I just attended a great webinar offered by HubSpot about utilizing the various online local networking sites to promote your business. There are so many local listing services than you can take advantage of for free. Many of them also offer enhanced services which let you add more information about your business, but the adding your business using the free service is well worth the time.
I knew about many of the local listing services such as Google Places, Facebook Places, Yelp, etc. But, I didn't know about other free listing services such as TeleNav, Topix, GetFave and a few others. But, I have to say that the best tip out of this webinar was being introduced to Yext.com. If you scroll to the bottom of the home page and click Yext Rep, you can sign up for a free service that compiles a snapshot of many local listings of your business. This is a great way to get an overview of your local listing activity, including reviews. Yext also offers a paid service that provides many enhanced features related to your local listings. It's worth checking out.
The next tip that's worth mentioning is the importance of reviews. Sure, you may get bad reviews from time to time, but most times you can add a rebuttal. But, why not ask your happy customers to provide a positive review of your services? According to HubSpot this is a valuable tool to attract visitors to your local listings.
In addition, adding these local listings will help with your overall SEO results. Each listing usually contains a link to your website. Some even let you add links to your Facebook page, Twitter account, or even a url to your blog. These are great features to connect your local listing to your social media presence, an important internet marketing component. Unless the listing service is utilizing the 'rel=nofollow' attribute on their anchor tags, those links will count towards your link popularity, thus adding to your overall SEO strategy.
To end this post here is a link to a blog post written by Eric Vreeland from HubSpot that lists 50 local listing websites. A must have for any business wanting to implement an online local marketing plan. Here's the blog: The Ultimate List 50 Local Business Directories.
IMI Software, Inc. is a Long Island Web Design and Software Development Company.