Get Listed in the Top Local Business Directories

Turn active local searchers into leads or customers by just being there when they are looking for you!

More calls, more e-mails, more walk-ins! Oh, and higher local search rankings!

Why Get Listed in Local Business Directories?

• More Direct Traffic / Leads / Walk-ins
  Local searchers do not scout local business directories ‘just for fun’. They do so for a very specific purpose. They have a need. They are ready to take action. All they need is a product or service to fulfill that need. Your business can be the one they choose, just by being listed there!
• Improve your Search Rankings
  Outrank your competitors in the local search results by having citations from multiple local directories. One of the factors affecting the position of a web page on the local search results page is the number of links/listings coming from other local sites. Local directories are the perfect place to start acquiring those 'local links'.
• More Exposure & Brand Recognition
  Brand recognition often equals to trust. Being seen across various local directories will increase the trust in your brand (and hence the brand recognition). In addition, we make sure we target the popular directories; the ones that receive a lot of publicity and that are actively promoted by big companies!
• Promote your Coupons, Deals & Offers
  In the future, you will be able to feature any promotion you are running on these directories. New coupon? Or maybe a new deal? You will be able to 'announce' that on your listings.

Not Convinced? Read On…

• Get Guaranteed Listings - We have been in this business for years now. We know what these directories want, and we use that knowledge whenever we make a new submission request. The result? Your website will get listed!
• Detailed Report - We deliver a detailed report upon completion of the submissions; this report includes the login information of each directory, so that you can update your information later on if you need to, or even promote new deals every now and then.
• Money-Back Guarantee - If we cannot get your site approved and listed, we will give you your money back.

The Guide to UK Citations for Local Search

Some of you probably know I’m a huge Anglophile.  I lived just off Farringdon Road in London EC1 for a semester, and have visited a number of times for both golf and sightseeing. So in some sense, I’m a little disappointed this post has taken me so long to get out, as I’d LOVE to be able to take on a few UK clients & fly over for some in-person meetings :).

If you are new to Local Search, you’ll probably want to read these articles on the importance of citations for ranking well in Local Search before this one to understand why these are such good places to list your business. And thanks to Martijn Beijk, Distilled, and Sokratis Papafloratos for their contributions to this article.

Where to list your business for UK Local Search

1) The Local Data CompanyLDC appears to be the infoUSA, or perhaps more appropriately, the Localeze of UK Local Search. Check out their impressive list of customers…and lo and behold Google UK actually allows them to use their logo explicitly.  You can submit or update your data here.

2) Market Location
Perhaps the secondary major data provider for Google Maps UK…it looks like this is the place to sign up.

3) Yahoo Local UKA no-brainer, obviously.  Somewhat surprisingly, they don’t appear to manage their own results…sign up below instead.

4) Infoserve
Infoserve provide results to Yahoo Local in the UK, as well as a few other portals, undoubtedly. Click here to sign up

5) Qype
According to multiple UK sources I’ve talked to, including the experts at Distilled, Qype may be the most popular Local portal in the UK at the moment.  It’s also very well-spidered by maps.google.co.uk. Sign up here

6) TrustedPlaces.comThe aforementioned Sokratis Papafloratos is the main man behind this well-indexed Local Search portal. Sign up here

7) Brownbook.net
Dave Ingram, who penned this excellent article on SMB reputation management a few weeks back is the founder of Brownbook, a well-indexed, wiki-style Local portal. Sign up here

8) Yell.com
Though Distilled and Martijn both speculate that Yell is not a quote-unquote “major” data provider, they still show up pretty frequently under the Web Pages tab.  Sign up for a free listing here

9) Yelp.co.uk
Just launched a few months ago (March?), most folks feel Yelp will be just as successful in the UK as it’s been in the US…at least as far as appearing in Google search results.  Sign up here

10) Thomsonlocal.com
According to Martijn, this is a major player in the UK. Sign up here

11) Touchlocal
An OpenList style portal for the UK.  Thanks to Joshua Sciarrino for this tip.  Sign up here

12) ScootScoot bills itself as the online business directory that does all the hard work for you.  Whatever that means.  Sign up here

13) Tipped.co.uk
Looks like this site started in London but is branching out to some of the UK’s larger cities such as Cardiff, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Manchester, etc.  Sign up here

Geo-specific sites to London include:

London Online | View London | Visit London | All in London | London Town | Timeout | SpoonFed

Hospitality industry sources include:

Square Meal | Fancy a Pint | HotelGuide

Any others I should highlight here, Brits?

Citation Building Guide

The citation building guide is all about local citation building. It features a step-by-step approach, beginning with the collecting of the business information, going through the research process, and finishing with the actual citation building. Some of the highlights include:

– Best ways to collect and compile business information
– Best tools for finding already existing correct and incorrect listings for a business
– Step-by-step citations research process
– Tips on determining which the best citation sources for a business are
– Tips for discovering these best citation sources
– Tips for choosing which listing to update and which to delete
– Alternative citation building tactics
– List of the best information sources from around the web covering the topic

In addition to the guide you receive 6 bonuses:

Bonus 1: Company Information Sheet Template – a template spreadsheet that shows how you could organize a file with all the information of the business you are doing citation building for.

Bonus 2: Setting Up Chrome Auto-fill – one of the big time-savers when building citations is the auto-fill function of Google Chrome. This is a step-by-step guide to how to set up the function.

Bonus 3: List of Business Directories for the United States – a list of over 200 business directories with their “Submit” URLs, i.e. the URLs from the pages from where the process of creating a listing begins.

Bonus 4: Fixing and Reporting Duplicate Listings – a guide to dealing with duplicate listings on some of the most important and most troublesome business directories.

Bonus 5: List of Sites That Accept Multiple Listings from One Account – not all sites allow multiple listings to be created/claimed via the same account. This list will be very helpful if you have a business with more than one location.

Bonus 6: Phone Verification Guides – guides to how to get listings on some of the most important websites verified.

You get all these goodies at just $30 if you purchase now. You will also receive any future updated versions, additions, or bonuses to the guide with no extra charges, although the regular price will rise with every update.

What people say about the Citation Building Guide:

Nyagoslav’s guide is local SEO gold. Citations are notoriously easy to mess up – but they’re something you can’t afford to mess up if you want to rank well locally. This guide shows you the pitfalls to avoid as well as ways to make building citations as hassle-free as possible. It’s simple, clear, and walks you step-by-step through what to do. Much of it had me nodding in agreement – “Yep, this is how citations should be done” – and the rest offered great tips and techniques that I’ll be incorporating into the work I do for my clients. If you don’t have the time to do citations wrong, hurt your local rankings, and end up redoing all your work, I highly recommend Nyagoslav’s guide.
Phil Rozek, LocalVisibilitySystem.com

The Citation Building Guide has really helped us become more efficient and professional at dealing with our clients citations. It’s been particularly helpful in improving our citation clean-up efforts at the start of the process. The guide gave us a comprehensive process on dealing with the existing (often “messy”) citations that need to be fixed to improve the local ranking for our clients. On top of all this, the bonuses included have been very helpful such as the Chrome Auto-fill instructions that saves so much time. Thank you Nyagoslav for producing this excellent guide that’s helped us and our clients!

Once I receive your email, I will send you the e-book together with all the bonus files.

Please, make sure you understand and agree with the applicable Terms and Conditions.

Ultimate Guide to Google Places for Multiple Locations

Having a well optimised Google business page with positive reviews is a vital part in ranking well in your local SEO market. But what if you are a business with more than one location?

What is the best practice for setting up and managing multiple location listings?

The best way to demonstrate what needs to be done is to use an example. Let’s pretend that SEO Maverick is a cafe or restaurant chain with three different physical locations around Adelaide:

1. SEO Maverick Unley	1 Fake Street, Unley 5061	Ph: (08) 8000 0000
2. SEO Maverick Norwood	2 John Smith Avenue, Norwood 5067	Ph: (08) 8000 0001
3. SEO Maverick Henley Beach	3 Maverick Lane, Henley Beach 5022	Ph: (08) 8000 0002

1. Create one Google Places page for each location

Each location needs to have it’s own individual Google Places page. They can be bulk uploaded or uploaded individually. It is generally advisable to upload them all under the same Google account login.

The name of your Company/Organisation should be the actual name of your business – no need to include the location in this field. The image below shows what I would fill out for my Unley restaurant.

*Bonus Tip* – The Bulk upload:

If you have too many locations to upload manually, you can use the bulk upload function within Google Places to set up all your business locations. This works well for a restaurant chain, franchises or hotels with more than 10 different locations.

The bulk upload function in Google Places. Very useful for larger chains such as hotels or restaurants.

2. Complete Google Places listing 100% for each location

I have covered this is in my Google places post a couple of months ago but make sure you fill out as many details on the Google Places page as possible and achieve a 100% completion on each Google Places page.

Fill out all of the following that are relevant:

• Name of business
• Street address
• Phone number (and any additional numbers)
• Fax number
• Email address
• Website
• Description of business
• Categories (choose 5 – pick the most relevant one that fits your business first)
• Service areas
• Hours of operation
• Payment options
• Upload photos (the first one you upload becomes the primary image so choose wisely)
• Upload videos
• Additional details such as: Parking available: Yes

3. Create a custom page for each location

The most effective way to manage multiple locations on your own website is to have a specific directory dedicated to a locator section illustrating the physical locations of your company.

For this SEO Maverick example, I would set up a new directory on my site like this:

www.seomaverick.com.au/locator

This locator page would contain links to the specific subpages for each location along with a brief description of each location.

The URL’s of the location pages would look like this:

1. www.seomaverick.com.au/locator/unley
2. www.seomaverick.com.au/locator/norwood
3. www.seomaverick.com.au/locator/henley-beach

4. Link each Google Places page to these location pages on the website

Within the Google Places “website” area, instead of just putting in the main domain name of your website like www.seomaverick.com.au, fill in the specific sub-page for each location.

So for the Unley location in my example, I would put www.seomaverick.com.au/locator/unley in the website section.

Simple!

5. Website location pages should be relevant and full of content

The next and most important part of these specific location pages is having relevant information which corresponds to the information on the Google Places page.

These are the elements that I would include on my Unley location page:

1. Name, address and phone number (NAP) in the page title.

Eg: SEO Maverick Unley – 1 Fake Street, Unley 5061 – (08) 8000 0000

2. A paragraph about that restaurant in that location using relevant copywriting including keywords.

Eg: “Established in 2010, SEO Maverick is a progressive Unley Restaurant located on 1 Fake Street…”

3. Embedded Google map showing the location (and a link back to the Google places page)

4. Links to your other business locations using keyword rich anchor text

The key here is to make it useful for visitors who click through from the Google Places page to your specific landing page. You want them to find out more information about that particular location including directions, images, relevant content and even reviews.

They are clicking through to your website to get more information, so give it to them!

6. Create a GEO Sitemap and upload to your website

I came across the Geositemap Generator tool recently and is extremely useful in giving Google a more accurate understanding of your business locations.

It’s really easy to use, and once you have followed all the steps on the website you need to upload the geositemap.xml into your Google Webmaster Tools account.

7. Reviews

Another very important part to your Google Places listing is the number, quality and star rating of the reviews left on your Google Places page.

As a general rule, the more positive reviews you have on your listing, the higher you will rank for local search terms. Don’t be afraid to ask loyal customers to leave a review on your Google Places page (they will need a Google account to do this).

I’m sure you could think of a number of ways to get more reviews on your Google Places listing – but be careful, false reviews and spammed pages can be penalised and you will lose all of your rankings and traffic!

Google reviews are important – This is what SEO Maverick’s competitors’ Google Places pages look like.

8. Local Citations

Having consistent business information for each of your locations across all local citation websites is very important. This refers primarily to your business name, address and phone number.

These details need to be consistent across all mentions of your business throughout local websites that Google using to confirm information about businesses.

Take a look at your competitors Google Places sites to discover the websites Google uses to determine name, address and phone consistency in your local area. Then create your own listing on these directories and make sure they correspond to exactly what you have on your website.

Google is looking for consistency of name, address and phone number!

The citation websites can be found underneath the reviews on any Google Places page.

Summary

This guide should help you to develop you own logical strategy to get each of your business locations to rank well in Google for your relevant local searches.

Further Reading

Google Places Expert on Quora.com

Citation Building Expert

Local SEO Blog

What is a Local Citation for Local SEO?

In simple SEO terms a Local Citation is simply where your company is mentioned on other websites and places found on the Internet. Local citations are used heavily in helping you to rank in local search results.

A citation is an online reference to your business's name, address and phone number (NAP). ... Along with links and reviews, citations are a primary factor that Google uses when deciding on which order to rank businesses in their local search results.

An example of a citation could be a business directory such as Yell, Thompson Local or Brown Book where your company is mentioned explicitly by name. Local citations do not to include a link to your site. It could also be where your company is mentioned, cited, referenced or spoken about on other local websites.

What Local Citation Do?

Citations are used to help rank your Google+ Local map listing (this was formerly called Google Places Pages) by providing Google with credible sources of information about your business in order that Google can understand your business exists, is legitimate and that what you say about your business is true and accurate by allowing Google to corroborate what is said about your business from multiple sources.

How Local Citation Work?

If Google finds your company information on other local websites and citation directories it can be very confident that your business operates its services in these locations, and ensures Google are more likely to display your business listing when a person performs a search for the types of products or services you provide.

In order for you to take advantage of local citations it is essential that you already have a Google+ Local Business Page setup, claimed and optimized.

In traditional organic SEO, Google largely looks at, counts and credits hyperlinks from one website to another website in order to rank a website in the Google search results. Acquiring more relevant links in theory will improve an already ranking website further.

In regards to localised SEO, company mentions (Local Citations) as well as text hyperlinks help to rank a Google+ Local map listing in the search results, acquiring more of these citations will help you to improve the position of an already established Google+ Local Business or to outrank your competitors in the Google Map 3-pack.

What are the Different sorts of Citations?

• General business directories
• Industry, niche or sector specific directories (Trip Advisor, Connecting Dance)
• Local newspaper and press websites
• Local themed blogs – For example LeftLion would be great for local night life (bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants or venues)
• Prominent local websites (particularly if they’re related to your business niche)
• Social Profiles (Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook, YouTube)

How to Find Local Citation Opportunities?

I would start by noting down the main general ones that come to mind when you think of local business directories, I’ve already mentioned 3 examples, however there are many more… Scoot, Qype, FreeIndex, HotFrog…

Begin by performing a Google search using the name of one of your competitors and look for the places that they’re also listed on.

If this all sounds too much like hard work then there are tools, both paid and free that will assist you in finding new citation opportunities.

What Makes A Great Local Citation?

A great local citation needs to be seen as credible and trustworthy by both people and Google. This is why established brands such as the Yellow Pages (Yell) or Thompson Local are great places to start as well as their primary purpose being to provide other people with a list of local businesses.

It’s important that when creating or claiming a business directory style citation that you also fill out 3 pieces of crucial information.

• Company name (This should ideally be your branded trading name)
• A local telephone number with a local area code
• The physical address of your business

If a local newspaper is covering a story regarding your business they are unlikely to ever display your company address or telephone number, in these instances it is enough to simply have your company clearly referenced by name in order for your listing to receive the value.

The information above really only applies to correctly creating and filling out both the general and industry specific directories.

So how do I win the Game?

To win the  game you essentially need more citations than your competitor. Whilst total numbers are important, so is the quality and accuracy of the information you enter. The more completed your general and niche citations are the more value they will create towards ranking your Google+ Local listing and improving your visibility and presence on the web overall.

Whilst business listing citations are relatively easy to obtain, the more difficult ones come from local or niche websites or local newspapers. You’ve obviously got to have something newsworthy for them to talk about and you have to get their attention in the first place.

What’s The Catch?

The process of creating local citations can be both time consuming and tedious to do, and you ideally need to have an overall marketing strategy in place in order to get the attention of press journalists and newspapers.

However if you’re a local business that would hugely benefit from a local listing within the Google 7 pack then it’s something you want to get a handle on. Alternatively if you have the budget, you can outsource this work.

Considerations

Remember Local SEO only helps to improve where your listing appears within the Google Maps Pack. (This is sometimes referred to as the 7 pack as this is the number of results Google will typically display, however there are other variations.) If your business operates in a particularly niche or obscure area that you cannot suitably describe using a broad or general category then there may not be any point in investing in a Local SEO campaign to get you appearing in the Google Map Pack. The maps are only triggered by specific keywords, and these keywords heavily favour local businesses or services.

For example: Estate Agents, Car Dealerships, Butchers, Cobblers, Car Garages, Driving Instructors and Schools.

It’s also important to understand that it is only specific phrases that trigger the maps to show in the results. If I perform a search for “Baker” the maps do not appear, however if I search for “Bakery” then the map listings are then displayed.

Further Reading:

About Google Local Listing 3-pack

Why Your Local Business Website Needs to Be Mobile-Friendly

Local Citation Building Best-Practices