Local Business Listings Webinar Report

I have just finished watching the local business listings webinar on search marketing now and I have a few thought…and a few questions.

My Thoughts

First off and most important is  localeze N.A.P. Gib referred to this quite often and explained NAP as

• Name
• Address
• Phone Number

He said that it is of the up most importance to have the same N.A.P. across all listings and having different information will come back to haunt you in the end. There were a few questions about call tracking numbers and non of the speakers recommended using them in your listing ( I have a feeling that you could use them on your website with no issue). The reason for this is that if you ever drop the number, of have different numbers listed around then the data can get very, very mixed. So real numbers, real address’s and real names.

Another very interesting point was the confidence score that localeze uses. They said that the guidelines don’t come from a special directory but that the score is a “trust” thing. I think the question to whether it will help your rankings was not clearly answered, but the more information directories have that is relevant, the better the outcome.

The comment was also made that 10% of searches are 5 word strings. They translated this to mean that people are moving away from searching for “Hotels Chicago” and searching for “pet friendly hotels chicago”  So your listings need to be very detailed to show up in more searches.

My Questions

• How do services like Universal Business Listing play into the formula- can you go their once and then only worry about places they don’t cover?
• Nobody mentioned 800 numbers in listings. Should you include your local number and 800 or just your local?
• Are listings with these companies ever going to move you into local listing directories. Is that an area they are exploring?

Over all I thought it was a great amount of information and with the polls that were done, I have a feeling the information will help people have better listings through NAP and verification processes.