Leveraging Business Listings For More Exposure and SEO Benefits – 145

Transcript For Leveraging Business Listings for More Exposure and SEO Benefits – 145;

Jesse Dolan: All right, today we’re going to talk about how to leverage your business listings online to benefit your exposure and get more SEO. I know you don’t like Yelp, know you don’t like the BBB, and all these other third party directories, but you’re going to want to use them.

Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. My name is Jesse Dolan. Today, we’re going to be talking about local business directories, third party websites, some social media, maps, apps, maps directories, and basically places online where you can list your business and where you should list your business, and how that’s going to help you for your SEO. So where this becomes important for you is, if you’ve already have your website. Like if you’re just starting out, if you’re just doing these things right now to begin with, you want to build these directory listings and the stuff that we’re talking about here after you have your website, because you’re going to link to your website from all of these.

So a good order operations here just to kind of set the stage is make sure you have your website. And ideally you also have a Google My Business listing, although we’re going to talk about Google My Business Listing, which is now the Google Business Profile, for those of you who haven’t been up to date your news recently. To the process of creating and setting up and optimizing your GMB is something I think that’s going to lend towards having kind of a template here for how you’re going to approach these other websites.

So just to kind of set the stage on that, we’ll start right there with your GMB. So when you set up your GMB, you’re going to be listing your business name, and then your typical address, phone number, link to the website, things like that, but then also your business description. Now that is something we’ve talked about this before on various episodes, from an SEO standpoint, you really want to optimize and choose your words carefully that you’re putting in your business description.

And what I would say is now set that aside, copy and paste that, put that aside in a folder here or a notebook or a document, whatever, and you’re going to use that when you’re setting up these web listings here that we’re going to be going through today. That is because for most of these, you’re going to have a spot, to give a description or a summary of your business. Some of these listings you’ll have the chance to actually list some of your products and services pick categories.
We’re not going to dive into that with each of these portals, but again, going through the exercise of setting up and optimizing your GMB is going to really go through the exercise and have you decide these things. So take a care of that first, but then also, because that is the number one business listing directory, third party website, if you will, that you want to get listed in. Your website, got to have your website, of course, that’s your own, that’s your .com, that’s your domain or whatever your top level domain is going to be. But then the first third party you’re going to go to is Google My Business. Okay.

So just to set the stage on that and make that very clear for you. The next one you’re probably going to want to go after is Bing. People overlook that quite a bit. Bing is the second most popular search engine here, at least here in the United States, and that can carry a lot of weight for certain demographics and certain niches. Definitely going to want to set up your Bing listing. That’s going to get you in the local pack for Bing, just like it would for the GMB on Google.

Very similar process on those verification, set up your business categories, business description, link to your website, all that kind of stuff, images and logos, things like that. Those are the two big ones that you’re going to want to worry about. If you kill the episode here, don’t worry about anything else, that’s fine. You’re going to do yourself some pretty good favors by having your GMB and your Bing listing set up. But I would definitely challenge you to go further in this.

So I’m going to list off a bunch of them here, for example, but I want to say it’s not going to be limited to the ones that I’m going to mention here. And I’ll expand on that here in a second. Some of the major ones you’re definitely going to want to go after, for business directories and different applications, are of course your GMB. You’ve got Bing. And then some of maps listings.

Apple maps, Waze, W-A-Z-E, some of the lesser ones you think about nowadays to like MapQuest. Things like that as well. But then social media is going to come into play here, too. All the typical Facebook, Instagram, put yourself in Foursquare, really anywhere that you are actively engaged right now as an A1, if you’re on Pinterest, if you’re on Instagram, and if you already have some of these, I guess this is a good detour here real quick.

Talk about Instagram, let’s say, or Pinterest or TikTok or Snapchat or whatever. If you have these profiles set up or other ones that I’ve mentioned also, you’re going to want to make sure you when you optimize them. We’re going to talk about a few things to do here as we set up in these third party websites and directories, but any of them that you’ve already checked off your list apply these same best practices to them.

Okay, so you’re all your social medias, the ones that you’re currently active in, or the one you are not active in that are still big. Not saying they necessarily got to go out and get set up on telegram. But the real big ones that have been out there for a long time, the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, things like that. Let’s see what else, oh, voice, you definitely want to get active in voice search, Siri, Alexa, for example, and then again, some of these lesser thought of ones, or even some that people try to avoid, Yelp, TripAdvisor, the BBB, chamber commerce, merchant circle, yellow pages are some examples.

Hey, everyone. Just a quick message about our free SEO audit tool on LocalSEOTactics.com. We’ll get right back to the show. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, go on out to localSEOtactics.com/freeSEOaudit, or look for the yellow button up in the top right corner, click that. And it’s going to take just a couple seconds. You enter in the page that you want to optimize what you’re looking for the audit to score against. Enter in that page, enter in the keyword you’re looking to get optimized for, and enter in your email address, click the button. And it’s going to take a few seconds. And then it’s going to send you off a PDF report via email. It’s a great report. It’s going to kind of give you an overall score of some vital SEO areas for that page and for your website at large.

Even though it’s auditing this page, that’s going to tell you some of the good things that are happening. Some of the bad things that are happening too, can give you basically a checklist of some things that you need to show up and what you can do to improve your SEO for that page for that keyword that you’re auditing. Now, you can use this as many times as you want. You can do multiple keywords, multiple pages, multiple keywords on the same page. You can even use this to check as your competitors, if you want to do a little reverse engineering, see how they’re scoring for a certain keyword. What they may be doing good, that you’re not. And some things to improve there.

So lots of different ways to use it completely free. Again, go on at the localseotactics.com/freeSEOaudit, or look for the yellow button in the top, right corner of the website.

Now that’s is kind of a quick list that we compiled real quick of some of the big, well known ones. But here is also what I would challenge you to do is in your local market or wherever you’re trying to be optimized for whatever local market it is. Do some searches for the products and services that you have to offer. Also, do some searches for the… Let me pause right there. Do the searches for the products and services that you have to offer and look to see what comes up.

Does Yelp show up? If yes, then you’re going to want to get listed in Yelp. If Jesse’s directory.com shows up, you’re going to want to get listed on that, too. So do some product and service searches for your local market. Identify these third party websites that show up, try to get listed in those. In addition, as you’re doing those searches for your products and services in your local market, pay attention to what the top competitors are for each market, then go back and do some brand searches for those competitors.

Again, if it’s Jesse’s Internet service, do a Google search for that company and see if Jesse’s Internet service showing up in Yelp, in Foursquare, in BBB, in some other directories maybe you missed. And you’re going to want to leverage those as well. So what we’re doing here is finding out which of these directories, which of these websites are already showing up in search. There’s some kind of SEO relevance there, and you want to get in those. And then which ones of the competitors already identified.

These are important for a couple areas. One, you’re going to want to grab these, just to hold the real estate, to make sure nobody else can squat on it. Grab that Twitter handle, grab that Facebook slug, make sure you have your pages and your real estate. If you acclaimed in each of these portals, even if you’re not going to use it, grab it, claim it. Nobody else can hijack it from you. But then you’re also going to be establishing this footprint and Google will see this. If you can get your name, your address, your phone number, your web link and information out there for you. Google’s going to be able to see all that out there in the landscape. That’s going to help your authority and show them how big your scope is really.

The other part of that is, it’s going to apply to your schema. You’re going to want to leverage all of these links in these associations back through your schema. So on the front side, Google and other search engines too, can see this stuff. They can see that you are listed on Yelp. They can see that you’re in the BBB and that’s great. We want to then tie it back in through our schema and say, on the backside, this is our company. This is our website. Here’s our listing on BBB. Here’s our listing on Yelp and make sure that Google can really complete that loop.

That they under not just understand that that’s your Yelp listing, but you’re telling them that’s your Yelp listing. And that’s going to definitely bode well for you on that as well. Another reason you’re going to want to obtain real estate listings and all of these areas are you can get reviews in a lot of these portals. The more reviews you get, whether it’s directly on your old business profile or any of these third party sites, Google will see these and kind of aggregate that information. And it’s going to help all things being equal. If I have more reviews, let’s just say on Facebook than my competitor, I would expect myself to trump that competitor. Again, with all other things being equal here, to be clear.

Another and often overlooked reason to claim all these profiles is you can actually get in front of an audience in these portals, in these directories, in these apps, you can get in front of an audience that you might not have got in front of otherwise. And I don’t mean getting on TikTok to be on TikTok now. I mean, particularly with a lot of our clients and that’s overlooked is the submission to Apple Maps. If somebody whips out their iPhone and does a search using Apple Maps, versus if they went to Google, you’re going to get two different results. Even though it’s easy to plug in an address to Apple Maps and use it for navigation, it also is a search engine. So being listed in each of these apps in each of these directories will allow you to be found, be shared within them.

Again, if we start talking a little bit more kind of social, like next door, the app, next door, the website next door, things like that. You have to be in there to be a part of those communities and be shared, be found and get that exposure. It’s going to benefit your overall footprint, digital footprint with Google. It’s going to give you a lot more areas to use for your schema, to tie all that in. It’s going to allow a lot more portals for you to get reviews. And of course, it’s going to allow you to maybe reach some potential clients and prospects that you wouldn’t have otherwise have within those apps.

So it’s going to take a little bit of elbow grease on your part. Again, I would start with doing some Google searches for those products and services, searches on the competitors, and then just do some other research if you will, to find out what you’re missing and see what you want to get listed in. If you’re going after things that are not on the first few pages of Google, again, through those brand searches, through those keyword searches, things like that, I would stop. I would probably not waste my time at that point, because if they’re not showing relevancy within Google, how relevant is it for you from an SEO standpoint or from that user engagement standpoint.

So just kind of keep those things in mind. There is a point of diminishing returns where once you get a number of these, the other ones aren’t going to be worth your while, because a lot of this is very manual. There’s not an easy button you can push to just get listed in there. You’re going to have to submit your information, fill out your form, enter in your business subscription, things like that. And again, I’ll go back like I said, on the front side, that’s where doing your Google business profile, your Google, my business listing on the front end of it, makes it a lot easier, because you’ll be going through that process.

Your GMB is probably one of the more intensive versions of this that you’re going to do. So if you knock that one out of the way, you really have that template for what you’re going to do on the rest of them.

Last thing I want to share when doing these is, these are all websites and SEO applies to them as well. Meaning a couple things, one, don’t straight up copy and paste the exact same business description in every single portal. Try to make them a little bit unique if you can. Tailor to the intent and the purpose of what this portal is for. Also, everything that you’re inputting has SEO keyword value to it. If you’re uploading a photo, make sure you’re saving that file name with some keywords in it, whether it be your brand name products or services, geolocation, whatever it is, all those things that you would think about.

If it was your website, those are also going to be things you’re going to want to keep in mind when you’re submitting your information and filling out your listings in these third party directories, so to speak. So there you go. That’s definitely some things you can take advantage of to improve your visibility and yourself listed in a lot of those areas. Oh, I almost forgot, the last thing this is going to give you in some cases it’s more valuable than others, but a lot of backlinks back to your website.

Any place that’s going to list your website is going to give you some sort of backlink back to your website and that’s going to help, too. So check that out when you can, do it yourself, put some team members on it, however you got to get help. Definitely take some time research those, get listed in those and then loop back, add them into your schema. If any of these things seem too complicated. If you don’t have the time or the bandwidth to do them, you want some professional help. Obviously we’re always here to do these things either front to back or just chunks of it for you like the schema, whatever you need. We are here to help check us out.

All right. If you are getting value out of this show and these episodes topics like this, we’d love to get a review from you. That’s how we know we’re doing a good job. As we get reviews, just like we were talking for these third party websites, let us know we’re doing a good job. Let’s others see that we are doing a good job and helps our exposure as well for the show. So if you’re getting a good value out of this and you’re liking what we’re doing, help us keep it going. Go on onto localSEOtactics.com, scroll down to the bottom, click on the button for reviews.

And you’re going to have links to whatever portal you want to leave a review on. It could be Apple podcast, Google podcast, Google My Business, Facebook, whatever it is, pick your portal that you’d like to leave a review, put it in there. And we also reviewed, I’m sorry. We also read a review on each episode here. So for this episode we got a great five-star review from Doug and Doug. I hope I’m saying your last name correctly. Is it Doug Reifschneider?

I hope it’s a long one kind of tricky. I’m not the best at English. Some days are hard, but anyways, I digress. Doug says, “I may bury the headline here, but a little context is good. I’ve been listening to the podcast since the beginning of the year, the format and the information is awesome for beginners and/or people like me who have had agencies or people who did SEO for their brands and want to learn the ropes. I haven’t made it past season one because there is a lot to learn. I use the free SEO audit tool many times. And now after some familiarity with the tool had questions, I sent two emails to Jesse and he not only replied, but he replied quickly with usable answers. Their service is awesome. And I only hope I find some way to become a client someday to return the favor for the free advice. Thanks, guys.”

Hey Doug, no problem. Remember the exchanges and yeah, that’s definitely what we do. We provide the advice here, the tips, the tricks to get found online, use our tool. If you use our tool, we’re going to send you some emails and communicate. And if we can help you out, we can help you out. Where it is above and beyond, just kind of some free answers and things like that.

Like you said, we’re here to be hired as well and have a great team full of professional SEOs that can execute everything that we talk about. So Doug, I’m glad you’re getting good value. Everybody else love to hear from you. Hopefully enjoy the show. We’ll catch you on the next episode.