Making sure that your business is adequately listed online is one of the most important things you can do after getting up and running. If any of you are like me, the first thing I like to do before visiting a new restaurant or business is to check out their website, just to see the menu or check out a little bit about what services and/or products they offer. If the business isn’t at least listed on common sites such as Yelp, Urbanspoon, YP.com, Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. it may make customers skeptical of whether or not the business is still in operation. Getting listed may sound like a daunting task, but there are resources out there to help small businesses with their online listings. Moz Local, formerly GetListed.org, is one of those resources. Their primary offering is an easy-to-use, online tool that makes the process of claiming business listings at Google, Foursquare, Facebook, Yelp, Bing, YP, Yahoo and other prominent local search engines more efficient. Moz Local can do two things for the small business owner depending on what stage their business is currently in:
- For those who are in business, they can check the status of their current listings. The first view shows how their business is presented by the various prominent search engines. When they arrive at the Moz Local homepage, they’ll be asked to enter their business’s name and zip code. From there, the tool returns to them a report on their listings and gives them a listings completeness score. They can see all missing listings, unclaimed listings and found listings. From here, they can see how their business is listed on each engine, claim listings, or edit ones that have already been claimed. Business need to make sure everything is accurate! If it isn’t, they should edit it so customers can find them easily.
- For those who are not quite yet in business, Moz Local will not find any listings for their business when they enter the name and zip code. However, it will return a list of those prominent search engines with links that will take them to where they can set up listings on them. When setting up listings on these sites, businesses should double-check to make sure their contact information is accurate. As mentioned above, businesses need make it as easy as possible for customers to find their business!
Next time you’re driving through unfamiliar territory and get hungry or need some batteries, take notice of the first place you go to find information on where you can get the stuff you need. It’s probably your phone! You’re probably using listings from the search engines listed above to find a phone number or address. This just reinforces how important it is to make sure that businesses are listed and listed accurately. Click here here learn more about Moz Local.
