6 Top Tips to optimise and manage business listings: 

Optimising and managing business listings is a weighty but important task. It helps your business to be more visible online and build both brand awareness and trust. The more present your business information is online, the more engagement and foot traffic you will drive. Here are our 6 top tips for you to optimise and manage business listings online:

1. Register and claim your business or multiple businesses on Google My Business and other platforms across the internet. Use a hyperlocal marketing company, like Vicinus, with a good network of partners, for example, Google and Google Maps, Facebook and Messenger, Yelp, Whatsapp, Instagram, Bing etc. 

2. Optimisee your listings by ensuring the NAPW (name, address, phone number, website) is present, accurate and consistent across all your listings. This helps Google find and provide the best information for searchers which will, in turn, allow your business to rank higher in local search. 

3. Another way to optimise your listings is to utilise duplicate detection and suppression tools. Removing duplicate, unofficial and out-of-date business information from the internet helps ensure accurate data is returned in search results. Again, this ensures that Google does not provide searchers with old business data which no longer correlates to your business and may lead to your customer having a negative experience with your brand. For example, if they show up at a store that has been permanently closed. Vicinus uses AI to perform duplicate detection searches to help you with this optimization technique.

4. Monitoring business images online can also help with local search optimization. You can use AI-led image analysis to monitor the images of your business uploaded to Google.  Vicinus uses Google’s Cloud Vision API to analyse your business images for you. This is advantageous because it allows you to monitor, check and remove the images irrelevant user-uploaded images of your business online. It also means you can identify when there are images present which may hinder your brand reputation. 

5. In order to manage business listings, it is best to have one centralised access point to all of your business listings. Having one central platform allows you to check on multiple listings for multiple locations all at once. Use a local listing management tool to help you easily and effortlessly keep an eye on your business data online. Vicinus, our hyperlocal marketing platform, allows you to do just that. Additionally, it lets you lock your business listing data which prevents external alterations, lead cannibalisation and online scams. This unique Vicinus feature protects all your consumer-facing information and ensures it is always accurate.

6. A final tip: respond to your online reviews. By engaging with customer reviews, both positive and negative, you will show your customers that your business is attentive and values them as customers. When a potential customer discovers your business, you have a better chance of being chosen over competitors if you have a high star rating or are at least responsive to reviews and queries. Vicinus can make this task easier; it uses Amazon Comprehend, Machine Learning-led sentiment analysis, to identify customer sentiments and gain location specific customer insights from the reviews they leave. The unique Auto-Responder tool allows you to generate automatic responses to reviews based on their star rating. For example, for a low star rating, create an automated apology and offer the customer help with their problem. 

And there you go! Those were our 6 top tips to optimise and manage business listings online!

If you are interested in using Vicinus to help optimise and manage your business listings, or simply want to find out more, please click here or email us contact@vicinus.ai. Our platform can help with all aspects of listing management. We have several different packages to help you with the whole listing management process, as well as optimisation.