In today’s fast-paced world, consumers expect businesses to be located within a matter of seconds on Google and other search engines.

Getting your business listed on relevant directories, review sites, data aggregators and mapping apps is critical to increasing visibility online. But managing these listings can be difficult.

Accurate Information

Business Listing Management is a process of ensuring that the information about a business is correct and consistent across multiple online directories and platforms. This helps ensure that search engines can verify the credibility of a company’s name, address and phone number (NAP).

In this technology-dominated age, where consumers research, shortlist and finalize a business they want to use before even interacting with them, the accuracy of business information is vital. Having inaccurate information about your business can erode your brand’s reputation and lead to missed opportunities to convert searchers to in-store traffic.

Having an accurate and consistent NAP is also essential for gaining a strong position on Google’s local search results. In fact, citation accuracy was ranked among the top five factors for local search engine ranking.

Real-Time Updates

Having updated business information across hundreds of directories, voice assistants and map services is essential to a successful local search strategy. Incorrect information or unreliable listings are harmful to a brand’s reputation and hinder your search rank.

Thankfully, there are a number of third-party tools available that automate the process of keeping all of your business information populated on a large number of sites at once. These tools will allow you to make changes to your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP) in real-time and update it on all of the listings simultaneously from a single dashboard.

In addition, the tool will automatically suppress duplicate listings to ensure your customers are always receiving accurate business information. This can be helpful for companies that have multiple locations or those that want to maintain an international presence.

Consolidation of Duplicate Listings

Duplicate listings are a common occurrence when it comes to online directories. These can occur for many reasons, including accidental submissions by customers, incorrect data being scraped by aggregators or when business owners haven’t managed their directory listing.

When you have multiple listings for your business on Google, it can be confusing to searchers and may negatively impact your ranking. It’s also a violation of Google’s guidelines, which could result in your business profile being suspended or your listings being filtered out from local search results.

Merging duplicate listings is a good way to eliminate these problems. To do this, start by ensuring that the addresses of the duplicate listings match the ones on your verified business profile.

Better Search Rank

Managing multiple business listing sites can be daunting for even the most seasoned of online marketing professionals. A smartly architected system will enable your business to maintain a high profile across a plethora of directories, portals and social media channels while retaining a semblance of control over the customer experience. You can also track the health of your business in real time to optimize for improved ROI. The most arduous of tasks is actually updating and monitoring your most important listings, while the rest can be left to the search engines. You can see your business in a new light when your clients can find you on their mobile devices and get the answers to any questions they have on the spot.