Do’s and Don’ts of An Effective Local Search Listing

It’s tempting to create a keyword laden local business listing stuffed with product names, locations and other juicy search terms. However, just like on your website the search engines frown on this sort of spamming and will penalize your listing.

Check out these suggestions and guidelines to ensure you both maximize your local business listing while keep in it nice and clean for the search engines.

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in the off-line world. The name on Google Maps (or the other search engines) should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website URL.
• Use the description and custom attribute fields to provide more information about your company or business listing. This descriptive content should not appear in your business title, address or category fields.
• Provide information that best identifies your individual locations and provides users with the most direct path to your business. For example, you should provide individual location phone numbers in place of central phone lines and the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets. Trying to game the system by dragging your map pin around will not work either.
• Only enter listings for businesses that you own or are explicitly authorized to represent. Hijacking is becoming more prevalent so please keep your hands off the competition’s listing!
• Create only a single for each physical location of your business. Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts. Service area businesses, for example, should not create a listing for every town they service. Likewise, law firms or doctors should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. However, if you do have multiple physical locations be sure to put the effort into customizing each location. Don’t just repeat each listing, make it unique for the location and speciality represented.
• Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords into the title field, and do not include phone numbers or URLs in the title along with your proper business name.
• When entering categories, use only those that directly describe your business. Do not submit related categories that do not define your business. For example, a limo company might properly categorize itself as “Airport Transportation”, but it would be not be appropriate to also use the category “Airport” by itself. Use each category field to enter a single category. Do not list multiple categories or keywords in one field. Categories are to place your business in the right bucket, not a keyword list field.
• Provide the one domain name that belongs to your business both in terms of the landing page and the displayed URL. Pages that redirect to another domain, or act as “click through” sites may lead to penalization. If you want to create more focused domain names for a specialty or location use a sub-domain or folder.

Spending time creating an effective local business listing that is accurate and appropriately reflects your business and products will not only please the search engines but create confidence in potential customers or clients.