Episode 163: SMALL BUSINESS SEO TIP: WHAT ARE LOCAL BUSINESS LISTINGS? Data Driven Daily Tip 282

Small Business Owners need to understand the importance of local business listings. In the entire history of the internet, any business has been listed on thousands of directories, whether they want to or not.

The reality is that much of that information is inaccurate. From phone numbers to addresses to hours of operation and web URLs.

Not only is this a detriment to the business owner, but this inaccurate information actually hurts your Google SEO ranking. Google's algorithm crawls the local business directory sites and ranks websites with consistent information higher than those without consistent information (well, let's just say accurate and CONSISTENT information increases your business' chances of ranking high on Google.

From Yelp, to FourSquare to Facebook to WAZE to Bing to many others, there are tools like Moz Local and Yext that "clean up" your local business listings via one time submissions.

This isn't the whole puzzle, as Google My Business is still the biggest piece. But behind Google My Business, I highly recommend Small Business Owners and marketers with many local listings consider Yext or Moz local.