Best Way to Optimize 38 Local Directory Listing In Major Directories
-
Hi Folks,
I am trying to figure out the best way to get our company's 38 U.S. locations in the major local directories. To start, I'd like to get us listed in the major ones: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp. I do have the resources myself here on staff to do everything manually. So, I don't necessarily need a service like Yext (but would also like any opinions on that offering if anyone can offer it).
But, from what I know in the past, every time you try to claim a local listing within each platform, you have to confirm your existence there somehow - whether it be by a mailed postcard or some sort of automated call they give you. Considering that we want to manage all social and local platforms here at corporate, how can we do this? I am not physically at these locations, but I'm sure this is possible to manage everything through one account. The addresses will be local, but the phone numbers on each local profile will route to our customer service here at corporate because the local locations are mostly administrative. In other words, businesses is booked through corporate and carried out at local destinations.
Thoughts/Comments?
I want to do what's best for SEO and also dont' want to harm anything or our link equity.Thanks,
Pedram -
This is probably too late to help, but here goes...
We actually had this exact same issue with a client. Ideally we would use a toll free number for all locations. These locations do interact with customers, but it is not the preferred method for new customers to contact us. (about 30% of transactions occur with the local location and 70% happen online, or with the call center)
In the end we sent in all the information ourselves but had each location verify by having a postcard sent to them. This was a huge pain. We had to contact each location manager as the post card was sent and have them make sure every employee who might touch the mail was aware that the postcard was coming.
I believe it was worth it. Everything is managed from the corporate office as well. But we had to make sure everything was verified properly. We are also a little wary of messing with anything Google has set up because we didn't want to have to go back and undo, then redo everything we set up.
I do have a follow up question for you, and anyone else who cares to chime in. Do you think there is value in having social media pages for every location? Just managing the corporate social media pages requires staff. To manage for 45 locations seems like an overwhelming task. However, if the value is really there, it is something we would have interest in exploring.
Best,
Joe
-
This goes beyond what I know at this point.
I went to a presentation by Greg Gifford (here is his blog post) and the merge is a nightmare between Google+Local and Google+Business
http://blog.autorevo.com/2013/02/merge-google-plus-local-wit-plus-business/
http://blog.autorevo.com/2013/02/how-to-tell-difference-between-google-plus-pages/
So I have stayed back on this. I assume there would be some bulk merge tool to use at some point and this would be your answer. (I have not looked into this).
Post that as a separate question here and see what you get.
-
I would agree with this point. You keep the local number so Google associates properly, but then corporate can manage the listing. Works for me.
-
Oh and more thing. Our individual locations in fact DO make contact with our customers and DO have individual phone numbers. I mention the 1-800 customer service number just because our clients typically call there anyway. But, if it's best to list individual business number AND I can still manage the profiles myself here at corporate, then I think we're golden, right?
-
Thank you, Miriam and Thank you CleverPhD! Both great answers and very informative.
Next question - should I worry about Google+ Local for business? We have a Google+ business page as is that I've linked to our corporate location via that page (waiting for a postcard in a week). Our Google+ page is for our corporate presence. We don't want to create individual Google+ pages if possible, which is why I am thinking Google Places Local is better for us - and for SEO. Agreed? Thoughts?
Thanks again!
-
If you own all the locations in the 38 cities, Google has a bulk upload function. It is done via a spreadsheet.
https://support.google.com/places/answer/178024?hl=en You are then able to verify in bulk .
Step 6: Request bulk upload verification
It's important to verify your authority to manage your initial upload, because unverified listings will not appear on Google Maps. If you are the business owner of all of the bulk uploaded listings in your Google Places account, you will need to request verification for your bulk upload. Simply click the “Verify your locations” link and fill out the subsequent form. It will be submitted to our team for review. A reviewer will respond to your request at your Google Places email address.
That said, I would not use a central 800 number if each of the local businesses has a local number that they are already associated with at a give address. Phone number is KEY to Google connecting the dots between what you submit, what they already have in their databases and what they find out on the web in other directories and from other business databases. If you change all of them to a central 800 number you may actually be messing up your local search results as now your NAP information in Google is different. It is not about where the local number routes, but the consistency of that number over time. If these are well established locations with well established phone numbers for those locations, changing the phone numbers via the bulk upload may negatively impact you.
I am not familiar with bulk uploads at the other resources you mention, but a quick web search should set you up. They will probably also be more responsive than Google. Just did this for you
More on Google - http://searchengineland.com/google-places-launches-new-bulk-listing-management-tool-120552
Bing - https://www.bingplaces.com/Home/MoreFAQ
Yahoo does not have this option - http://www.rioseo.com/local-seo-bing-places-bulk-upload/#fbid=mUJJOb8Zyi6
Yahoo - http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/local-listings/
Yelp - http://www.yelp.com/topic/charter-township-of-clinton-business-with-multiple-locations-sign-up-help
"If you send an email to feedback@yelp.com they can help you with multiple biz locations. Just send them a list of the locations you want to claim. "
Also http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-yelp-best-practice-for-updating-multiple-business-locations
-
Hi Pedram,
While some platforms do allow for bulk uploads of data (see: https://support.google.com/places/answer/178024?hl=en), you will need to provide a local, non-redirecting phone number per each physical location in order to comply with the Google Places quality guidelines which state:
"Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible."
Be careful, too, of the eligibility of your locations. You mention that many of your locations are 'administrative'. Do they comply with this guideline?
Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.
Some links you might want to check out:
I hope these tips help!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to outrank a directory listing with high DA but low PA?
My site is at 4th place, 3 places above it is a gumtree (similar to yell, yelp) listing. How can you figure out how difficult it would be outrank those pages? I mean obviously the pages would have low PA and they are top based on the high DA of the site. This also seems to go back to keyword research and difficulty, when I'm doing keyword research and I see a wikipedia site in top 5 rank, or a yell.com or perhaps an article in forbes.com outranks your site. Typically the problem seems to be Google giving a lot of credit to these pages rankings based on the high DA rather than PA of the pages. How would you gauge the difficulty of that keyword then if the competition are pages with very high DA which is impossible to compete with but low PA? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | magusara2 -
Best way for Google and Bing not to crawl my /en default english pages
Hi Guys, I just transferred my old site to a new one and now have sub folder TLD's. My default pages from the front end and sitemap don't show /en after www.mysite.com. The only translation i have is in spanish where Google will crawl www.mysite.com/es (spanish). 1. On the SERPS of Google and Bing, every url that is crawled, shows the extra "/en" in my TLD. I find that very weird considering there is no physical /en in my urls. When i select the link it automatically redirects to it's default and natural page (no /en). All canonical tags do not show /en either, ONLY the SERPS. Should robots.txt be updated to "disallow /en"? 2. While i did a site transfer, we have altered some of the category url's in our domain. So we've had a lot of 301 redirects, but while searching specific keywords in the SERPS, the #1 ranked url shows up as our old url that redirects to a 404 page, and our newly created url shows up as #2 that goes to the correct page. Is there anyway to tell Google to stop showing our old url's in the SERP's? And would the "Fetch as Google" option in GWT be a great option to upload all of my url's so Google bots can crawl the right pages only? Direct Message me if you want real examples. THank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Directories
Hi All, Some saying getting listed in hundreds of directories has no real SEO benefit. Some saying opposite. Some saying there are only one directory to concerned with, the Yahoo Directory. What are your opinions on this question after all Google's Pandas and Penguins ? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
Best practice for listings with outbound links
My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities. Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links. What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links', Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
How Does SEO Help Local Businesses
Hello, I recently took a position as a digital marketing manger with a advertising agency. Its my job to grow the digital marketing department. One of the issues I am running into is 90% of our clients are local businesses. When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search. For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term. How can I justify a larger SEO budget when there is just not a lot of search volume for these keywords? This is nothing like Dog Training Videos or something similar. Am I missing something? Where can I pull traffic from for local businesses to justify larger SEO budgets? Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Links directory: is it worth it?
Would there be any benefit or penalty for implementing a links directory with over 300 external links to websites that somtimes return the link? Or would it be more beneficial to simply ask for one way inbound links when gaining links? For example this section of this website: http://directory.flyawaysimulation.com/ This is their directory and most but not all of the sites in that directory link back to them. Your ideas, thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Triple listing in rankings
We have a triple listing for the keyword vca cursus (Dutch keyword). But the page we optimized for that keyword ranks lower than our vca examen page. First we had the number one spot but now we rank 2 to 5. In opensite explorer i compared the competiton and we scored on almost all factors better. Do you know the causes why the vca examen page ranks higher then the vca cursus page. Is it possible to change that or reverse the triple listing somehow. And why does our competitor ranks higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PlusPort0 -
Best ways to build up Page Rank (PR)
What are your sure fire ways to build up page rank, quickly and effectively for long term gains. Do you have a check list?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | therealmarkhall0