Why Business Listings Are Essential for Local Businesses

Last week we covered voice search and its relevance in 2022. We always like to kick off each year with landing a solid foundation for location businesses, and that’s why we want to talk about the importance of creating business listings for the local businesses you represent this week.

Business Listings Are Essential

Yes, we are back on the bandwagon about local business listings. Why, you ask? Well, they are important – pay attention and we’ll outline just how important.

While surveys like the 2021 Local Search Ranking Factors indicate that citations are not as influential as other SEO factors, they play an essential role in the Local Search Ecosystem.

We’ve discussed business listings – also referred to often as citations – on the regular. Our results, along with the results of our clients, only back up the importance of citations as an SEO signal.

While Google isn’t as dependent on citations to establish a business’ trust and authority, search engines Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave and other data sources depend on them.

Data Sources Search Engines Trust

Damian Rollison explores this topic in detail on Street Fight and outlines some of the data sources these search engines count on.

Bing

For Bing, the data source for business listings is Bing Places – makes total sense. Bing uses TomTom for maps, and for reviews and photos they rely on TripAdvisor, Facebook, Foursquare and others.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo uses Apple MapKit to display their local results. They use Apple Maps for mapping and navigation. While much of their data comes from Yelp and TripAdvisor, this is sourced via Apple Maps.

Brave

Brave uses Leaflet, Stadia Maps, OpenMapTiles and OpenStreetMap for their map listings. Local business data is obtained from sources including Yelp, The Infatuation, TripAdvisor, plus the listed business website.

What Data Sources Do Others in the Local Ecosystem Trust?

Have you considered where Apple Maps, Yelp, TomTom and BingPlaces get their data? These places get business data from listing management companies like Advice Local. Businesses can also go directly to these citation sources, but most of the data is received from listing management companies, data aggregators and similar sources.

For another example, picture this…

• Directory A trusts Directory B, therefore Directory A uses Directory B’s data to populate their directory.
• Directory B trusts Directory C, so they use Directory C’s data to populate their directory, and so on.
• The cycle repeats…

Just imagine the data sources out there, and who is using the data from the sources. These data sources (oftentimes trusted directories) are known as data amplifiers. Data amplifiers are extremely important – it’s clear why businesses need to be listed with a consistent NAP (name, address and phone number).

Data Amplification Is Inevitable – Why Not Make It Work for You?

At Advice Local, we prioritize distributing local business data to data sources that are also data amplifiers. And since we distribute to them in real time, once a business is entered into our listing management solution, the business’ local visibility starts improving almost immediately.

We include distribution to many of these data sources within our solution for free. Here are a few of those:

Yelp

Yelp is one of the listing platforms, and Advice Local includes Yelp public edits for free for our platform partners. This means we will add important business data to a listing such as address, phone number and opening hours.

Apple Maps

With Siri and iPhone searches delivering results from Apple Maps, it’s crucial for businesses to be listed here as well. We include submitting to mapping apps for free – Apple Maps is one that’s included.

Bing Places

While Bing delivers a significant portion of daily U.S. searches, it is consistently overlooked. Make sure your clients are up-to-date with Bing Places – and we include creating listings in Bing Places for free.

Data Aggregators

Listing businesses on Foursquare is easy for Advice Local platform partners, as we include submitting to all the data aggregators for free.

Try Our Business Listing Solution for Your Clients

Maintaining business listings for multiple clients is a time-consuming affair, especially if you’re trying to do this manually. Advice Local provides business listing management from a single, user-friendly dashboard. Try it for yourself – request a demo now. Give us a call at (214) 310-1356 today.