On-Target SEO

What Happens If We Don’t Renew Our Local Business Aggregator Listings

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When purchasing Local Business Aggregator Submissions with On-Target SEO, your business listings are managed and marked with a trusted data stamp for 12 months. This data stamp also enables you to update your listing for free within this 12 month period if you have a name change,  address, phone, or some other element of your normal listing.

Local search experts recommend keeping your aggregator listings claimed and trusted.

The major benefit of renewing your submission to data aggregators is that your data retains it’s ‘trusted’ status within aggregator feeds to 3rd party directory sites. This means that 3rd party sites see this data as being more ‘official’ and are less likely to overwrite it with data crawled/imported from other less-accurate sources.

This also helps to ensure that your listing won’t be deleted from these 3rd parties directory sites, as they are spending money to purchase this data from the aggregators to keep their directories up-to-date and accurate.

There is a fee to renew your submissions with the aggregators to keep your data trusted. It is the same amount as the original submission, and unfortunately, there is NO automated renewal setting; therefore, On-Target SEO will manage the renewals for you.  Each year we will email our clients to gain their authorization, then proceed with the re-submission, payment, and confirmation.

On-Target SEO

Citations – Building Blocks for Local Search Optimizations (LSO)

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Citations are to your local listing what back-links are to your website.  It is the way the search engines find and verify that your Business Listing is legit.  A good citation is made up of your business name, address, phone number and sometimes your website.  An example of a citation could be found in the online yellow page directory. Citations are also popular on local chamber of commerce pages, or on a local business association pages.

Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in Google Maps and Bing Local, to name a few. If you have two listings that are equal in every other way, the business with the greater number of citations will most likely rank higher than the business with fewer citations.

To increase the effect of a citation, it’s important that it appear on a well-established and well-indexed portals (i.e., Superpages.com).  These type of portals help increase the degree of certainty the search engines have about your business, it’s contact and categorization.

Citations are even more important in less-competitive niches, like electrical or plumbing, where many business owners don’t have websites themselves. Without a website full of information to draw from, the search engines rely heavily on whatever information they can find.

Citations also prove that a business is part of a community. Google is logical and logic dictates that it is difficult for someone to fake membership in a local chamber of commerce or a city’s  business index, or having articles written about them in local online newspaper or blogs.  When the search engines find a business among these types of listings, they bring credibility to that business.

So, if you want to be found on the local search engines like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp or Bing Local, make sure to develop a healthy and accurate number of citations for your business location.