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 (which includes Google Maps), 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 a foundational backlink for your business’s website.
Consider working with a local marketing agency to set up your listings correctly.
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 Ps—people, products, and premises—and posting them 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 need to be publicized (or you don’t want it publicized), the following three business listing services allow you to hide your physical address from public view. Your city or town name plus “California” will still display.
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 your organization’s GBP listing, 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
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.
Other Business Listing Services
There are 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 exactly match across listings.
When search engines such as Google evaluate your business’s online presence to determine rankings in search, this consistency is ultimately considered.
Most businesses should have an active presence on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.
