Strengthen Your Local Rankings By Fixing Your Listings

Many potential customers want to know why their listing is not coming up quickly in a local search. Even those that have created their own Google+ profile and local listing may find that when conducting their own search, they are not showing in local rankings.

Unfortunately, this is fairly common. Google has not made tools readily available to tell people why their listing is not showing. So if you are not an expert it may seem tempting to simply create another profile, but don’t. This is perhaps one of the worst things you could do.

Over 500 local search consultants were polled during a recent webinar to find out what the most common reasons were for their clients not showing up in a local search. Here is what they had to said.

Citation Inconsistencies Were the Most Common Issue

Look at your profile in the local business directories to ensure that your information is accurate. You need to review your NAP (name, address, and phone number) data to make sure that it is consistent throughout all platforms. This is essential for both Google marketing and coming up in local search results.

According to those polled, this accounted for 41 percent of the problems businesses were having. When business data is conflicting online, the search engines don’t know what to believe, and your listing may not show up as a result. This is understandable and quite frankly, you want your business data to be accurate anyway. Sending a customer to an old address would only make them upset and cost you business. In order to ensure the accuracy of your profiles, we recommend that you audit them on at least a yearly basis.

Duplicate Google+ Listings Can Hurt You

The second largest issue was businesses having a duplicate Google+ listing. This creates a natural problem of not knowing which listing is accurate. This is one of the first things we look for when determining why a business is not showing up in a local search. Fortunately, this is an easy problem to identify and correct. Once the additional listing has been removed, the problem should go away, and you will have a better chance of showing up quickly in the local results, especially on Google Maps/Local.

Watch for violations

While only 4 percent of those polled viewed Google Places violations as an issue, it is probably bigger than we think since Google does not publish clear guidelines on these violations. As such, if you are not working with a Google marketing expert, you may never know that you have a violation that needs to be corrected. Until Google does a better job of publishing their guidelines this is one area where an expert is absolutely necessary.

Showing up quickly in local search results is critical for gaining business from local search. With the majority of US adults owning smartphones, this is going to continue to be of importance and perhaps even more so going forward. This makes it essential that you spend the time cleaning up your profiles, deleting duplicate listings and avoiding any penalties so that your business comes up in a search, and you have the opportunity to capture that business.

Keeping your web presence clean can be a large task. Contact Local SEO Sites if you would like to speak with someone about your web presence.