When looking for a product or service your business provides, you want customers to find you—quickly and easily. Online listings help you show up in targeted searches within a localized area, which ultimately boosts your accessibility through search engine optimization (SEO). Read on to learn more about the importance of local listings and how they can help your business gain an advantage with SEO.

Help Customers Find You

The local listing is what a potential customer finds when searching for a particular product or service “near me.” Often displaying a business’s name, location, and contact information, these listings—or “local citations”—are found across social media platforms, apps, online directories, and more.

Local listings are valuable to both customers and businesses. They help patrons find the goods or support they need while driving traffic to that business’s website. This helps the shop build traction among search engines, which increases its ranking potential to engage even more customers. So, these local listings are essential tools for reaching more and more people.

Structure Your Listing

A basic local listing includes the details noted above. But providing more detail helps customers know more about your business and helps it rank better among search engines. For your local listing, consider adding elements such as:

• Operating and holiday hours.
• Business profile.
• Photos and/or videos.
• Social media links.
• Customer reviews.

The more information you can provide about your business, the more it will gain credibility with web crawlers—a program used to search and automatically index website content and other information. And established businesses often rank better, pushing their visibility toward the top of searches, where they’ll be seen first.

Keep Info Up to Date

Another equally important component of your local search listing is keeping business information current. If your business moves, adjusts its hours, changes phone number, or adds to or removes its profiles on social media, you want to update your listing as soon as possible. This will help you maintain your presence in local search results while continuing to provide up-to-date information for customers.

Additionally, the information you have online can be scanned and added to smaller directories and listings. So, if your details are inaccurate in one listing, chances are they’re inaccurate across the web. Incorrect info decreases your business’s validity and dings your search rankings.

Incidentally, PRIME’s Scan-Verify-Lock Technology™ helps determine inaccuracies in business listings. Simply enter your business name and see results from more than 75 networks to find out whether your details are accurate, or where they need to be updated.

The SEO Advantage

Local listings help customers discover and find your business. When implemented and maintained correctly, they also provide a virtual word-of-mouth endorsement through SEO. Your local listing gets you noticed, and keeps you there, by:

• Driving traffic to your website (and business).
• Increasing online visibility, which helps to outrank competitors.
• Building trust through established brand authority.
• Offering customers a platform for reviews.

By confirming who you are, where you are, what you do, and when, your business is more likely to rank higher in online searches. What’s more, your listing can guide other web sources to your page through backlinks, which helps build page credibility and increase search ranking.