BE DIGITAL – Business Listings are an online summary of important information for your company that serve as a powerful tool to help customers find you online and your brick and mortar location. Here’s what you need to know:
NAP+W
Yes, you’re reading that correctly. NAP+W is the acronym that identifies all the information that should be included in your Business’s Listing.
Name
Address
Phone number
+
Website
These pieces of information are the Business Listings starting point. They provide basic information potential that customers need to have in order to research, contact and locate your business.
Looking to go beyond the basics? Include information like hours of operation — it’s what most customers are interested in!
How do I know my listings will work?
The Business Listing’s effectiveness depends on where the information is available and how accurate it is. They’re available through search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing!, DuckDuckGo, etc.) online directories, maps, or social media platforms. When it comes to listing’s availability, more is definitely better.
Presence on as many sources as possible will create multiple avenues for prospective customers to find your company. BUT (and this is a big but), availability only pays off if the listings are perfectly accurate. They’re considered accurate if the information is both correct and consistent across all sources. Simple enough, right?
Why is my Business Listing important?
Business Listings with a high level of availability and accuracy will absolutely pay off for your business:
No more cat and mouse
Stop hoping for customers to guess at how to find you, accurate and readily available listings will help guide consumers right to your business’s door steps.
If your listing is incorrect or missing, most consumers will be apprehensive about dealing with you, potentially leading them to choose a competitor.
The availability of accurate listings makes sure that customers are actually able to find your physical locations while they’re open for business. This means more money in your pocket AND — something we’ll dig deeper into in a week or so — it means that your customers can review your business.
“The service at _______ was…”
A consistent review pipeline is an important tool for developing a company’s online reputation and cultivate brand loyalty. Reviews allow customers to talk about their experience with your company to potential buyers, but if your customers can’t find you listed online, their views won’t be well-informed. PERFECT business listings create opportunities for transparency between companies and consumers in the form of reviews, and the availability of these reviews will help increase an organization’s visibility.
Shift your search into full throttle
Consistent, perfectly accurate listings and reviews will significantly benefit a company’s’s visibility by improving its ranking in local search engine results. Search engine optimization is a complicated tool, so do the easy things first and ensure your business is listed with accuracy. Increased visibility means more customers, and more money on your bottom line!
What’s next?
This low-down on listings provides some basic information and describes the importance of business listings. Listings on well known websites worth lots of SEO points to improve your company’s listings score. We’ve ranked these sites by importance using a number of key factors—how many websites reference them, web traffic, visitor demographics and more.
To learn more about how the team at BE Digital can help your business improve it’s online presence, send an email to BEdigital@businessexaminer.ca.