Local Search is The Modern Day Storefront
Local Search Success Requires a Strong Digital Presence
To succeed today, every business in the world needs a strong digital presence. Like street signs or billboards do offline, a digital presence ensures that customers searching online will find their way to your local business. To assure this, you must be deliberate in crafting and adopting a local search strategy.
Welcome The Modern Storefront
Consider these facts:
- Approximately 3 billion search queries contain local terms every month. (Source: comScore)
- 70% of online searchers will use local search to find offline businesses. (Source: Kelsey Group)
- 30% of Google searches are for local information. (Source: HubSpot via Google)
According to official Google statements, more than 50 percent of search queries globally now come from mobile devices. Searchers on mobile devices expect one-touch engagement with your business. Most local searchers never leave the search results page to call your store or office, view hours and services, read reviews, get directions, reserve a table or schedule an appointment.
“The importance of local SEO has grown…” and “the ride isn’t over yet.”
— Entrepreneur Magazine
According to Hubspot, making sure that you have a presence everywhere your potential customers might find you is critical to any local marketing plan. So how do you do that?
A complete digital presence includes:
- A thorough Google MyBusiness profile
- A website optimized for local search
- Social media profiles & posts
- Organic search ranking
- Customer reviews
- AND — Online directory listings
That last bullet is a lot trickier than it sounds...
The Problem: Bad information is Hurting Your Business
Today, 4 in 5 consumers search for local businesses online. When consumers find incorrect information about a business online, 73% lose trust in that business. And, incorrect information abounds — According to one proprietary study, up to 40% of location info online is wrong! That same study estimated that incorrect or incomplete information online causes small businesses to lose potential customers at a cost of $10 billion per year.
If you have been in business for any time at all, there is likely an abundance of inaccurate information about your company online. Why is so much information incorrect? Because there’s no permanent record or single source of location data online. This is a HUGE problem.
A quick review of this graphic from MOZ Local, highlights the complexity of the local search landscape:
Dozens of third-party directories share conflicting information about you based on scraping and crawling business listings. As this information is copied and replicated, it quickly escapes your control.
Adding insult to injury, Google factors conflicting third-party information into your business’ search rankings trust factor. Directly and indirectly, misinformation about your business found online is costing you customers.
The Solution: Take Control of Your Digital Presence
The solution is local search identity management (IDM).
In principle, the notion of IDM is pretty straight forward:
- Reviewing any existing directories for accuracy, correcting misinformation as required
- Listing business everywhere else that matters, this can involve setting accounts with dozens of online listing directories
- Regular monitoring of these same directories to be sure your digital presence remains accurate
In practice, however..
DIY local search identity management is not practical for most business owners.
If only there was an easy way to manage IDM…
And, of course, there is. One of the best solutions for managing IDM is a platform called YEXT. MojoMediaPros was the very first agency in Nashville to adopt this platform several years back to help our clients take control of their online busines information.
With YEXT, we can create a single, consistent search profile for your business that replaces all the inconsistent information found about you on third-party directory sites including Google, Facebook, Bing, Yelp, Yellow Pages and Waze. In fact, we can update more than 70 third-party directories from a single pane of glass, and that number is growing.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits of local search IDM, read more here.
And if you are curious just how accurate your online business information is, visit mybizlistings.mojomediapros.com, for a FREE automated report of your online business listings.
