As a business owner in today’s highly competitive marketplace, it is more important than ever before to get your business found online. With local business listings and generating traffic right to your website, your online presence can be an asset to your business. Maintaining a high search engine ranking for various highly searched keywords and phrases within your niche is one of the best ways to maximize traffic to your site. It can help your business gain visibility and maximize your ability to convert prospective customers into actual customers. With search engines looking to improve their end-user experience, they have placed a significant emphasis on developing local optimized results, making local listings relevant and important. Local business listings are a significant ranking factor for overall rankings. Below, we will be going over the top 20 reasons why local business listings are so important for your business.
Top 20 Reasons Local Listings Are Important:
1. Give Your Rankings A Boost
As mentioned, local listings are going to play a critical role in determining your actual rankings. Google relies heavily on local listings when they are ranking a site. In fact, Google places a spotlight on local rankings by featuring the results ahead of other organic results which they call their “Local Three Pack.” These are the three local businesses that show up in the Google Places section when you search for a local keyword. For example, if you have a pizza restaurant, your local listing will show up within the first three search engine results if someone searches for “pizza restaurant.” This alone is reason enough to invest time and energy into your local business listings because it can dictate whether or not you are able to achieve a ranking within that local 3-pack which can lead to prospective customers considering your business.
2. Maintain Your Reputation
Reputation has become crucial to any business in today’s marketplace. It is very uncommon to see a prospective customer make a buying decision without looking up a business’ reputation prior. Because of this, you want to take the steps to secure your business reputation by improving the results that come up about your business when someone searches for it. Optimize your local listings by having greater consistency with business contact information including name, address, and phone number.
3. Provide Easy Information
When you are creating your listing, it’s not only the search engines you want to cater to. After all, local business listings make it as easy for prospective customers to get the information they need. Because of this, you want to have your listings optimized with the right information to give a prospective customer or lead whatever they need to make a buying decision.
4. Generate More Conversions
Local listings typically have some type of review element attached to them. You will find all kinds of business listing directories with their own review scores. This will enable you to generate more positive feedback for your business and brand which can help to boost your conversions.
5. Boost Brand Awareness
Local business listings boost brand awareness. Simply getting your business to rank as high as possible within the search engines in your industry is going to allow your business to maximize brand awareness. This alone can have a crucial benefit for your business.
6. Keep Up With Competition
It is very likely your competition already has optimized business listings. Because of this, you want to be certain you are optimizing your own to sustain pace with them. Having your competition’s listings ranking higher than yours is one clear way to lose out on significant market share.
7. It’s Easy
Claiming and optimizing listings doesn’t have to be difficult. You are simply providing the information that is pertinent to your business. Filling local business listings out and maintaining them doesn’t take too much time or effort.
8. Get More Traffic
When your business listing is higher ranked, many more people will come across your website, services, etc. Organically, your site traffic will increase. These are prospects that are actively looking to buy something. Therefore, it is very valuable traffic that you will be able to get to your business and/or site.
9. More Calls
Like getting traffic, you will also be able to generate leads in the form of calls. A lot of people use these directories and listings in order to get the phone numbers of businesses they are considering buying something from. After all, local business listings are, essentially, a digital phone book that customers can use.
10. Easy Updates
Nothing is worse than having outdated information out there that is causing confusion with your prospective customers. Updating online listings is very easy and it can allow you to avoid funneling traffic or phone calls to the wrong number or email.
11. Mobile-Friendly
Getting ranked high on mobile devices is crucial with the number of people using their phones nowadays. Because of this, you want to try to improve mobile rankings to boost the traffic of ready and willing-to-buy customers. Improve your business listings, so they rank first for local searches.
12. Optimize Listings For Local Keywords
Optimizing your local business listings means fitting in local keyword search phrases commonly searched by your target market. Stone Amp SEO is an expert in keyword optimization. Contact your Lee’s Summit SEO agency for more information.
13. Some Business Listings Are Inaccurate
Many businesses are either not listed online or aren’t entirely accurate. This means if yours is, you will be able to funnel a lot of the misdirected traffic your way.
14. Reduce Costs
By generating more local buying traffic to your business, you will be able to directly reduce the associated costs by paying for paid search ads and more. Having more organic traffic that is directly targeted to local searches can prove to boost your bottom line considerably.
15. There Are Many Available
Having so many local business directories available will give you the opportunity to boost the ranking potential of your site exponentially by gaining more links. It is important to note that with the various local business directories, keep your listings consistent and filled with the same information across the board.
16. Showcase Pictures
By using the listings to showcase high-quality photos and videos, you can generate a lot more interest in your business. Not everyone’s business listings are optimized with high-quality content. Brand your business with photos that accurately represent you, your team, and your services.
17. Get Discovered
A lot of people might not even know your business exists. By having your own listing on local directories that people regularly use, you have a better chance of getting discovered by people that wouldn’t have come across your website or business otherwise.
18. It’s Free
Claiming local business listings on most directories isn’t going to cost you a thing.
19. Promote On It
Find ways to actively promote and market these listings. Some listings will allow you to run coupon codes, special announcements, and more.
20. Huge Returns
Because these listings are free to list your business on, you are going to be able to generate huge returns on your time and monetary investment. Some come with enhanced listing opportunities which give you the ability to boost the visibility of your listings which can be tracked to see how well it’s working. Thus, it can generate big returns on your investment when utilized properly.
Overall, local business listings are incredibly important for your business. They can dictate your overall ranking potential and your local ranking potential. Invest time and energy into business listings because it will help you generate more targeted traffic to your website and/or business.
Lee’s Summit Reviews cares about local businesses and wants to support in all the ways we can. Let us know what we can do for you!
