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Local search visibility helps drive traffic, customers, and sales. There are several ways to improve local visibility.

The first is to make sure that your business listings are featured on major sites like Google, Yelp, and Yahoo.

The importance of industry listings

How often does Google display a business listing with minimal information, no images and few reviews? Have you trusted this company enough to visit or contact them?

Probably not.

Business listings give local businesses visibility and increase their online presence. A business listing with updated information, reviews and pictures attracts local users and helps convert them into paying customers.

The best part? It's free and doesn't require any special technical skills.

Which channels should my company be listed on?

You've probably noticed that there are dozens of platforms out there that offer business listings. Let's take a look at some of the most popular websites and explain why they are important.

• Google My Business: Google is the world's leading search engine and dominates more than 88 percent of the global search market. If you want to create a business listing this is the starting point.
• Bing places: While Bing only accounts for about 6 percent of the global search market, it can still be worth your while to post your business listing there. After all, that's 6 percent of the billions of searches.
• Howl: Yelp is probably the most popular business review website in the United States. Companies with high and high reviews of Yelp reviews grow their sales faster. In fact, 42 percent of Yelp visitors shop on the same day.
• Next door: With Nextdoor, companies can target customers with hyper-local marketing. Companies register for entries that are visible in their neighborhood. According to their website, a quarter of US households use NextdDoor.
• Yahoo Localworks: Bing actually supports Yahoo search. You will get the same traffic from Bing. Although Yahoo only captured about 2 percent of the search market, it is still 2 percent of all traffic.

Note that these are only the most popular listing sites. Other websites to consider are Foursquare, HotFrog, eLocal, and SuperPages.

The key is to find the business listing websites your customers are likely to use and make sure those listings are complete and up to date.

How can you keep up with so many business listing websites? There's no way to cover all of the listing pages yourself without spreading out too thin.

There are two ways to deal with this:

1. List your business only on the websites that make the most sense for your business. Choose the websites like Google and Yelp that give you the best visibility. Also, advertise your business on some hyper-local websites like Nextdoor.
2. Use an SEO tool like Ubersuggest to optimize your information for SEO and then spread it across multiple listing pages at once.

How to set up your company profile

Each site has a slightly different process for claiming and setting up your company profile. Let's take a look at Google My Business first as this will allow you to reach the broadest audience.

To set up your company profile in Google My Business:

First, find your company. Either search on business.google.com/add or search for your business on Google search engine and select "Claim This Business" or "Own This Business?" under the business profile.

If someone has already claimed your business, you can request a transfer of ownership.

Wait a few days for your request to be approved. You will receive an email notification and you can start managing your listing.

For sites like Yelp, Bing Places, and NextdDoor, the process is pretty much the same:

• See if a listing already exists. If so, you can request the listing.
• If your company doesn't have a current listing, add one.
• Bing will send you a PIN to review your listing and protect it from unauthorized changes.

Once you've reviewed your listing, your page will be published. However, this can take a few days.

Optimize your business listing for local SEO

A business listing is only as trustworthy as the information it contains. Please provide as much information as possible.

A shining example of a great business listing is a Google listing for the Winn Memorial Library, a national historic landmark in Woburn, Massachusetts. As I go through the steps to tweak your listing, I refer to the library to show you the importance of each step.

Once your listing is complete, use the following local SEO tips to help optimize your listing.

Make sure your business listing contact information is up to date

According to Think With Google, 54 percent of online searchers search for business hours, 53 percent want directions to a store, and 50 percent are looking for an address. Make sure to include this information so that searchers can find what they need.

Providing your address will also generate a card PIN for listing websites and directions to your business.

Make sure you have your phone number so that potential customers can contact you quickly.

The Winn Library has all of the contact information under a well-written description on their Wikipedia page (if you have one, you can do the same). They even include the architectural style of the building and the first day it opened in 1879.

Include all relevant data in your business listing

In addition to your contact information, your business listing should also include:

• Your website
• An SEO-optimized description of your company
• Links to your social profiles
• Photos of your company

Depending on your company and the business listing website, there may be space to add additional information.

The Woburn Library Google List has a graph that shows the library's busiest times and the average length of time customers have stayed.

If you're a restaurant on Yelp, you can include icons that you can use to categorize your business for searches based on type of food or seating.

You should also complete the health and safety update checklist.

Include as much information as you can on each listing page. This improves your ranking and gives potential customers a clear picture of what your company has to offer.

Build smart campaigns in Google

Google Smart Campaigns is an easy way for businesses (especially small businesses) to create ads on Google. When you create a smart campaign, you're essentially handing the work off to Google.

With Google Ads, you need to find out about keyword research, keyword bidding, geo-targeting, and a number of other things. With Smart Campaigns, Google does it all for you.

You've probably seen Smart Campaign ads at the top of your own searches on Google. They look like this:

Each ad includes a headline, description, site link, card PIN, phone number, and address. Your ad will appear when someone searches for keywords related to your business in your area or when someone outside of your area searches for keywords and your location.

Basically, you give Google a description of your business, a keyword topic to target, and your budget. Google picks up the ad from there and distributes it across all platforms including YouTube and partner websites.

You can run one or more campaigns at the same time.

Add photos to your business listing

According to BrightLocal, 60 percent of consumers say that good pictures influence their decision to patronize a company. They offer some tips on how to include images in your business listing:

• Include a variety of photos so prospects can see what your business is about.
• Do not add overly polished images. In fact, professional photos may seem untrustworthy to users.
• Google finds and deletes photos. So don't try to use them.

Again, the Winn Library does an excellent job. This includes indoor and outdoor shots of the building and its books. I wish they would take pictures with the staff to add a human touch to the listing.

Optimize for voice search

Digital assistants have become more sophisticated and people rely more on them to search, especially when they are on the go. It is therefore important to optimize your entry for voice search. Voice searches are more chatty and use longer search terms.

Most voice searches are formed as questions rather than phrases that you type into a search engine. Think about how you can include the answers to these questions in your business listing.

Optimize your company page for national / global customers

While your business listing is meant to help with local searches, it is still a good idea to keep an eye on national and global searches. You may have someone in another area looking to send flowers to a relative from a local business, or someone moving from around the world looking for a good agent.

You want to continue to be visible during such searches. Here's how.

Response to customer reviews

It's not enough to collect reviews from customers and then just let them sit there. Responding to customer reviews, both the good and the bad, increases engagement, makes your brand human, and instills trust with potential customers.

For good ratings, thank the reviewer and add an element of their text to your response. Check out this review for an oven maintenance company:

I had a great experience with National Heating and Cooling when my oven stopped working. Your technician was on time and very professional. She quoted me at a fair price and explained every step of the process. She even wore shoe covers to keep my white carpets clean.

Now look at National Plumbing's answer:

Thank you for choosing National Heating and Cooling! It was a pleasure for us to help you with your stove! Don't hesitate to call us for any of your heating and cooling needs. We even have discounts for customers who sign up for regular annual maintenance.

Note that National Heating and Cooling did not only consider details from the review. They also included promotional text to encourage the customer to sign up for an annual package.

While it's important to respond to any review, it's important to respond to bad reviews as soon as possible. If you respond to a bad review, include the following:

• A sincere apology for the bad experience.
• An offer to replace or refund defective products.
• A discount or gift card to compensate for poor service.
• An offer to take the conversation offline. As they do this, listen to what the customer has to say and work with them to fix the problem.

Use the Google Trends feature

With Google Trends, you can find trends in search terms in real time or over a period of time, as early as 2004 and only 36 hours before your search.

You can also break your search down by location to find sample search trends by region or country.

Use Google Trends to update your list with selected keywords. For example, when I search for "libraries" in Massachusetts and look at trends, people will often be looking for library lessons and computers. So I should add this information to my list.

Build a high quality landing page

Landing pages are the pages that search users get to. Your homepage can serve as a landing page for your business listing.

Other landing pages can be included in your Smart Campaigns. In the plumber example, four landing pages are listed: the service page, vouchers, a contact form for planning services and their info page.

Landing pages should contain keywords that users can use to find you when they search. It should contain testimonials, high quality pictures, and a contact form. Try to keep your text short to avoid scrolling and don't add too many links to internal pages. The goal of your landing page should be to encourage the prospect to take a specific action.

Here is my landing page for Ubersuggest, my SEO optimization tool.

While a user can use the navigation bar to look around or use the chat feature, the focus is on one action: entering a domain or keyword to begin some serious search engine optimization.

Conclusion

Local business listings are a relatively easy and free way to gain visibility and target the right audience for your business. The trick is to keep them updated with relevant, useful information that will help users become customers.

By responding to reviews, you can convert and retain customers and build trust in your brand.

If you need help with the refinement of your business listings, your search engine optimization or your content marketing, contact us!

Now that you know how many business listing options there are, where do you start? Which websites are right for your company?

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