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By Sarah Giometti | Google
Hey everyone, Sarah Giometti here. In the last video, I showed you what first a crucial step that you needed to take, in order to take control of marketing your local business online. In this video, we’re going to take it to the next step. We’re going to talk about why your information needs to be consistent and accurate across all the different directory listings, even some of the random ones you’ve never heard of, in order to show up better on Google. Now, Google does not want to be wrong, ever. If they start serving up wrong information to people, people will stop using them to find the information. Let’s take restaurants for example. If a prospective customer is searching for a restaurant near them, Google does not want to send that customer to a restaurant that is not open, even though the listing says they are. If Google starts giving all that wrong information, people will stop asking it for the information. So not only do you need to make sure your Google My Business listing is correct, Google will then take that information and compare it in a nanosecond across all these other directory listings to verify that your information is correct.
This is why it’s imperative that your information on Google My Business listing matches everything else on the internet to a T. Close enough doesn’t count. It needs to be exact. If you are on South East Street, you either spell out the word south, you use the letter S or S period on everything. They are not the same. Remember, these are Google, it’s in a computer algorithm, it’s not people, they don’t have deductive reasoning like the rest of us to realize that South S, S period are all the same thing. So let’s take a look at what a listing that is not accurate across the board looks like. Now, here’s an analysis of a business where their information is all over the place. They have 14 inaccurate, five accurate, compared to what the business entered here, not necessarily matching Google My business, and 19 not found. Now, when Google does this nanosecond comparison, they based it off of what information they have on Google Maps, but this does not match what the business entered into this tool. Nothing really matches here. A lot of the listings are missing. You get down here there’s a few that match, it’s all over the place and this is what Google looks for to verify whether or not they should send a perspective client or customer to your business. This is the basis of where you want to start.
Now your action steps for today, which would be step two. Step one was claiming and filling out your Google My Business listing, making sure all of that information is filled out, accurate and consistent. Today’s action is step two, claim and fill out your information on Yelp, Yellow Pages, Facebook and Bing. Now you want to make sure when you’re adding things like website, address, phone number, email address, description, every little piece of information you add on those four websites today, have to be identical to what you put on Google My Business. Consistency is key here. S is not equal to S period, is not equal to South. Keep that in mind. However you write it in Google My Business, you should write it everywhere else identically the same. Make sure you’re consistent.
Now, if you want to take the guessing game out of all the other listings, if you want to take a step ahead, use our free scan tool, which would give you the report that I showed you today, where the information, some was right, some was wrong, for that local business owner. It’s a free scan tool, you just put your information in and it serves you up the report that you saw in the video. There’s no catch, no strings, no nothing. It’s just a short cut to give you a way to figure out where you need to focus on first. If you want a more complete picture of your local SEO results, use our free local seo audit tool to see how you compare online.
Now, I really appreciate you watching my videos and I hope you find them useful. If you think another business that you know would find it useful, feel free to share it with them. We’re here to help local business owners and we hope you’re finding this useful. Thank you.
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