Learning Hub | Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

How Our Local SEO Services Can Help Your Business

November 13, 2015 | Jon Teodoro

Recently, our company joined Yext as a Certified Partner company to expand our offerings for local SEO services. Though our Yext partnership, we are able to now provide brick and mortar businesses with a managed option for their local SEO efforts. One of the most important factors in local SEO rankings is a business’ online citations, which Yext allows us to efficiently manage for our clients without requiring them to manually go in and make changes to each individual listing.

Why Should My Local Business Care About Citations?

According to a study done by Moz, local citations are the 2nd most important ranking factor for local SEO visibility in the local search results (if you didn’t know, this is the area of at the top of the organic search results with the map and listings beneath it). The only other search factor that beats local citations is proximity.

Even though this holds true, having a business citation isn’t enough. Your business’ information needs to be consistent throughout all of your listings. For example, if your business’ name on Yelp is Joe’s Plumbing but on YP it is Joe’s Plumbing, LLC and on your website it is Joe’s Plumbing Detroit, the search engines will get confused and won’t be able to effectively identify you. And if they don’t know who you are, then you can count on not being ranked.

When customers are looking to work with a local business, most of them will first look at the local search results. If your business doesn’t show up there, you’re going to miss out on being visible to a lot of potential customers. That’s why boosting your local SEO through optimizing your business citations is now more important than ever.

NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number)

Your business’ name is important, but there are also two other major components of your business’ citations that you need to pay attention to: one is your address, the other is your phone number.

Often times businesses will change their phone number or move to a different location without remembering to update this information across the web. Much like the situation above with the varied naming conventions, if your phone number and address are off, it will be hard for the search engines to identify you. This leads to the same outcome as above: low local search visibility.

One thing to also remember is that your NAP also needs to be on every page of your website. It could be anywhere, as long as it is visible and the NAP is consistent with the rest of the information on your other business citations.

Can’t I Just Update My Local Citations Myself?

Yes, you can. Soon into the process, however, you will find that you will hit some road blocks.

When we attempted to manually build our own citations, we discovered that popular sites like YP, CitySearch, and WhitePages required us to go through Yext to update our listings. From there, just to have a comprehensive update to all of our business citations, we had to pay $999 up front.

Even if we decided to build out our citations on our own, the whole process of signing up for an account, entering all of our information, formatting our photos and logos, then confirming our phone numbers and/or addresses with post cards, verification calls, and text messages on over sixty websites wasn’t scalable at all. It would have taken us a few days or even weeks just to cover all of the properties out there.

So we decided to bite the bullet and sign up with Yext as a partner agency where we made a pleasant discovery:

We Could Save Our Clients Time & Money While Providing Flexible Billing Options

For Yext’s premium package, the annual cost was $999 which was required in one, up front payment. For a lot of our small business clients, that was cash they didn’t have to spend in one hit.

By becoming a partner agency with Yext, we are now able to provide all of the following Premium package services with flexible monthly billing options:

• Listing Management – Update and maintain citation consistency on the top 60+ citation websites / social media directories
• Duplicate Listing Suppression – Eliminate any duplicate listings on the web so search engines can clearly identify and rank your business
• Enchanced Content – Ability to manage the hours of operation, photos, videos, menus, products and services, staff bios, and more without having to individually login and update each one
• Review Monitoring – Keep up to date with your business’ reputation on the web by getting notifications every time a customer leaves a review
• Local Search Analytics – Get powerful analytics showing your top traffic channels while also being able to see lead and prospect data – all in one place

Through our partnership with Yext, we are now able to offer their services we can split the payments up into monthly commitments. Not only that, we are able to save business owners a lot of time, money, and hassle which is normally required if you plan to manually build and maintain your own citations.

Say goodbye to your archaic Excel spreadsheets!

How Can I Check The Health of My Local Listings?

To check/improve your business citations on the web, click on the banner below to run a free scan.

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