Online Business Listing Best Practice Guide

Transcription

1 Online Business Listing Best Practice Guide It is important to take control of your business information. DAC Group will simplify this process. We will provide solutions to optimize the content your customers and potential customers see about your business across the web. Inside the Guide: Name, Address, Phone Data 2 Data Fields 3 Data Fields 4 Business Categories 5 Distribution Network 6 Google Verification 7 Rankings 8 Glossary 9 Optimizing business listings and profiles will set you apart from your competitors and will help potential customers find your business. 1

2 Best Practice Guide Name, Address, Phone The data you provide during your local listing management program is critical to the success of your program. Incomplete or inaccurate data can confuse search engines and ultimately give your customers bad information about your business. Here is a brief guide on how to fill out certain data fields. Anchor Data - Primary data used to aggregate citations. Business Name - Use the official name of your business, adding keywords to your business name will confuse search engines, reduce your citations, and ultimately can lead to a black-listed business listing. Phone Number - Use the main phone number that is associated with your business, it is important not to use tracking numbers and to avoid mobile phone and 800 numbers. This is a field that is used to aggregate citations, so it is important to use a phone number unique to your business, many tracking numbers have been used by multiple businesses in the past, which can hurt your citation volume and quality. Address - Use your physical location address, you can later choose to hide this address, but it is important to have your actual US Postal address in order to verify your business. City - Just like your address, you should also use your physical city from your mailing address. Picking a city based on search volume will only hurt your listing, in the long run, you can designate areas you serve in the areas served field. What Are Citations? Citations are defined as mentions of your business name and address on other webpages, even if there is no link to your website. An example of a citation might be an online yellow pages directory where your business is listed, but not linked to. It can also be a local chamber of commerce, or a local business association where your business information can be found, even if they are not linking at all to your website. You may also see the term web references used on other websites a synonym for citations. 2

3 Best Practice Guide Data Fields The data you provide during your local listing management program is critical to the success of your program. Incomplete or inaccurate data can confuse search engines and ultimately give your customers bad information about your business. Here is a brief guide on how to fill out certain data fields. Anchor Data - Primary data used to aggregate citations. Business Name - Use the official name of your business, adding keywords to your business name will confuse search engines, reduce your citations, and ultimately can lead to a black-listed business listing. Phone Number - Use the main phone number that is associated with your business, it is important not to use tracking numbers and to avoid mobile phone and 800 numbers. This is a field that is used to aggregate citations, so it is important to use a phone number unique to your business, many tracking numbers have been used by multiple businesses in the past, which can hurt your citation volume and quality. Address - Use your physical location address, you can later choose to hide this address, but it is important to have your actual US Postal address in order to verify your business. City - Just like your address, you should also use your physical city from your mailing address. Picking a city based on search volume will only hurt your listing, in the long run, you can designate areas you serve in the areas served field. Google spiders all of these secondary portals regularly, so it's important to make sure your information is correct and consis tent EVERYWHERE across the web. -David Mihm, President & CEO, GetListed.org 3

4 Best Practice Guide Data Fields Continued Business Categories These items are very specific and I have dedicated a page to the explanation of how and why they are so important. Business Description Your business description is meant to speak to the customer, while keywords are a plus, it is not intended to be an extremely keyword rich string of 200 characters. Think of this as something that will make a customer want to do business with you, rather than something that will make a search engine display your listing. Services This is the field where we want to focus on keyword rich statements, separated by commas, try not to waste space here with conjunctions; stick to search words Areas Served This is a relatively new field, with increasing importance. The field is still being developed, but as of right now it accepts input as a radius from a location or zip code OR a list of recognized cities. If you can take the time to choose your recognized cities, this is a better choice, more specific usually means more relevant to a search engine. Products Again this field, similar to services, is a field to list the popular products, while considering what your potential customers may be searching for. Keywords/Specialties Here is a field that is somewhat confusing, especially after filling out Services and Products, but this field is used for a specific data provider, this is a crawlable field, which means it is much, much more important to search engines than to actual users. Here is where you want to waste no space on words that are not relevant to a search. No if ands or but s. Brands This field is important for businesses who have or represent well known brands, often this is used to simply encourage the customer to clickthrough by giving them more details about what you sell; but it is speculated that this field is also crawlable. Photo/Video URL s These are great to have, they show a search engine that you ve taken the time to put media content in your listing, which makes it a better user experience, and you will likely be rewarded for the effort. This also is great to show your customers what makes you unique. At the very least you should have your logo, but many listings are getting more creative and adding things like video testimonials, commercials, or photo s of their products. 4

5 Best Practice Guide Business Categories Categories are one of the primary ways that businesses are classified on many search engines and local search sites. There are several classification taxonomies that are commonly used across the web; if you only choose categories from one, your listing may not be recognized under any categories on certain engines. For example, Google uses their own list of recognized categories, but Yahoo uses standard yellow page headings, which do not match any Google recognized categories. By not selecting a diverse array of categories, you ve missed an opportunity to optimize your listing, and maximize your potential exposure. The primary types of business classification taxonomy are as follows; NAICS (National Industrial Classification System), SYPH (Standard Yellow Page Headings), SIC (Standard Industrial Classification), and of course Google, as always, has their own proprietary taxonomy. NAICS - Among the broadest, and are primarily used by the large databases, ie infogroup. SYPH - Specialized categories, used by Localeze and Acxiom, derived from a standardized list of categories often found in print yellow pages. SIC - A variation of NAICS categories, these are automatically assigned based on your NAICS code Google Categories - The most specialized list of categories, Google requires you classify your business in at least one of their categories. 5

6 Best Practice Guide Distribution Network Universal Business Listings (UBL) Infogroup Acxiom Localeze Google Bing Yahoo Local Ask GetFave.com AOL Local Superpages.com Telenav Tellme DAPlus.us Switchboard.com Centerd Yelp Yellowpages.com Superpages.com Switchboard.com Local.com Yellowbook.com Judy s Book* LocalMatters Google* Yahoo* Google Yahoo Bing Twitter Facebook Superpages.com Yellowpages.com Best of the Web Local OpenList DexKnows GetFave.com Addresses.com Citysquares YellowBot Edmunds.com Amazon Praized 6

7 Best Practice Guide Google Verification One important factor in encouraging trust in your Google listing is going through the verification process. This process can be done in three ways. Two ways are manual, either by postcard, verifying your address, or by phone call, verifying your phone number each of these are treated equally and Google sometimes offers both, or only one as an option. The third method requires a correspondence with Google, we primarily use this process because it does not require coordination from the field, and it can be much quicker. During the bulk verification or white list feed we supply data to Google and send it to them for approval, once they review the data they will reply with any feedback, or simply mark them as verified. This bulk process can take anywhere from 4-6 weeks, whereas the manual process can take 2-8 weeks, depending on the number of listings and the availability of field locations. 7

8 Best Practice Guide Ranking on Google Google is very protective of their algorithm, since this is the primary differentiating factor, which delivers users the results that keep them coming back. Google has shared some level of detail surrounding what factors influence the ranking in which your business listing will appear. Location/Distance: Two of my factors fit directly your address and proximity to location specified in search. Another factor that relates to this factor is your service area, which can be specified in the areas served field. Business data consistency also involves maintaining a consistent address. Relevance: Which is determined by business categories, text in fields such as business description, and citations. The more citations you have the more relevant Google see s your business, by the logic of, if all these places have the same information for x business, it must be good Prominence: Citations, citations, citations. Factors like reviews and other traditional SEO tactics, such as linking, will also play a role in your listing prominence. KML mapping is a good way to provide exact location content on your website and on Google My Maps 8

9 Best Practice Guide Glossary Black-listed Aggregator Anchor Data Core Data Base Crawalable field Google Categories iyp Local Search Site NAICS (National Industrial Classification System) NAICS code Organic Business Listing Paid Listing Search Engine SERP SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) SYPH (Standard Yellow Page Headings) A listing which is deemed as 'spam' and rejected (not displayed) A search engine, local search site, or iyp, that collects data from several sources- also known as 'data scraping' the aggregation of data provides more robust listing data, however is often the primary cause of incorrect listing information. Business Name, Address, Phone Number (the primary information used to gather citations) A database that is the source of listing information, these databases are where other sites will retrieve information about business listings, on a weekly or monthly basis. Information that is actively read by search engine spiders A category taxonomy used by Google to classify business types Internet Yellow Pages (yp.com) A website that is primarily used to satisfy searches of local specific data (Yelp) A category taxonomy used by core data providers to classify business types Numeric value assigned to each category in the NAICS A listing that naturally ranks on a page with no financial influencers, ranked soley on the merit of the data, as seen by each search engine A sponsored link or listing that is paying for positioning on a page A website that analyzes all web contents, including local data, and answers search queries with results it deems as 'most relevant' based on their proprietary algorithm Search Engine Results Page, this is the page you see after you type a search and hit 'enter' A category taxonomy used by core data providers to classify business types A category taxonomy used by core data providers to classify business types 9