Hey, what’s going on, it’s Gary Geiman with DMN8 Partners. I want to help you rank in Google Maps. I want to talk to you about a really critical item, that is off page, related to Google Maps. That is directory listings: citations. How important are citations on a scale of 1 to 10, there are about a 6 to a 7. Again, it provides credibility and relevance, which are two ranking factors. When you were listed in other business directories, Google picks up that information and matches it to what’s in the Google My Business listing. While inside of Google is important, outside is as well. So directory listings are very important, we call them citations. So what are some directories? Well, there’s the primary directories like Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. There’s secondary listings like Yellow Book, USA Business Directory, Manta. The list goes on and on. Then there’s tertiary listings that are like local listings, national small listings. Typically there’s about 350 to 400 useful business directory listings that you have the ability to rank or to add your business to. Now there’s all kinds of schools of thought on whether they should be manual or automated but here’s the thing: There are data aggregators that aggregate data that is pushed to the internet and then pushed to the primary and the secondary listings. These data aggregators are Neustar, Localeze, Factual Data, Axiom. And there are tools out there where you can register your business inside of those data aggregators for an annual period and pay a fee around $100 to $150. What it does is it allows your listings to stay consistent with your GMB. So you lock information from your GMB and then there’s information submitted but maybe it’s a little changed. Maybe one time information about your business is submitted and “street” is spelled out but in the next instance it’s just “st”, but on your Google My Business listing, you’ve spelled out “street”. You want that to match. It’s called NAP: name, address, and phone. You want the information to be consistent across all directories because it gives ranking signals to Google that you are a credible business and other listings have picked you up. So that’s why citations or directory listings are important. Utilizing a data aggregation service allows you to make sure that your listings stay compliant with NAP, that your NAP is consistent across the internet. Let’s say you have a listing that you’ve used a service as part of your name, but really your name isn’t that. For instance, our company’s name is “DMN8 Partners”, but I’ve named our listing “DMN8 Partners Digital Marketing“. What I need to do is, I need to make sure that my Facebook name matches that, all of my primary listings match, my secondary and tertiary listings match, and if someone submits information about my company, I need to make sure that that matches as well. A data aggregation puts a lock on changing those directories when that information comes through and it’s constantly aggregating and pushing new information for you, but maintaining the NAP to those directory listings. You want to make sure that you have a lock on your citations or your directory listings so that information stays consistent.
If you have any questions related to that, please give us a call at the office (859) 757-2252 or click the link below. We want to help you dominate your market, help you dominate Maps. We’re looking forward to doing just that. Check out your citations, check out the aggregation, and get a service that locks that down so you dominate your market, dominate Maps, and dominate your competition.