If you’ve spent the time and energy to list your business on local directories, you’ve already taken some necessary steps to make grow your business using the power of local search. With all of the work you’ve likely already done, it can be tempting to take a “set it and forget it” approach when it comes to your local listings. However, not routinely auditing your local listings can make a mess of your hard work. Why is it so important to audit your listings? How often do you need to be performing these audits? What should you be auditing? Read on for answers to these questions and more from the digital marketing pros at MyAdvice.
What happens if you don’t audit your local listings?
The key to success with local listings is consistency. Your information needs to be correct across every platform your business appears on. Incorrect information not only opens you up to potential penalties from search engines but also frustrates and confuses people searching for your business. Here’s the real kicker: it’s very common for listings to update automatically, at any time. Here are three ways this could happen.
Your Website
The information on your website plays a huge part in your online listings. Often, search engines will use the content on a website to display services or procedures they think you do. Whether or not the information they change is correct? That’s up to you to verify.
Third-Party Apps
It’s often necessary to give third-party apps access to your local search platforms, but you may not realize that some of these apps have the ability to push data to your listings. If your information isn’t correct within these apps, your listings may change without you even realizing it. Monitoring the settings of your authorized apps helps to stop these unexpected changes.
User Suggestions
That’s right, many platforms allow users to make suggestions to local listings. While that’s helpful when information is incorrect or out of date, sometimes that’s not the case. Not every single suggestion automatically goes through, of course, but this is a very real source of potential changes to your listings.
How often should you perform these audits?
If we had it our way, every business would be monitoring their local listings continuously and fixing any issues as they come up. It’s a common misconception that inaccurate local listings don’t really impact businesses, but user research overwhelmingly tells a different story. According to some statistics, 80% of searchers lose trust in a business if their local listings are incorrect. With 54% of your users looking your business up online before they contact you or visit one of your locations, that’s a huge potential impact on your business. If you can’t continuously monitor your local listings, monthly audits are the bare minimum, or consider outsourcing this process to a trusted professional.
We Can Help
Local listings are incredibly important to any business, but management can be time-consuming and frustrating. MyAdvice developed Local Power to help businesses keep their information accurate in real-time, automatically. Our platform monitors your listings across 60+ platforms and corrects mistakes without any extra effort. Contact ushttps://myadvice.com/industries/ to see how we can help your medical, dental, legal practices in addition to other specialized business in need of the best marketing.
