Any enterprise marketer can tell you: multiple locations are an indicator of a growing business but often a hot, soupy mess on the web. From wrong phone numbers to incorrect websites to defunct stores, the thousands of listings where your enterprise business can appear online often contain hundreds of errors (if not thousands). And since good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) follows good business listings, it’s important to get the listings right the first time. Your SEO is depending on it!
Why Is It Like This?
In any given week, we talk with marketers at large enterprises who are in the midst of a tangled web of listings. When they confess their pain points, it often sounds like this:
“The North Beach location closed last year. But South Beach opened last week. Why is South Beach showing up as ‘closed’? And our West Main location isn’t claimed at all. I thought we fixed that problem!”
Unfortunately, this lament is all too common. But we take it seriously because listing management is the basic foundation of a successful SEO program. Enterprise (and local business listings) should include:
- Accurate data such as the business name, address and phone number
- Consistent naming conventions: “The Taco Stand West Beach” and “The Taco Stand North Beach” is an example endorsed by Google
- Completed local profiles with categories, pictures, videos, coupons and hours of operation. (You’ll need to claim your business on sites such as Google My Business and Yelp to do this.)
Connectivity suggests distributing your pristine listings near and far. Our platform has a wide reach, including the major search engines; big data aggregators; news and media partner sites; social media networks; and other directories.
Bad listings data won’t go away on its own. In fact, the more directories and social media sites that pop up each year ensure that the dirty data present in so many listings will continue to march forward. Take steps now to bump up the quality of your SEO by increasing the quality of your listings.
Olga is a Senior Manager in Marketing and Sales Operations at Connectivity.
