As always, if you’ve missed the first few articles, make sure you look at the archive to catch up. It will definitely help to fill in a few gaps for you and bring up up to speed very quickly.
Local Listings Tip #3 – Use the right categories for your business.
For the most part, customers today are searching more for a specific category of service (i.e. Plumbing, electrician, interior designer, SEO Denver, Internet Marketing Plan, etc.) than a specific business name. What this means is that you need to make sure your business is listed accurately so your potential customers can find you.
In order to get your local listing to show up, here’s what you’ll need to do.
Obviously, up to this point, you’ve already claimed your listing and updated all of your contact information. Your next step (Tip #3) is to update your categories with the local listing providers.
In order to do this, you could always look at your competitors and see how they’ve classified their businesses or your can use the ‘search’ tools that are provided within each of the local listing tools. Either way, this should help you to get a good understanding of where your business should be listed.
Also, don’t forget to think like a consumer. Far to many businesses forget to think like their consumers and therefore, they are missing the boat when it comes to getting listed correctly. For example, we have a lot of clients in the window treatment industry. We’ve been doing great work for them for 9-10 years now. Dealers typically refer to “Hard Treatments” and “Soft Treatments”. While these are accurate ‘labels’ for people that are in the trades, just remember that your customers don’t know what these terms mean. Therefore, you’ll need to make sure you are listed under terms like, “Interior Designers”, “Window Treatments”, etc.
Some people ask us if they should only choose one category or if they could have multiple categories on their local listing. We encourage you to select as many as possible…just make sure they are relevant.
This ends Tip #3. If you need any help with the other areas, just check the previous posts on this category. Also, look for the next post on Local Listing Tips.
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Markomm is a Denver Based Internet Marketing and SEO Firm. We have offices in Denver, Colorado and Virginia Beach, VA. We are very customer focused and keep striving to give our clients the best customer support while also keeping them abreast of what technologies they could be implementing to attract more customers.
