- May 13, 2015
- Posted by: Wevio
- Category: Sales & Marketing, Wevio Blog
Local Business Listing is a must when you have a business with a physical location and expect your customers to visit. You will need to take care of location-specific SEO requirements for your website apart from other Organic SEO strategies. More than 20% of Google Search is local, as Google and other major search engines such as yahoo, bing etc, sort location-specific businesses into localized search results.
These results have less competition than you would have with organic search results but it takes a few smart steps to rank at the top of them. One important step is to enter your business in local-business listing sites. In this blog we are discussing about the top 5 business directories that will help your business grab the first page results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).
To be accepted as a local business on Google, you have to make your presence known in three major places mentioned below.
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Google Places
- Google+
Yahoo Local Listing is a great free service that displays your local business address, phone number and URL and gives you the option of choosing up to five business categories.
The basic free listing can include additional information such as working hours, email address, payment options and years in business, and you also earn a link to your site.
- Yelp:
A Yelp business account directs textual and visual representation of your business to the categories of Yelp users that are most likely interested in your business. You can also add a link to your website on your Yelp profile and there is no limit to the number of business photos you can upload.
Yelp allows for customer reviews and gives you the option to respond to them. Moreover, you also get personalized analytics to monitor the traffic.
- Bing:
For local businesses, being listed on Bing is as important as being listed on Google+ Local. You can claim your business listing that already exists or create a new one by clicking on the Get Started Now link shown in the screenshot below.
MerchantCircle is a popular free American local-business listing service. It retrieves information from yellow pages listings. After signing up you get to access a comprehensive dashboard on your account that has plenty of editing options to add and modify your business details.
Most importantly, this site allows you to post a link to your website, thus providing a high quality inbound link to your site.
