One of the most important things you can do for your business is to make sure you can be found by your customers and potential clients. The most popular method, by more than 65% of all consumers, is to search for a business or organization online verses looking at printed materials, such as the phone book.
There are many benefits to getting your business listed. Four important ones are:
- 1. Potential customers or clients can find you when they search online for businesses like yours. This is important even if they are looking for simple things like directions, hours of operation, or how to contact you.
- Many consumers like to visit a web site before visiting a business. If yours is not listed, they will find your competitor.
- In-store traffic. Consumers are using the internet more, and print yellow pages less. As stated above, print materials account for less than a third of local business search. An online business listing is the best way to get people to walk in to or call you.
- Web site traffic. Even though this is somewhat obvious, your listings on other sites will include a link to your web site, which will result in more traffic, and in turn, more traffic builds even more traffic on your site.
Depending on how you move forward getting your company listed, the process can be either time consuming or cost you some of your advertising budget. The price of not being listed can easily mean the difference between being profitable or closing your doors!
You can also choose to pay someone to do this for you, and we would be happy to help. Yet with a little time and effort, there is no reason why you cannot do this for yourself by setting aside an hour or two each week over the next few weeks. Another good item to note is that if your basic information does not change, there is little reason to monitor the listings regularly, simply check on them every few years.
A Couple of Pointers When Creating/Updating Listings
- Be accurate and consistent. Each listing that you create online takes time and it is best to thoroughly complete each one so that you will not have to go back to each one.
- If you have a registered business name, use that as your business name in all cases. Some of these sites will verify your information with public business registration data, and consistency will help your search ranking.
- Fill out everything you can. More information helps you get found, and makes your listing more useful to searchers – remember, your goal is not just to have your listings show up, you want people to visit your business. The most useful part of filling out each one of these is that these sites have a much higher search engine ranking than you could ever hope to have starting out. It’s all about exposure when your potential customers are searching online. The more listings you have with the most detailed information the better chances are you will be found.
- Find a place to safely store this information, including usernames and passwords so you do not lose it. Keep track of all the places that you have listed your information. If you ever need to update your information or modify a listing, this information can make the process easy to update.
- Be patient, the process takes time. Many of these listing services require the creation of an account, creation of a personal account to create a business account, and/or awaiting a PIN to arrive by mail.
- The good news is that there are many free ways to get your business listed online with outstanding results, if you choose to proceed forward on your own.
*NOTE: As you list your business on these listing sites, you will receive a lot of verification emails, offers to pay for additional listings and upgrades, and you will likely get phone calls. Please know that the difference in paying for the additional services is NOT necessary to get your company or organization listed well.
2 IMPORTANT PLACES TO GET LISTED RIGHT AWAY:
(your listings on these two SEO’s will be copied by other smaller search engines over time)
OTHER SITES THAT ARE GOOD TO HAVE YOUR BUSINESS ON:
Manta http://www.manta.com/
Merchant Circle http://www.merchantcircle.com/
Facebook
Setup a business listing. If you do not post regularly and use FB for getting the word out, it will at least verify that you are a legitimate business with the search engines. People will find your listing on FB, which should contain information such as a link to your website, your location, hours, contact details, etc..
YouTube
Even though YouTube was never intended as a search engine, it has fast become a location for people to find information. If your business ever creates a promotional or instructional video, consider opening a business channel on YouTube and list every detail you can on your company channel. If you have videos on YouTube, make sure you embed YouTube videos back on your website.
