Understanding Local Business Directories

Local business listings are an online profile that provides your business name, address, phone number, website, and other necessary information. There are literally thousands of local business directories with familiar names like Google Places, Super Pages, Yelp, Bing, and Yellow Pages. Directories like these are a great tool to increase website visibility to search engines. Long gone are the days of using a thick, heavy phone book to search for business listings, digital communication is the way to go in the 21^st century. When conducting a local search such as Portland SEO Consultant the search engine results page (SERP) will show what is called the local pack.  This is what a local pack looks like.

The main goal of local directories is to bring traffic to your website. As you boost your websites’ visibility to search engines, your rankings will improve and you will start to see more traffic on your website. When someone searches for something like “Italian food near me”, directories with applicable listings will often have the highest ranking. Many of these directories have large marketing budgets to use to drive traffic to a website. This allows them to gain more visibility when someone is searching for their product, service or information. In addition to considerable budgets, they may also have strong organic rankings for important search terms (keywords).

How can you easily get a Listing?

To qualify for a business listing you must have these four fundamental ingredients:

1. You must have a business name or DBA
2. The business must have a local phone number. This number cannot be toll-free or a shared number
3. You must have a physical address. PO boxes, shared addresses and virtual offices are not permitted
4. The business must make face-to-face contact with customers. Most of the time these directories require verification from the directory service usually done by mailing a postcard to a physical address or calling the listed number

Data that is Consistent and Accurate

Consistency of information is extremely important. Search engines will not recognize different information from one directory to another for example, the address and phone number not matching across all directories. It cannot be emphasized enough to keep your information current and accurate which will in turn make your business more visible to search engines, increasing your chances of showing up in search results. Moz Local is an excellent tool to assist you in monitoring your listing and improving your positioning in SERP (search engine results page). While it is not necessary to use a tool like Moz, it’s easy to use format will allow you to identify directories and ensure all your information is identical.

Additional Considerations

It is important that a business have only one listing per directory unless they have multiple locations. Duplicates like this can confuse the search engine and will likely result in a decrease to business visibility online. As an example, let’s say that someone has three different business Facebook pages, each one with a different phone number. Google or other search engines will not be able to identify which one is the real you. Consistency is the key to increasing web site visibility. In addition, adding business descriptions, categories, and images helps to add credibility.

As a Portland SEO company we believe that if you keep these key facts in mind as you build your online presence you will bask in the glory of greater traffic to your web site.