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Checking Your Local Search Status
At Fathom SEO one of the many online marketing activities we perform on behalf of our SEO clients is local search. Although many of our clients have a national or international target market, we still recommend they register and/or claim listings with the major local search engines. If we notice a client is ignoring an audience in their own neighborhood, we inform them of the lost opportunity to secure local business.
Managing local search for clients can be a challenge at times. Below are common issues we encounter:
- Existing profiles that aren’t tied to a known registration login
- Existing profiles that are duplicated
- Existing profiles that contain inaccurate information
- PIN verification postcards getting thrown away after we’ve submitted their listing
Basic steps to help improve or establish a local search presence:
- Start with GetListed.org (This is a great tool that reviews your current status with Google, Yahoo, Best of the Web, and Live)
Even if you didn’t create a local search profile, they can be created by former employees, customers, or even pulled from other online sources. - Perform a Google search for your company name and claim all local profiles you have not created
Again, you may be surprised with what has been created or populated in some of the lesser known local search engines. - Keep a spreadsheet with registration information, and verification status
Stay organized so your company can make quick changes to profiles when necessary.
If you haven’t checked your local search status in the last year, now is the time! If you cannot capture a local searcher at the moment they are looking for your product or service, you are missing out on an easy opportunity for potential business.
Great Resources for Local Search:
- Local Search Ranking Factors by David Mihm
- Local search marketing advice by GetListed.org
- How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages by Dev Basu
View more Fathom SEO posts about Local Search:
- Google Maps Mishap
- Cleveland Rocks Google Street View
- Can I Find Your Business?
Visit our search engine marketing forum.
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Comments
4 Comments so far4 Responses to “Checking Your Local Search Status”
Kurt,
Great article. Anything that helps improve the process of submitting local search is welcomed by me. Also, great find with GetListed.org. Do you happen to know of any other sites like GetListed that focus on other local search properties like Local.com or Yellowpages.com?
Good gems will continue to crop up with the sprawling Internet. Nice catch and thanks for framing this so well.
Kurt, this is great compendium of local search websites, logistics, and how-to’s. I find this especially timely because just last week, a client of mine found his business profile auto-listed in a wiki-type directory. The info contained language, however, that could have gotten the client sued. We were able to change it quickly, avoiding any potential nightmares. This wasn’t a local listing per se, but that fact that it was discovered and corrected was extremely important, and this is another compelling reason why local search profiles (and all online profiles, for that matter) need to be monitored.
Hi, I enjoyed using this tool for Firefox, but with the last update the function “Show Backward Links†was changed, for example with previous version links in Yahoo looked like this:
1) http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Aexample.com+-site%3Aexample.com&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
and now they look like this:
2) http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=example.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s
Can you please let me know what I should do so the links look like in option 1?
Thanks