How Directory Listings Help Secure Your Online Presence

Have you ever gone to a restaurant, business, or wellness center and been impacted deeply enough to go to their Yelp or Google listing and leave a comment?

Whether you’re using a health service, shopping for clothes, or even visiting a financial institution, anything that incorporates service will have an online presence that's affected by user-generated content. And people need to be able to find your business easily online in order to talk about your business.

Most people who are digitally savvy have at least read if not written reviews for various companies, and people between the ages of 25 and 54, in particular, are generating about  70% of the user-generated content. What's more, about a quarter of searches for the world's biggest brands are linked to user-generated content.

What's the Link Between User-Generated Content and Directory Listings?

Anywhere your company is “listed” may end up encouraging user reviews. Websites such as Amazon, Yelp, and Glassdoor are all examples of third-party sites that act as directories and places to leave reviews. Having your business listed on these types of websites can bring you more business, simply because they are attracting organic traffic from different source points.

In addition, a business listing in Google Local (Google Places) will automatically mean that your Google Plus account is tied into search engines. But it's not just your contact information or reviews that get noticed with such citings. When you have your website formatted in a certain way — for instance, if you’re able to incorporate structured data — citations in various directories can offer potential clients snippets of information about your company.

For these web benefits, you need to update your contact information and descriptions, no matter what your niche or specific direction.

Directory Listings and SEO Rankings

So what does all of this have to do with directory listings?

Let's start with this scenario. You think you have an up-to-date directory listing, but somehow reviewers consistently seem to believe that something is wrong. You're checking these responses regularly, but they're still inaccurate.

If you own a franchise and the company next door gets terrible reviews, you want to make sure their customers don't leave reviews for your business as well. Maintaining your directory listings is one way to prevent this.

And there are actually a bunch of reasons why you should have your directory information updated at all times – here are a few.

Consistent citations of name, address, and phone number accounts for as much as 20% of a brand's rankings in search engine optimization (SEO) results, according to Moz.

Seeing and being mislead by incorrect information is the number one turn-off for a consumer. With Yext, you can go from most of your listings having a variety of errors to having virtually none. That's a win in anyone's book.

Yext is integrated with hundreds of top online brands so they can maintain your business's information and data everywhere it counts.

Their platform provides the perfect solution to improve brand engagement and reach local customers in real-time as they visit store locations.

With AI-powered directory listings, you can:

• Help drive revenue online and offline
• Make data updates easy and fast
• Create and keep loyal customers

Directory Listings and Brand Experience

How can a directory listing influence your brand? Think about it this way: even though it may be a tiny bit of information that's floating around out there in various directories, this small piece can make a significant impact on people who are searching for a company with products or services like yours.

Added to this is that directory listings deteriorate over time and must be maintained. When web crawlers pick up the wrong information (or worse), competitors can change information to try and hurt rivals. For instance, we know of a restaurant where someone is constantly trying to change the listing to say they do not offer catering. With software like Yext API, all of the listings are claimed and securely managed to prevent this from happening.

Missing phone numbers, incorrect addresses, and other online missteps are unacceptable in this era. Yext provides you with a uniquely reliable platform to address and prevent these issues. Yext continues to enhance their service offerings for verticals like healthcare and restaurants, which have industry-specific needs.

How can you improve your digital presence by ensuring your directory listings are kept up to date? Not sure if your listings are correct? We can help you run a free scan to check your listings on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, and more.