Why Manage Your Local Listings?

With a local listing strategy, you can make it easier for people to find your business on search engines like Google and Bing. You can also take steps to ensure the information that’s published about your business across the web is accurate and up-to-date.

Local listings platforms like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare, and Infogroup are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to local listings management. Every day, these properties are gathering data about businesses to use in online business directories. Unfortunately, not all of this data is correct. Without a strategy in place for managing local listings, businesses will often find outdated or inaccurate information about their store hours or locations posted online. 

How Local Listings Management Works

Local listings platforms aggregate and publish information about businesses. Even small errors, like a misspelled address or an outdated phone number, can lead to multiple listings for a single business. In a worst case scenario, this kind of incorrect information can lead to customers showing up to a business when it’s closed, or showing up at the wrong address. These are all reasons why it’s important for brands to maintain correct, consistent online data across the hundreds of properties publishing local listings on the web.

Because the process of manually checking listings information on hundreds of platforms is incredibly cumbersome, especially for brands with multiple business locations, local listings management platforms have become a popular solution. Using these automated systems, brands can monitor their local listings. Instant notifications can also be setup to let brand managers know when changes have been made to their local listings and when they should take action in real-time. 

Recommendations for Local Listings Management

To manage your local listings, you should have strategies in place to handle these tasks:

• Deduplicating Listings: Search engines have been known to penalize brands with duplicate listings, even if those listings were created in error. A local listings management strategy should involve the automated detection and removal of duplicate store listings. The complete removal of duplicate listings is the only way to avoid the chance of a listing being taken down or consumers being misdirected by inaccurate information.
  

• Data Cleansing: One of the reasons why duplicate listings are accidentally created is because of data errors, like an address that’s spelled two different ways. Data cleaning software automatically analyzes location data, along with geo-sync matching, and distributes accurate data to hundreds of local listings properties.

• Vertical Listings: The local listings ecosystem is vast, with vertical-specific platforms for nearly every sector. Depending on your unique business needs, you will need to track and manage your listings on a number of local directories.