Many small businesses, especially B2Cs, may be unaware of the explosive use of geolocation data. The practice, which digital marketing expert and author Susan Baroncini-Moe characterizes as commonplace today, pre-populates listing and review sites such as Yahoo or Bing and social media pages such as Facebook, with or without your input or permission. Baroncini-Moe indicated online mismanagement is the biggest threat to brick and mortar businesses. In a recent post on her blog, Business in Blue Jeans, she provides a comprehensive review of this serious issue and recommends ways for small business owners and marketers to manage their online reputations. Here are a few highlights:
As a result of this permission-less data creation, there are sites—and well-trafficked sites—that have your business data everywhere. And there’s very little you can do about it. Your business information is public knowledge and you want that…but there are a host of problems that come with this pre-population of data.
Last year alone, searches by people looking for local businesses increased by 62%. And with more and more people using smartphones to look up information on local brick and mortar businesses on the fly, anything that happens with your business’s online reputation is serious.
Most importantly, the majority of brick and mortar businesses aren’t claiming their listings on sites like Google (+ and Places), Yahoo Local, Bing, CitySearch, and more, leaving others in charge of maintaining their listings, creating a laundry list of problems:
- Inconsistent, Incorrect Information … when different sites have different information, it makes your business look bad, like you don’t have your act together.
- Reviews, Good and Bad … Reviews serve an important function—they let you know about problems in your business (including consumer perceptions that need to be corrected), and for the consumer, they provide valuable insight into your business and how it’s run. …the most important thing you need to know about online reviews is that they exist in perpetuity.
- Competitor Data and Advertising … when you don’t create and populate your pages yourself, the web sites will take advantage of the empty space and populate that space with information about and ads for competitors who have claimed their listings.
Read the entire article at Business in Blue Jeans.com.
You can hear more of Susan Baroncini’s advice for small business owners and marketers on this episode of The Marketing Mojo Show.
While the days of letting your fingers do the walking are long gone, including those confusing contracts for print directories, it is imperative for small business owners and marketers to manage their online listings. We offered a few tips in the previous post, Online is the New Yellow for Small Business Search, and would like to add a few more to the list.
Visit this link for The Moz Local Learning Center, a great read at your own pace guide on local search. The guide covers online marketing development, listings, reviews and ratings, website optimization, social media strategy and a terrific glossary of terms.
Consider an annual investment in Moz Local, a one-stop shop to manage and monitor your business listing(s) on the sites, apps, and directories that factor most into local search engine results.
Constant Contact provides an online listings management program, SinglePlatform, and you can learn more about it here. In the meantime, here are a few of Constant Contact’s recommendations for taking control of your online listings:
- Identify your industry’s hot spots
- Claim your listings
- Optimize your website with location information
- Offer location information to data aggregators
- Encourage reviews and recommendations on social
- Pay to sponsor listings
- Find a better solution … there is an alternative to doing it all on your own.
With this insight and additional suggestions, we hope your online reputation will make you say Ahhhh instead of Ouch. How do you manage your online reputation? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.
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