Is your business targeting local traffic? Do you know how well your local listing is populated across several websites that help drive customers to your site and content? Some might think that creating a social profile and perhaps adding themselves to the Yellow Pages is enough. The reality is that most users looking for keywords that could return your website in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are using browsers (whether mobile or desktop) that are using there current location to help display the results.
A great tool to help you visually see how well you have updated your content across many search engine local listing sites is Moz Local. You can use the Moz Local tool to help see how well your business data is populated. Although Moz offers some great paid services, this tool is free to use. It actually tells you how well you are doing and what Moz can do for you if you choose to go ahead with their paid service.
Below you will see how marcowebdesigns.com is doing. When we first started to focus on our score we started out at around 17% by doing the bare minimum which was a Yellow Page listing and perhaps a Google+ page. We have now (as of this article) increased our score to 43%. Quite a significant increase by following a few simple steps that this tool lays out for you. Look for an updated blog post in the future to show how we are doing and how we have increased our Local SEO listing score.
As you can see in the score breakdown above, there are 4 categories. Complete, Incomplete, Inconsistent, and Duplicates. Each of these are tabs that provide more detail to its related category.
As you can see on the Completed tab, the sites listed that go above the line and are primarily green are the sites that you have a local listing with.
On the Incomplete tab you will find a list of sites that either you do not have a listing or your listing needs a little work. It will tell you what data is incomplete such as images, categories, etc. This is where we started. One by one, we are working to get data published on the sites that drive local search engine traffic. Some of the sites are paid but most are free. For the free sites, we suggest creating your profile, verifying that you are the owner of the local business or can interact on its behalf. This takes time but be patient. Some sites require several days for a review/approval process before you can add your business data.
Next is the Inconsistent tab. Here you will see your listings that don’t share the same information across the sites. Examples here would be your address, operating hours, phone number, etc.
Finally, there is a duplicates tab. This tab shows sites where you have duplicate listings/profiles.
Check out this tool and hopefully this will help drive the local traffic to your site that you have been missing. This in combination with on page SEO techniques, good content, mobile friendliness, and site optimization can get you to rank above your competitors.
Contact Us today to help get your website online and ask where we can help with optimizing your website.