Business Listing Audit & Cleanup

Do you know how your business is represented online?

You’ve had a website for years but your online presence is more than your website. You no doubt have some form of social media too – Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – and you may even have videos on YouTube or Vimeo. You probably have a Google Business page and even a Yelp listing, even if you didn’t intentionally create them.

But that’s not the end of your business’s online presence.

Just like Google Business and Yelp mine data and create listings without our knowledge, there are other data aggregators that collect your business information and then push that data out to dozens, even hundreds, of business directories and listings. This seems like a good thing. You’re getting free publicity and even sometimes links back to your website. Good, right?

But what happens when your business information changes? Do those directories and listings update too? No. No they don’t.

This means that if you’ve had an online presence for a few years and in that time have changed your website domain, your phone number, your address, and especially if you’ve rebranded or changed your business name, your information is likely to be wrong in many, or all, of those directories and listings.

A Business Listing Case Study

Take TruTemp Solutions for example. They’re an HVAC installation and service company in Tuscaloosa, AL.

Their Google Business page was ranking at the 88th position in Google Business local listings for the search “ac repair Tuscaloosa”. That’s basically non-existent. So we optimized their Google Business listing.

We followed all of Googles rules and we gave it plenty of time. Their page jumped to a ranking of 32. But that’s still basically non-existent. We optimized their website too. No significant change. Finally, we ran our Business Listing Audit and discovered A TON of mistakes about their business across the Internet.

We found wrong business names, wrong phone numbers, wrong addresses, and wrong websites. In fact, one of their old domain names had been purchased by a Chinese company and so some of their listings (for Tuscaloosa, AL) were showing up in Chinese!

Needless to say this was a huge problem on several levels. When your information is incorrect across the Internet…

1. Potential customers may be steered away from doing business with you either because they can’t connect with you or don’t trust you.
2. Google Business doesn’t trust you. They won’t promote or “rank up” a site they don’t trust.

After discovering the errors in their Business Listing Audit, the next task was to attempt to correct them. This can be a long process (in TruTemp’s case, about 6 weeks) but it really pays off.

I’m happy to say that ever since we corrected their online directories and listings, they’ve been ranking between 1 and 5 for various search terms on Google Business among some very difficult competition.