A Definitive Guide to Business Listings Management

Everything You Need to Know for Listings Management for Your Business

In today’s digital landscape, there are a million ways you can try to capture audience attention and score new leads, and all of them can feel challenging to do effectively and correctly.

One of the ways your business can boost visibility among audiences and ideal users, especially local users, is through business listings management. Business listings promote your business name and relevant details across the internet to increase visibility within your target market, improve your rankings in local searches, and ultimately attract and score new customers.

And business listings aren’t just for companies with storefronts. Those that offer any local service or contact customers in person are eligible to create profiles with search engines (including a Google Business Profile) and online directories.

Managing business listings can feel overwhelming for anyone unfamiliar with the practice, but this guide breaks down the process and offers the facts, tips, and suggestions you need to ensure your listings are optimized and working for you.

What Are Business Listings?

Business listings display the information your customers need to know about your business on whatever platforms you have profiles. And you can create profiles on hundreds of platforms and directory websites.

Which Listings Platforms Are There?

From generalized platforms to restaurant platforms, healthcare directories, legal directories, and hundreds of others, you can sift through the options and create profiles on the sites that best serve you.

Some of the most popular platforms and directories most companies can benefit from using include:

• Apple Maps
• Bing Places for Business
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Google Business Profile*
• Instagram for Business
• LinkedIn
• Superpages
• Yahoo
• Yellow Pages
• Yelp for Business
• ZoomInfo

*Google Business Profile is bolded and starred because Google is the search engine kingpin, and a Google Business Profile determines if and how you appear in local searches and on Google Maps. Plus, a Google Business Profile allows you to respond to reviews, answer customers’ questions, create posts and offers, and more. If there is a single place to start with your business listings, it’s with a Google Business Profile (but don’t just use that one; utilize all the listings that are relevant to you).

What Info Is Included in a Business Listing?

Some platforms or directories vary with what you can and cannot include on your profile, but they will always call for your NAP—Business Name, Address, and Phone Number. Listings can also include:

• Hours of operation
• Business category
• Website URL
• Company bio or about info
• Product and service information
• Forms of payment you accept
• Relevant photos and/or videos
• Reviews that customers have left

Who Are Business Listings For?

It used to be that only companies with a storefront location needed online business listings so that users could easily locate them out in the real world. While it’s true that listings benefit companies with physical locations that customers can visit, they are also beneficial for companies that might not have a physical storefront but still offer in-person services to local customers.

So whether you own or operate a restaurant, retail store, law firm, wealth management company, hotel, IT management company, dog grooming salon, HVAC company, or any other business that provides goods or services in your area, you can benefit from business listing creation and management.

Why Is Listings Management Important?

Listings give your customers or potential customers the details that tell who you are, what you do, and how well you can serve them. Listings management ensures that each online profile or directory the business uses displays the correct information.

For example, a business with poor listings management could have a profile with one online directory that provides an accurate name, address, and phone number for the company, as well as a profile with a different directory that displays the owner’s name as the business name, a previous address, and a phone number with a typo.

Your information needs to be accurate and consistent across the internet for a multitude of reasons, including:

You’re Ranked According to How Accurate Your Listings Are

Search engine algorithms, including Google’s local algorithm, cross-check listings and rely on your information to rank your business in a relevant search.

You and your competitors are all vying for visibility and high positioning on SERPs. To make the sorting process easier on Google’s end, the algorithm automatically bumps a business down if its listing details aren’t the same across each platform. To the algorithm, inconsistency or inaccuracy is a sign of either spam, dishonest business practice, or unhelpful or disinterested management, none of which users want to deal with.

If your listings aren’t well managed, you could miss out on the opportunity to rank higher and capture more people’s attention.

Your Listings Information Is Vital for Local SEO

The local algorithm takes priority these days when people enter their queries into Google. Even if all you enter is “pizza,” the first feature you’ll see is the Local Pack, which displays three pizza joints closest to your current location. It doesn’t matter if you wanted to find pizza recipes or learn about the history of pizza; Google will first assume you want to purchase a pizza and you don’t want to go far to do so.

So, going back to the Bluetail scenario, let’s say your pizzeria has business listings with incorrect or inconsistent information. And let’s say Bluetail makes it into the local pack in a search conducted at noon on a Sunday. But the listing information shows old store hours from when you used to be closed on Sundays. Even though you’re now open, the user will see information saying you’re closed and will choose a different pizza joint that says they are open at that time.

Another scenario could be that Bluetail has changed locations—your restaurant used to be in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, but you’ve since relocated to Decatur. Still, some of your listings continue to feature your old Buckhead address. Folks searching for pizza in Buckhead could come across your restaurant, go to the address displayed, and become very frustrated with what they (don’t) find.

Users Lose Trust in Companies That Aren’t Consistent

Trust is one of the most important things a company can earn from its customers, especially in online spaces. Shopping for a product, service, or solution to a problem is easier than it has ever been, thanks to today’s digital landscape. Honest, hardworking businesses can use their corner of the internet to satisfy customers with the right solutions. But at the same time, malicious folks can use their online space to prey on shoppers, oversell, underdeliver, and ultimately scam their victims out of money.

Shoppers understand this and can be on higher alert whenever they come across a company they have never done business with before. No one wants to get duped, and something as simple as inconsistent listings from your company can be enough to make you appear illegitimate and cause shoppers to move on to one of your more consistent competitors.

Google Will Update Your Profile for You if It Thinks Your Current Information Is Inaccurate

Have you ever visited your Google Business Profile only to discover that information has changed and is no longer accurate? Maybe your phone number keeps changing to your old one, or perhaps your address keeps reverting back to the address of your previous location.

Google’s algorithm is diligent and persistent, a little too much at times—if it encounters information from another source that does not align with the information featured on your Google Business Profile, it will note the inconsistent information and could self-edit your profile to help you appear more consistent across the board.

Whenever something changes with your contact information, it is essential to make sure the change is applied wherever your information is displayed online.

How to Create and Manage Your Listings

Creating your business listings is easy, but it does take strategy to maximize your profiles and improve SERP performance.

Step 1: Research Your Profile Options and Decide Which Ones to Create

While there are hundreds of directories out there, you don’t need to create a profile on all of them. Depending on your line of business or the nature of your company, there are some platforms and directories that are more effective to use. For instance, it would be odd (and potentially not possible) for you to create a Bluetail profile on a healthcare directory, but both a medical practice and Bluetail should create a Google Business Profile, Apple Maps profile, and Bing Places profile.

Claiming Your Google Business Profile

Platforms like Google may already have your profile created; you just have to claim it. Google will create profiles for businesses that already exist, and claiming the profile is easy. Once you have control of it, you can fill out your profile with all the accurate, up-to-date information needed.

Step 2: Maintain Consistency Across All Profiles

Whichever platforms or directories you choose to utilize, your information must be accurate and consistent across the board. The most important fields of information are your contact info, including your:

• Name
• Address
• Phone number
• Website URL
• Hours of operation

Step 3: Fill Out Your Profile With Quality Descriptions, Photos, and Videos

Accurate and up-to-date contact information is crucial to feature, and captivating extras are also highly beneficial to showing who you are and what you can do for customers. For a business like Bluetail, you can (and should) create an engaging description of your restaurant, upload attractive images of your pizzas and location, upload images of your menu*, and perhaps even feature a video of a pizza coming out of the oven—whatever you want to captivate users and entice them to visit your restaurant.

*Remember that if you upload an image of something changeable, like a menu, you’ll need to remove it and reupload a new picture should the menu or photographed item ever change.

Step 4: Engage With Customer Reviews

Customer reviews and ratings play a significant role in peoples’ decisioning these days. Reviews help potential customers gain an idea of what it would be like to do business with the company in question. Engaging with the reviews people leave will further show what someone can expect from your company. From appreciative “thank you” responses on positive reviews to sincere, professional, and courteous responses on negative reviews, your review engagement can help shape your image among users.

Step 5: Stay on Top of Your Profiles

It’s likely that your business name, address, or phone number will not change often. But it is still important to check in on your profiles to ensure you’re displaying the correct information, regularly adding photos or videos, responding to customer reviews, answering questions or DMs, and more. This is where the importance of management comes in, because one incorrect listing, neglected review, or stale profile can throw off all the hard work you’ve put into creating your profiles and building your reputation among algorithms and users.

“Do I Have to Manage My Listings?”

The short answer is, “Yes, you can!” There are a few advantages to managing all of your business listings yourself. First of all, it’s free. Second, it gives you total control of what to add or update and when to do it.

The issue, though, is that listings management can be highly time-consuming and requires a specific kind of diligence to ensure all your profiles are correctly updated and maintained. As a business owner or manager, you have a million and one things on your plate already, and being tasked with maintaining your business listings, although crucial, adds even more. Management can easily slip through the cracks and become neglected or forgotten.

Going back to Bluetail, it’s likely that you or your team regularly receive customer reviews, questions, and DMs on all the profiles you have, including Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Apple Maps. If you are the only one managing your profiles, you have to constantly monitor all of your profiles so that you never forget to respond to a review on one profile or answer a question or DM on another.

What Are My Options for Business Listings Management?

Self-Management

As mentioned, you could self-manage your business listings if you or your team has the diligence and time to monitor and update each profile properly.

Management Software

There are plenty of listings management platforms and software options from vendors all over the world that can make the self-management process a bit easier.

Continuous Management From the Experts

Companies like M&R Marketing offer business listings management, taking the responsibility off your hands and putting it in the hands of skilled, in-house digital strategists who understand business listings inside and out.

Our digital team regularly monitors our clients’ listings, makes consistent updates whenever necessary, and ensures listing accuracy to boost performance on the SERPs. Our solutions not only enhance brand visibility, but they also help drive traffic to our clients so they can convert leads into paying customers and grow their brand throughout their service area.

Listings Management Wrap-Up

Skilled business listings management is more than just a good idea—it’s vital if you want to optimize your performance on search engines and your reputation among your target audience and customer base. While there are several ways to go about managing your business listings across the board, the most effective way is to partner with the Google- and Bing-certified digital experts at M&R Marketing.

M&R Marketing relies on an in-house team of digital strategists, web developers, graphic designers, and copywriters who all understand the “whys” and “hows” of Business Listings Management. Let us dive into your company profiles and begin optimizing your local SEO performance and boosting your business. Send us an email at hey@mandr-group.com or call us today at 478-621-4491.

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