What is a local listing? It is a listing for your business that shows up on Google, Bing, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, YellowPages, and many other places. If you don’t take control of these listings, customers could find the wrong information about your hours, location, and contact information.

Basically, it could cause real harm.

Potential Damage To Your Brand

What’s the worst thing that an inaccurate local listing could do? It could harm your business by driving customers away. For example, if your hours are wrong, customers are going to go somewhere else, even though you’re open. What’s even worse, you could be listed as permanently closed.

Here are some other issues we find in local listings:

Negative customer reviews without responses
Wrong or inaccurate photos
Wrong address, phone number, or email address
Missing Rich Data – Leading to less useful search results and lower conversion rates

Examples of Incorrect Local Listings

We like to see real-world data. We’ve taken a sampling of our local businesses and came up with the following errors and issues that could harm their online presence. Remember, the more steps a prospect has to take to reach you, the less likely they will even bother. (Source: https://uxdesign.cc/analytics-for-better-ux-c0128c0da55e)

Our research: (names redacted)

Amish Goods Store near Hillsville, VA – Incorrect / inconsistent phone numbers. Potential to cause customer confusion, leading to less calls. User pain point: Which number do I call?
Amish Furniture Store near Hillsville, VA – Phone number listed for multiple businesses. Unknown which number to call for which business.
Chinese Food near Galax, VA – Business was temporarily listed as permanently closed. This lead to confusion about whether the business was open, and required action on the owner’s part to quell this rumor.
Coffee Shop near Galax, VA – Business listed as permanently closed & no hours listed.
Racetrack near Wytheville, VA – Inconsistent phone numbers. Three different numbers listed across platforms.

Fixing Your Local Listings

Take control of your listings. Search Google & other platforms to find any listings that are wrong. As you go through these you can claim the listing to fix & update the information.

PRONETS local listings optimization. We can help you take control of your listings, save you the trouble of fixing them up, and can even enhance them. We will optimize them for you so that they perform their best in search, and if you have a website with us, we can optimize it with Rich Data.*

*Rich data allows places like Google & Bing to display your upcoming events, site navigation, and more inline in search results. Boosting your customer’s search experience.