Avoid Negative Factors in Your Local Business Listing

Last in a series of five articles on factors affecting local business listing search rankings.

It is possible to lose some points in the game. David Mihm feels you can lose up to 20% of your score by doing everything wrong here. The good news is you’re not likely to do everything wrong, or even come close if you follow the steps above and avoid the ones coming.

• Keyword Spamming- Keyword spamming is the overuse of your selected keywords. I have seen listings where the description and the categories are just keywords strung together. First, the search engines don’t like this and penalize you. Second, it looks and sounds stupid. Remember, you are trying to impress a potential new client or customer so do so.
• Multiple Addresses On Your Contact Page- If you have a number of locations create a separate contact page for each. Be sure to create keyword rich URLs and title meta tags as discussed earlier.
• Negative Reviews- Negative reviews are not likely to hurt you in regards to your ranking success, however they may be a turn off for your potential clients and customers.
• Exclusive Use of Toll Free Numbers On the Contact Page- It is very helpful to add a local number to your contact page(s) instead of just a tool free number. The local number adds, well a local flavor.
• Multiple Local Business Listings With the Same Business Name- Now this is a big negative and is clearly spam. Ensure you have only one listing for each legitimate location. Any more and it is clearly out of line and deserves a negative rating.
• Exclusive Use of a PO Box- This is a difficult situation. For a variety of reasons you may only have a PO Box. If you are in that situation and you are not using an official USPS PO Box then call your PO Box a suite number.
• Multiple Local Business Listings With Same Address and Phone Number- This is another harmful situation, however it can be problematic where you use a shared office situation. It appears that as long as the listings with similar addresses are not all yours then you are OK. If you are doing the work for other companies consider having different accounts for each listing.

Try as much as possible to eliminate the impact of these negative factors. Your aim should be to score a 100% in each of your local business listings.