BUSINESS LISTINGS

This video go over the digital marketing concept of small business listings. Our agenda for this video is to first discuss what our business of scenes then go through the process of standardizing your data. Well then look at the general process of a business St. We’ll go over a number of actual listing profiles will then talk about the concept of aggregators and finally aligned on the concept of citations.

What are Business listings?

So what are business listings? Business listing comes it consists of three attributes which are sometimes referred to as a nap short for your name, your business name, address, business address, phone business phone. citations are places our actual websites where you can place your business information to be found by the different search engines. One of the most important things about business listing Is that it’s very important to display the exact same data everywhere. So this data again is your name, address and phone, exact spelling exact address abbreviations, it’s very, very important to make sure this all looks the same.

So, business listings are used by search engines like Google and Bing to show different attributes and their search engine results. So this could include your location, your business hours to contact information phone number email website. Also, in addition to search engines, mapping websites also use this information to show your location of your business. Again, major ones I’ve been in Google, but also other ones like MapQuest and Apple Maps.

The benefit of business listings to digital marketing profile is that gives you places on the internet where your business can be found. Additionally, because many of these websites actually show different categories, you are also going to be shown next to your competitor. So if somebody is looking for a specific industry or category and one of these websites, reason you want to have your business listed on them is so you could be shown next to your competitors.

Standardize Data

Business listings is this those things is very important that you actually standardize your data. In addition to three main aspects, the nap the name, address, and phone, there are other information that a business listing profile may include. That would be a good idea to standardize what would be your business description. This could be information about your business, its mission statement, its tagline, other things like that you want to convey to your potential customers. Another thing that many profiles allows actually a business history. This could again be information about when your business was formed, different after attribute How it grew, maybe some different awards you may have had or something like that.

Additional things you may want to standardize on is your logo, always using the same file. So your logo always looks the same across all the different business listings, you may place your business photos are very important. One, they show information about your business, but they also could show some behind the scenes information and different aspects your business. And the last it’s small, but it’s actually the industry or in some of the different profiles have different categories you may go into. So they’re not, you know, an industry standard categories across all the businesses, business listings, but again, you want to look and try to standardize as close to possible across all the different platforms.

General Process

Next thing we’ll look at briefly is actually the general process of how you go about setting up business listings. So when you identify a website that could have a business listing, the first thing you want to do is actually search to see if your business is already present. depending on the length of time your business has been open, they’re actually may have already generated some profiles for your business. If so, there should be a way to claim that business listing on that website. However, if you don’t find your business, you can go ahead and create a new business listing. Many websites will offer free listings, there are some that are paid and need to make judgment calm. Whether or not that website is a good one to pay for to actually place a business profile on there. Since you may be doing many of these to good idea to actually create a spreadsheet so you can track all the usernames and passwords that you set up and the actual URLs for the individual business profiles that you might create on this. This will make it much easier down the road to go back in and make any changes you might need to if you make any changes to different business characteristics such as your opening hours.

Business Listings Profiles

Next thing we’ll go over is actually some examples of actual businesses and profiles that are important to your business.

Google My Business

The first one is x is something called Google My Business. This is a Google property that actually allows you to create a profile for your business. The reason this is most important is if someone were to search for your business name on Google, the Google My Business Information will occur in what’s called the knowledge panel. It’s usually on the right side of a desktop view in the Search Console. So because it Google’s most popular search engine, having a Google My Business profile page is very important. The good thing is it’s free. Additionally, this profile of will also show up on Google’s maps so it’s kind of a two for one there. Once you’ve actually set up my account using separate profile using a Google account, they’ll actually has to be a verification process. Now there are a couple of different ways occur but typically, this is where Google will send a postcard with a special code to your address. And then you can go back in and finalize up the setting up your Google My Business profile by verifying via this postcard.

Bing Places for Business

And other listing the joint want to set up as you’re being places for business being is the search engine that is set up by Microsoft. It’s also the default Microsoft Windows. So it makes it the second most popular search engine. Again, it is also free, and much like the Google one. It will actually show up in both Bing searches and on the main map has a very similar process including the fact that it might actually pull some information from the Google My Business profile.

Yelp Business

Another important listing for many businesses, though not all is actually Yelp business. yelp is a very popular review site. And so having a profile that is important that people should Start searching for your industry within that, again, this one is also free to set up. One of the benefits of having a Google excuse me a Yelp business profile is it actually gives you the ability to have quotes sent directly to your business via an email address that you assigned to. So people might find you and ask for a quote, and they don’t even have to do a search and one of the search engines. Additionally up, Yelp is a review site. So you’ll actually need to claim or create a profile in order for you to respond to any reviews that may be left on your business.

LinkedIn

Another one that’s useful to set up is actually on the LinkedIn social network. Now LinkedIn is more of a business social network. But it does allow the ability to create a company page, which can have the additional information because it’s also a business social network and kind of formed around the idea of putting up a online resume. A LinkedIn page company page might actually be useful for employee recruiting. If You’re into that. Lastly, LinkedIn has a thing that allows for direct messaging between different people that aren’t connected on LinkedIn. So that may also have some benefits if somebody wants to get a hold of you through that method.

Business Listings Aggregators

Next, we’re going to talk about what are aggregators. aggregators are a special kind of organization that collects business details like the name, address and phone number that are porn for business listings. And they then take that data and actually give it to other sources. So if you sign up for a few of these, it actually could get your data out to a number of different websites that rely upon the aggregators for their source data.

Aggregator Services

So companies will actually submit information to these aggregators for you, they’re not really accessible to normal public people. So you actually have to go through kind of a third party in order to do those submissions. companies that do these submissions are Yext, mas local and bright, local Next,

Business Listings Citations

Top Websites

We’ll go over the concept of the actual citations. The citations are again, starts with basically making sure you have the name, address and phone number. But again, as I mentioned earlier, there could be other information like your logo or business description, or business hours and things like that. So whether you call it a profile, business listing or citation, there are different words that are used. But here’s some of the main top websites where you’ll want to actually create these profiles. So this citation then is accessible to this different search engines, in addition to the fact that people may actually find your business through these sources. So just briefly, we’ve already gone through Google My Business being places, but additional ones are mapping services like MapQuest and Apple Maps. Facebook, Foursquare, there are the ones related to reviews like trustpilot, their more traditional ones may have heard of like the Better Business Bureau There’s some industry specific ones like Angie’s List. And then the list goes on. And this is just a very small sampling of the many that might be out there.

Home Service Websites

If you’re specifically in the home services industry, these are a few that are really good ones to get your profile on their Angie’s List and homeadvisor are kind of the top ones thumbtack, and next door things that other people may have heard of.

Conclusions about Business Listings

So we’ll end up this video with some final thoughts in the conclusion section. So what are the benefits of having businesses? Well, the first one is again, just to provide your business information on multiple places on the internet. These websites allow you to write the citations or business listings or business profiles that have the standard standardization of your data, particularly your name, your address and your phone number. Because these websites list many people within your industry in different categories, you will actually show up next year. Competitors so not having these listings on these websites does put you at a disadvantage to your competition. And the final big benefit is maps. Many people are using maps to find places on their smartphones now with GPS. And so by having your business listings on many websites that have a mapping functionality, that information could be directly shown on a smartphone when somebody is doing a search for your industry.