For small businesses in Grafton, IL, having a strong online presence is crucial for brining in business. One of the most important things to have optimized is your online business listings. Search engines and other online platforms feature business listings for businesses to help condense all the information potential customers would be looking for. If your digital marketing strategy dose not include optimizing your business listings, you are putting your business at a severe disadvantage. In this blog post we would like to go over the ways your business listings can improve your SEO and overall online performance.
Claiming your listing
As we have previously expressed, trying to establish a strong online presence without taking the time to optimize your listings is a recipe for disappointment. Obviously the first step in optimizing your listings is to actually claim them. Create accounts on the platforms for the listings you want to optimize. For example, if you want to claim your Google Business Profile listing, you will need a Gmail account. Once you have your account set up simply find your listing and follow the provided steps to claim. While claiming can sometimes be simple, it may not always be. You might have it as easy as verifying the listing through a call verification using the phone number on the business listing. That may not be what is required for your business as each business is different. You may be required to do post card verification to verify your address or something else. These measures are in place in order to stop there from being fraudulent business listings. As long as you follow the steps you are given to get verified, you should be able to get access into your verified business listing in no time.
The Importance of Consistency
Once you do have access to your business listings it is time to start adding information about your business. As you do so, it is crucial to ensure everything on your listings are consistent with one another. Make sure that your hours are the same, address is the same, phone number is the same, and etcetera. Your SEO can be negatively affected if your business listings on different platforms have inconsistent information. Overtime you may need to make updates to your information or include information such as holiday hours. If you do so, please update your hours on all of your listings. Not only dose ensuring information is consistent on all your listings help with SEO, it is generally just smart to do as you want to make sure that anyone, regardless of which listing they are looking at will be able to get the most accurate and up-to-date information about your business.
Optimizing Local SEO
Having good local SEO is important for any small business in the Grafton, IL area in order to bring in more business. Your business listings serve as a great way to improve your local SEO. Many of the most popular business listing platforms feature a way for you to add your service areas to your listing. This will help get your listing to populate in searches when people from those areas are looking for the services or products your business provides. Having this optimized will help your performance online big time.
Customer Reviews
A big way you can get the most out of your business listings is to build up the size of customer reviews. Search engines can rank listings higher depending on their feedback. You can work on getting more reviews by asking your customers to leave you a review. One thing to note is that while it is fine to ask your customers for reviews, you should not aim to add as many as you possibly can, rather build them up overtime. Many platforms with listings have filters in place to stop fraudulent or spam reviews from populating and getting to many reviews at once can trip their filter. Aim to get reviews of any kind and be sure to stay on top of commenting back to feedback when applicable.
All this optimization for your business listings can be time-consuming and as a small business owner in Grafton, IL, you may not have enough time in a day to dedicate to doing all this. If you are looking to hire a company who can help manage your business’ business listings, call Hometown Marketing Group today. We provide reliable digital marketing services to businesses in Grafton and the surrounding communities. Give us a call today to learn more about our services or to schedule a meeting with one of our professionals.
