While Google’s guidelines express a preference for local area code phone numbers, they’ve supported toll-free numbers for some years. This is particularly important for businesses like hotels: they’re local, but most of their customers come from out of town and find a toll-free number especially convenient. If you use a toll-free number instead of a local one on your Google Business Profile listing, make sure your website and all of your citations consistently use this number.
Google also wants you to list the number that connects as directly as possible to the subject of the local business listing (rather than to a call center).
Many citation forms will also allow you to list an alternate phone number, a toll-free number, a cell phone number, and in some cases a vanity number.
Google specifically stipulates that your listed website URL goes directly to a page owned by the business, rather than referring them to a third party, a social profile, or anywhere else.
For multi-location, multi-department, and multi-practitioner businesses, it’s common to point the listing for the business to the website homepage, while the listings for the branches, departments, or practitioners point to their respective landing pages on the site. This helps keep the entities separate. If you follow this model, be consistent and link all citations for a given entity to their respective page on the website. You don’t want some of a practitioner’s listings to point to the main homepage while others point to their landing page.
This is an area where you can experiment a bit. Perhaps you’ll find that your rankings increase if you point all of your listings to your homepage, as it has higher authority than an internal page. Beware, though — what you gain in rankings could be lost in human usability. You don’t want a user to click on a listing only to have to navigate your site to find the right landing page. There’s an ongoing debate in the local SEO industry as to whether rankings or usability should determine where your citation URLs point.
Most local business data platforms have a set of categories you’ll be choosing from to define what your business is. You’ll typically select 1–10 of these categories; when it comes to Google in particular, proper categorization can have a profound impact on rank. Google’s guidelines encourage you to choose categories which define your business at the most refined level (e.g. Federal Credit Union is a more refined category than just Bank) and avoid category repetition (not using both Restaurant and Mexican Restaurant). For an in-depth look at perfecting your Google My Business category strategy, please read Why Local Business Categories Matter.
No other platform has guidelines as stringent or detailed as Google’s when it comes to categories, but it’s important to be as accurate as possible when categorizing your business. Make it easy for platforms and search engines to understand which searches you’re most relevant for.
Sometimes, a niche business may not find a truly accurate category to represent itself on a given platform. When this happens, the best practice is to choose the closest possible category and then rely on other elements (like the business description) to clarify the exact nature of the company’s goods and services.
This field is an opportunity to highlight the most persuasive and impactful elements of your business — the things that most convince a potential customer to choose you. Typically, you’ll have several hundred characters available to create a short pitch for your company. You may choose to write a unique description for each platform, or if you prefer, you can safely create a single description and publish it on all your citations.
Some descriptions allow for the use of rich text (including hyperlinks), but you should avoid spamminess. Make your description read in a natural voice, like an elevator pitch, rather than a string of disjointed keywords. Descriptions are not believed to have any impact on local search rankings, but they can influence click-through rates (CTR).
Some local business platforms have a field for entering a tagline or slogan. There’s no need to create one if you don’t have one, but for brands whose taglines have become locally famous due to radio, tv, or social promotion, this field can help with consumer recognition. An example of a well-known tagline would be Nike: Just Do It.
Many platforms will give you the ability to link to your profiles on Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Facebook, and more. It’s worth it to fill these fields out whenever possible to direct consumers to additional forms of user experience and customer support.
Google has stated that images have a major impact on local business listing click-through rates, so it’s always a smart idea to upload as many high-quality images as you can whenever a platform presents the opportunity.
Each platform has its own guidelines as to image size and what types of content are allowed in images. Here are Google’s. Be sure to follow guidelines, both for best display and resolution and to avoid images being taken down for non-compliance.
Finally, as many platforms allow users to upload their own photos of your business, it’s important to monitor your profiles on a regular basis to be sure that inappropriate imagery hasn’t been uploaded by pranksters or competitors.
Certain platforms allow you to upload videos, menus, and links to other forms of media. This creates a richer user experience and can influence conversions.
Most platforms offer fields for toll-free, cell phone, or vanity phone numbers, which can be of assistance to different groups of users.
This common field is particularly important to any business that uses fax as a regular means of communication (such as medical centers that request new patient forms to be faxed in), but it’s not a required field.
Jamal Yellow Pages PakistanIf trust in your business relies on licenses or professional certifications, be sure you’re including this information whenever a platform makes this field available.
Being alerted to major brands you carry is a huge convenience for consumers, particularly when those brands enjoy a loyal following. This is an especially good field for retail businesses to fill out.
Many platforms allow you to specify which payment methods you accept, from cash only to digital wallets. If your business supports the most modern payment technologies, make good use of this field to influence consumers’ decisions to choose you.
Attributes are relatively new to the Google Business Profile dashboard, expected to grow in importance. When creating your Google Business Profile listing, you may have the ability to choose from a set of descriptions (like “24-hour service,” “late night food,” or “wheelchair accessible”) that further define your business. It makes sense to let Google (and consumers) know as much as possible about your business whenever attribute fields are available. Be aware that some attributes (like “cozy” or “hip”) can only be added by the public, as they represent subjective impressions of your business.
Platforms are always adding new fields and functionalities for your consideration. Google, in particular, is quickly developing functionality around communications and transactions. All competitive local businesses should consider use of newer amenities like the bookings button, messaging capabilities, and integration of merchandise and product listings into the profile.
Local business listings and citations play a vital role in reputation, rankings, and revenue. That’s why it’s critical to see the big picture of their purpose.
Not so long ago, local business owners had a set of offline publicity options, such as paying for Yellow Pages inclusion, advertising in the local newspaper, print marketing in the form of brochures and coupons, postal mail marketing, telemarketing, and local radio/television buys. All of these are still viable options in many industries. But while some offline avenues have become optional, Internet marketing is now a necessity for every single local business. If a business can’t be found on the web today, it’s akin to being “nowhere.”
Not so long ago, local business owners had a set of offline publicity options, such as paying for Yellow Pages inclusion, advertising in the local newspaper, print marketing in the form of brochures and coupons, postal mail marketing, telemarketing, and local radio/television buys. All of these are still viable options in many industries. But while some offline avenues have become optional, Internet marketing is now a necessity for every single local business. If a business can’t be found on the web today, it’s akin to being “nowhere.”
Before considering your business listing landscape, it's helpful to see how your business listings already appear across the internet, and how accurate they are. Fortunately, we've built a free tool that can check all the important business listings and citations. If you find any that are missing or inaccurate, you can start with these.
Yellow Pages - Fingers may still be “doing the walking” on smartphone screens, but searchers no longer need to thumb through a heavy print directory or even to be at home. A consumer located anywhere is connected with any business in town instantly via local listings on major platforms like Google Business Profile, Facebook, or Yelp. While some business models still see good ROI from print Yellow Pages directories, it is costly, whereas inclusion in most of the online local business data indexes is free. Plus, the online audience is vast, with two-thirds of the world being online and about 70% percent of US residents owning smartphones. The basic data within your local business listing is a dominant driver of traffic and revenue.
Print Marketing - The taglines, descriptions, attributes, driving directions, coupons, menus, reviews, and owner responses included on many top-tier local business listings do all of the heavy lifting of traditional print marketing. From a single complete listing, a consumer can discover a business, learn where it is, what it does, what special offers it runs, who likes it, and how well the company takes care of its customers. It’s everything you could fit into a brochure but in an accessible, digital format.
Radio/TV Advertising - On local listings that support images, video, virtual tours, call buttons, and links to social media profiles, a consumer can both see and hear a business from the comfort of their cell phone. What’s more, they can click to call, chat, or follow social media links to interact with the business directly — something a radio ad can’t really provide, and for which TV still needs to catch up. A robust local listing provides a thorough experience in the blink of an eye.
Make sure customers find you with the power of Moz Local, our local SEO & reputation management tool. See how accurate your local listings are online with your free listing score:
No competitive local business would give up the powerful — and largely free — advertising potential of online listings, but it’s important to maximize your ROI by allocating staff hours efficiently. There are two considerations here:
You should determine which platforms it makes sense to be listed on. It’s not a best practice to devote hundreds of hours to getting listed on every possible search engine, index, or app, just because they exist. Instead, hit the majors (Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, Apple Maps, etc.) and then hand-select other platforms that are highly relevant to your company’s industry or geography. By getting listed only in quality places, you won’t squander sweat equity.
Creating local business listings can be toilsome and boring. It’s exciting to get your best data together in a spreadsheet, but it isn’t all that fun to enter that data over and over again into the forms of the various platforms. This has led to the rise of automated solutions for active location data management like Moz Local. These solutions allow you to fill out a single form, distributing your data to high-quality platforms and continuously monitoring it for progress and any changes. You can always supplement your automated push to the majors with a small investment of time in building listings on geo/industry-specific platforms, but the fact is that automation lightens the load, reduces human error, and leaves your team free to focus on more creative projects.
Whether you decide to take a fully manual approach or a semi- or fully automated one, the most important thing to remember is that local business listings are extremely powerful.