Should You Update Online Business Profiles?
Online business profile services (directories) such as Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local, among many more, are a great, free services that can bring you new customers, more traffic, and more interactivity with your clients. A properly optimized and complete profile gives your enterprise a better chance of being found in map and directory searches, lets those searchers know what you’re about, and gives them an extra level of confidence when they actually want to visit your establishment.
Lets take a closer look at some additional services like this and what they allow you to add to your profiles.
Online Profiles Your Company Should Consider
- Google Places
- Bing Local
- Yahoo Local
- Yelp
- UrbanSpoon (foodie)
- VoicePlaces
- CitySearch
- MojoPages
- SpottedHere
- Kudzu
- SuperPages
- YellowPages
- InsiderPages
- TrueLocal
- Any Local-Specific Directories
This list is not exhaustive, but should be a good starting point. There are hundreds of these business profiles on the web, and you really only need to focus on updating those with the biggest reach. If you have had success with one not on this list, please do leave us a comment so we can check it out.
Common Online Profile Features
- Address, contact & website information
- Ability to add images
- Inclusion in multiple business categories
- Hours of operation
- Short Description of your business
- Customer reviews, including the ability to respond (in some cases)
- Social Media Feed syndication of Twitter feeds (in some cases)
- Additional information about services or products offered, including general pricing and payment terms (in some cases)
These features sometimes require you to verify the profile represents your business before updating. This is usually done via a post card of phone call that contains a verification number.
Benefits of Updating these Profiles
- Visibility in local map and directory searches
- Potential for your profile to show up in organic search results if the user is within proximity
- Customers are more educated about your business upfront, and more confident
- Patrons can leave positive (or negative) comments, allowing you to see how they are interacting with your business
- You can respond to this feedback, creating an additional level of trust and confidence (if handled properly)
Get Your Profiles Professionally Updated
Have questions? Not sure how you should go about getting all of your profiles updated and optimized to their maximum possible potential?
Email Us, and we’ll get you taken care of. We offer a few different packages that will have your business on its way to receiving the benefits listed above.
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Hey this is somewhat of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding know-how so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!
I recommend WordPress. You get a WYSIWYG editor, or you can write raw HTML. You can download (free & paid) third party plugins, themes, etc that do a lot of work for you (though they often need a bit of customizing themselves depending one what you are looking for).
I prefer writing all of my HTML for my pages/articles because I dislike some of the code that WYSISYG editors inject, but for most users it is not an issue.
Good luck! You shouldn’t have a problem figuring out WordPress – just take a little time and give it a chance.
cool topic, very relevant now!
Local Pages and Business Review pages have increased traffic of many of my customers. This is a nice comprehensive article. Thanks for sharing.
Most of our traffic comes from local search. Its much easier to compete in the local market. thanks for the extra info
It will really help if you have an updated online business profiles. It can contribute on how you can get more clients in the market as well. Thanks a lot for sharing this information.
[…] more about the importance of online business profiles like CitySearch Business […]
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