Why Accurate Listings Are so Important

When you’re trying to attract new customers and grow your business, even the tiniest details matter. Listings management is one of the many facets of digital marketing that’s usually the last to be considered, but can be the most transformational towards the findability of your business. Read on to find out how to build your online presence and dominate the market.

How well is your company is performing online? Find out right now with our free listing report!

What Is a Business Listing?

A business listing is an online summary of important information for your customer. It can be a powerful tool to help customers find you online or at your physical store.

Business listings typically include your company’s name, address, phone number, and website but can also include hours of operation. This information provides the foundation that your customers need in order to research, locate, and contact your organization.

How Do I Know My Business Listings Are Working?

The effectiveness of your business’s online listings depends on where the information can be found and how accurate it is. These listings can be found on numerous platforms including search engines, online directories, maps, social media platforms, and more.

When it comes to online business listings, more is better—being present on as many of these sources as possible is imperative for your business to be found by customers, but it only works if every listing is accurate and exactly the same as other sources. Many businesses are surprised that it can often be easy to create an accidental duplicate listing.

These duplicates, mistakes, and omissions of listings can pose some serious challenges to the findability of your business, though. You may have to do a little digging if you’re wanting to manually adjust all of your business listings that are on the web.

Why Are Accurate Listings Important?

Correct business listings provide many benefits to your business. Instead of simply hoping that customers will find you, widely available listings will help lead them right to your front door. Most consumers are apprehensive about dealing with a company that has missing or incorrect listings, possibly leading them to choose your competitor. Correct listings also help to build trust and improve your search rankings.

Attract New Customers

The goal of attracting new customers is to get people who are new to your brand to contact you or visit your store in order to make a purchase.

If someone tries to call your store or visit you, but can’t find the right information or is led to the wrong location, they’ll most likely lose interest in doing business with you. In fact, 71% of people had a negative experience with a business because of incorrect information listed online.

Build Trust

An incorrect or missing business listing weakens customer trust in your brand and products, and often leads to miscommunication or missed opportunity for your business. Inconsistencies also create confusion.

If there are multiple phone numbers listed online, customers will be confused as to how to get ahold of your business and likely won’t try either number. If someone tries to visit your business, but an incorrect listing takes them to the wrong location, chances are they won’t try to find you again since 80% of customers lose trust in a business if they see an incorrect or inconsistent listing. Without accurate business hours listed, a customer might even show up when you’re already closed.

Increase Your Search Ranking Results

In a 2018 study done on local search ranking factors, consistency in business listings was found to be the second most important factor. Incomplete business listings negatively impact your search rank results, making it more difficult for you to attract new customers. With correct and well-maintained listings across the Internet, you can experience increased website traffic and higher search engine rank results on top search engines such as Google.

Changes in a business’ listings can be made up to 61 times a year, sometimes even by third party sources! It’s imperative that you can keep up and maintain these changes across all sources so your customers can remain well-informed and you don’t get penalized for providing differing information.

When it comes to business listings, it’s all about the details. For example, even a difference as minor as varied street abbreviations in your different listings can lessen your company’s search rankings. So what do you do if you don’t have enough hours in a day to comb through the entirety of the Internet and search for places where your listings might be inconsistent, inaccurate, or missing?

Local Listings Solution

At Pulse ISM, we understand the challenges that small businesses face in order to promote their products or services. Our team of experts wants to help your business be found on all corners of the Internet and give you peace of mind that your customers can find you so you can get back to running your business.

Before we even begin, you can take a few minutes for yourself to see how well your company is performing online. We’ll conduct an audit of all current listings that can be found for your business online—you might be surprised how many there are that you didn’t know about! This report will help us to build you a consistent online presence.

Our full-range of solutions can be tailored to the unique needs of your business including correcting your essential data on top listing sites and monitoring your business listings to make sure they’re relevant and updated.

Our team of professionals will incorporate their knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to make sure that your website is seen and appraised by customers and search engines in order to be highly ranked in searches related to your community and industry.

Our team at Pulse ISM is here to provide you with our Local Listings program that ensures your business is found when potential customers are searching for you. For more information or to set up a consultation, give our staff a call at (913) 662-1405.