Whether your Sacramento Area business serves consumers, businesses, or both, claiming certain business listings and optimizing the listings you’ve claimed make good online marketing sense.
Business listing sites are worth paying attention to even if your business sells its product or services outside the Sacramento area.
The top listing site, Google Business Profile, has options to extend its reach beyond attracting a local audience.
In addition to providing greater visibility for your business, a claimed (or created) online business listing can drive more traffic to your website due to a hidden factor.
The factor is that each claimed business listing can mean an additional authoritative backlink for your business’s website.
Quality backlinks are essential to how search engines generally regard your business’s online authority.
Most listings encourage businesses to upload photos that give viewers a visual impression of your business. As such, the various services either explicitly or implicitly discourage stock photography.
No matter what business you are in, consider taking good-quality pictures of the three P’s — people, product, and premises — and posting these to your business listings. If much of your work is done at customer sites, upload photos from those sites too.
It’s always good practice to keyword the filenames of your photos.
Your business should have profiles in the three business listings below if:
- People visit your business, even if it’s only occasionally
- You or your staff visits customer sites, even if it’s only occasionally
If people never visit your business and your street address doesn’t even need to be publicized (or you don’t want it publicized), the following three business listing services allow your physical address to be hidden from public view. Your city or town name plus “California” will still display.
1. Google Business Profile (GBP)
Because it’s part of Google and the most visited business listing, Google Business Profile may well be the most crucial listing for any business to claim and optimize.
All businesses — from small local consumer businesses to sizeable B2B businesses that serve global markets — should have a GBP listing. Here’s our headquarters Google Business Profile in Google Search.
If Google did not automatically create a GMB listing for you, creating your own is a simple process.
Google all but states, “add lots of photos and add them often.”
Here’s an example of a Rancho Cordova-based business that took Google’s advice to heart. This profile has more photos than any Sacramento-area business that we could find.
Regularly uploading quality photos of people, products, and premises is recommended for optimizing a Google Business Profile.
Many people recommend posting to GBP regularly.
Resource recommendation: The Local SEO Bible from Hypertrix
2. Bing Places for Business
Bing is second to Google in visits. Because Bing is the default search engine for some versions of Windows, a Bing Places for Business listing should be claimed or created.
Bing Places for Business allows for adding:
- Basic Info – company name, website, physical address
- Category Information – multiple categories can be added
- Contact Details – phone number, email address, Twitter profile, Facebook Page
- Business Hours – includes special hours for specific dates
- Photos of Your Business – up to 10 photos
Bing Places for Business offers limited opportunities for optimization. Category Information and Photos of Your Business offer the most flexibility.
3. Manta
Manta is an extensive, searchable database of businesses. Here are the Sacramento area listings alone.
Manta offers significantly more editorial control of a business listing and, therefore, more optimization options than any other service.
Unlike most listing sites, which require categorizing a business from a predefined list of categories, Manta lets you use your own words to categorize your business. This is particularly important when a canned list of categories does not cover your business’s offering.
Manta allows you to create a free-form short description of your business, up to 150 characters. You can also add a detailed description of up to 2,500 characters. Other options include product or service showcase pages and brands carried (great for resellers).
All this means that you can more accurately and fully describe your product or service on your Manta listing than in other online business listings.
While Manta doesn’t have the clout of Google or Microsoft, it’s a listing site worth claiming and optimizing for a wide range of business types.
Other Business Listing Services
If you have a local Sacramento-area business and people frequent your location, there are many other business listing services to consider claiming or creating, some of which your business may already be listed on. These include:
- Yelp
- Yellow Pages
- Yahoo Local
Regardless of which online business listings you claim or create and optimize, ensure the NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) components are consistent across listings.
When search engines such as Google evaluate your business’s online presence to determine rankings in search ultimately, this consistency is taken into account.
Most businesses should have an active presence on Twitter and LinkedIn.
