Are your business listings working for you? Are you inviting feedback? Here's how you can maximise the SEO potential of your business listings, and drive more traffic to your website.
What are business listings?
Business listings are the equivalent of the Yellow Pages. Digital indexes of business information, which is sometimes paid for, sometimes free. Google My Business is one of the most prominent, but there are many other business directories that exist and drive traffic.
How to maximise your listings:
1. Ensure consistent and complete information
Sounds simple, right? Ensuring consistent and complete information in your business listings is both the simplest and the most overlooked action for optimising. Accuracy and regular updates of your information, opening hours and addition of pertinent content will help to keep your listing presence fresh.
2. Optimise images
A really simple way to maximise the SEO impact of your business listings is to ensure you name your images appropriately (instead of 'IMG0256', use 'Black-Ankle-Boots-Digbys-UK'). Adding ALT text (a text explanation of your image used by screen readers) is also highly beneficial. Not only from an accessibility perspective, but from an SEO perspective, you are making your photos easier to find and understand.
3. Encourage feedback
Feedback is most definitely a gift, and many of the business listing websites gather or display feedback and reviews. Don't be afraid of bad reviews, take the feedback and move forward, and ensure you invite customers to leave their feedback.
4. Keywords
When you write your business listing, ensuring you use pertinent key phrases that relate to your business is key. SEO is essentially the act of making it easier for search engines and customers to find you, by ensuring you describe your business and products well. Ensure this best practice is used in your business listings too.
