Short answer: yes!
If you want to increase your sales online and crush your competition, you need more than just a responsive website. Your business needs to appear when customers make inquiries about the services you offer. That point is where accurate business listings come in – How so?
Business listings are a network of third-party directories that influences local search engine results. And while that might seem like technical jargon, know that 86% of customers rely on those results to meet their needs. Now, imagine the impacts of uploading inaccurate information about your company on such listings; wouldn’t that be detrimental to your sales? We bet it would!
In essence, ensuring that your business information is accurate on online directories is a no-brainer – it matters a lot. And, when you do it right, you stand to enjoy several benefits.
The Top 3 Benefits Of Accurate Business Listings
Builds Your Credibility
A quick question: imagine yourself as a consumer; now, you saw a business with three different working hours across three online directories. Would you buy from them? We doubt it!
You see, information is key to how customers see your business. And, just a misspelling can mean a lot. To you, you would think of it as an oversight. On the other hand, a customer might interpret that as a lack of organization.
Ultimately, when too much essential information about your business doesn’t correlate, you risk losing old and new customers. More importantly, you risk tainting your credibility. To avoid all that episode, ensure that all details about your company are consistent and accurate.
Suggested reading: Getting the Most Out of Your Google My Business Listing
Assists Your SEO Efforts
The chances are that you have already invested heavily in SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Well, that is great for your business. However, when you have inaccurate listings, your SEO efforts can turn sour. How so?
Search engine bots don’t rest – they are crawling the internet 24/7 to find more information about your business. And, once they find a business with a similar name as yours, but with conflicting details, they become confused. At that point, the bots will assume the businesses are different.
Unfortunately, when bots split your business, you won’t fulfill your aims – crushing your competition. Instead, you will rank lower, and your prospects won’t find you. But if you ensure that all your details online are accurate, you will assist search engine bots and rank fast (and high) on the result pages.
Free Marketing But Effective
The ultimate goal of all businesses is to spend less while making more. Then, it is perfect that accurate business listings would save you money. The third-party directories won’t ask you for any money to upload your company details – you might as well then do it accurately.
But if you upload wrong or misspelled details on those directories, then your mistakes will be expensive. It would cost you sales and the trust of your customers.
Verdict
Accurate business listings matter a lot to your business. For starters, they show your customers that you are a professional they can trust with their needs. And ultimately, that trust will lead to a solid reputation and incredible sales for you.
It can be a challenge to make sure you’re listed everywhere you should be and to keep those listings up-to-date. Our Listing Management solution is designed to help small businesses do that by keeping information accurate in one place and then syncing that information across all your online listings.
