may even be searching directly for your agency. Claiming these listings will make you easier to find and contact for these potential customers. It will also allow you to take ownership and manage the information that’s shared about your business.
Why you should claim your listings
If you don’t claim your listings, Google and other search engines try to update them for you with information from around the web and customer suggestions. If the information on the listings is already correct, you may be wondering why you’d need to manage them yourself. Well, if that information is ever altered or made incorrect by a search engine, you’d have no way of changing it. Plus, managing the listings allows you make your agency’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) the exact same across the internet. Keeping your NAP and other online information exactly the same will improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the increasing of web visibility and traffic through organic search engine results. Basically, strong SEO makes your business easier to find online.
Once you take ownership of these listings, you can view your web traffic and activity for each site. You’ll also be able to see what customers are saying about their experience, and respond to any reviews or messages they’ve left.
Where to start
Some popular listings you should claim and keep up-to-date are on:
Google
Yelp
Bing
There are a ton of search engines and websites that hold your business information, but these three are used most frequently. You can also visit smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local and plug in your company’s name to see if your NAP is the same on other sites.
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