May 5, 2020
Understanding Business Listings
Do you even think about it….
The ways your customers find and engage with information about your company has changed and will continue to do so.
Simple organic results in search engines are now replaced by more intelligent answers with information in maps, applications (apps), voice search, digital assistants, search engines results pages, GPS systems, and social network platforms.
These AI-powered services have created an entirely new channel where customers can engage with your business — are you in control of your businesses information they see across all these platforms?
Business listings are other websites around the internet that have your companies information on it which direct people back to your business. An example of this is a Google business listing.
As seen in the image below, Google will store your business’ information.
When people search for your business in their index (on Google) they will show that information to the user. But, did you know that there are hundreds of other websites that people are using to find businesses?
If you have not consciously created a listing, you are most likely non-existent on these platforms
The Value of Digital Knowledge Management:
A report from Google reveals that today, over 76% of people who use location search visit a business within one day. An astounding 43% of businesses across the US have at least one incorrect or missing address online.
Imagine how many sales those businesses with the inaccurate listings are missing out on?
Another report shows us that if you do have inaccurate listings 73% of your potential customer base is losing trust in your business. Not having correct listings means you’re losing sales — today. Our listing solutions will fix this instantly, so you can drive more customers to your business. We want you to focus on servicing new business, not having to go get it.
Why Else Are Business Listings Important?
Besides the fact that more listings will drive more people to your business, listings also help search engine optimization and are especially important for local businesses.
The “world wide web should be thought of as… drumroll please…. a web.
You want other TRUSTED websites to link back to your business.
We are way past the point of just having tons of different links (a numbers game) linking to your website. This trick worked at the start of the internet but search engines algorithms have gotten much smarter.
This was a major part of Google’s Penguin update in 2012. In fact, Google will penalize you (rank your website much lower and literally flag your site as spammy) if you try and buy/use bad backlinks.
For more information on Google updates you can visit Moz’s comprehensive list of major algorithm updates here.
Basically, without going too deep into backlinks, you want trusted websites that are of high authority that are relevant to your business linking back to your website.
Listings are the foundation of this.
Making sure your business information is all up to date and accurate across many different listing websites like Google is important. Everything is connected so if you have inconsistent listings with old addresses, phone numbers…etc, then the search engines, like Google, don’t know what is right and what is wrong.
This is factored into ranking your website because it’s all about user experience. If users are getting inconsistent information, then that is not good.
Now, imagine your competition has up to date listings on hundreds of different websites while you do not
When someone does a Google search for a business like yours, which one do you think Google is going to present to them? The one where the business took the time to make sure everything is accurate for users or the one that is not?
Seeing the internet from this viewpoint is key and is something you will want to get in the habit of doing when thinking of your website rankings and online reputation.
| Some Facts: | |
| REVIEWS | Source |
| 52% of time when customers switch brands it is related to customer experience | Gartner/CEB |
| Businesses that respond to reviews see, on average, a 1/4 start increase in their average rating | Emeral Insight |
| Only 40% of businesses respond to reviews today | |
| It is 6-7 times more costly attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer | Thinkjar 2016 |
| 40% of consumers expect a response in 1 hour | Altitude |
| According to Google, mobile searches including “best” have grown 80% over the last two years. | Think with Google |
| LISTINGS | Source |
| Complete listings are 2.7x more likely to be considered reputable | Ipsos Research, Benefits of a complete listing 2017 |
| Complete listings are more likely to attract location visits | Ipsos Research, Benefits of a complete listing 2017 |
| Complete listings are 50% more likely to lead to a purchase | Ipsos Research, Benefits of a complete listing 2017 |
| Complete business listings get on average 7x more clicks than empty listings | Ipsos MORI, Impact of search listings for local businesses, Aug 2014 |
| BRAIN | Source |
| 73% of high-intent traffic is going to new services | Yext proprietary study, February 2017 Entrepreneur |
| On average, companies who invest in managing the facts about their business online get 49% more views after 12 months. | Yext proprietary study, 2017 |
| VOICE | Source |
| Over half of consumers expect their digital assistants to help make retail purchases within the next 5 years. | Microsoft Market Intelligence, Voice Report 2019 |
| 75% of households will have at least one smart speaker by 2020. | Microsoft Market Intelligence, Voice Report 2019 |
| 57% of respondents expect to be able to reach and engage with their favorite brands through digital assistants within the next 5 years. | Microsoft Market Intelligence, Voice Report 2019 |
| 25% of people use their digital assistants to help them make a purchase, and 54% of users believe that digital assistants will help them make retail purchases within 5 years. | Microsoft Market Intelligence, Voice Report 2019 |
| 47% of respondents use digital assistants to search for a business | Microsoft Market Intelligence, Voice Report 2019 |
| 52% of respondents use digital assistants to search for a product/service, and 44% of respondents use digital assistants to research a product/service | Microsoft Market Intelligence, Voice Report 2019 |
The Pricing
We charge a monthly fee to manage these citations which can be added to any of our marketing plans or added on its own.
We always recommend our clients to update their business citations on a monthly basis because that is how often our strategic partner sends your information to the listings.
If you stop paying, and we stop sending that information to the listings, it is up to the listing to keep your business information accurate, and unfortunately that means that the information does not stay updated on its own.
Trust me, we have tested this
We have paid one month and not the next to see how many listings would stay consistent and mostly all of them did not, so this is why we recommend that if you are going to update your listings, it’s essential to use a service like ours.
3 easy steps to never have to think about this again!
- Audit your business listings with our tool HERE.
- Fill out our contact form and let us know you want us to update your listings for you.
- We will collect some basic information about your business and then take care of everything else from there.
