Business Listings are a large component of the online footprint for SMBs and can have a strong impact on the success of a business. This means that it is very important that SMB owners have a solid grasp on how their business is appearing online across different directory sites. In 2013, Yext estimates that incorrect business listings data cost businesses about $10 billion!
Duplicate business listings are one of the major contributors to incorrect information being displayed about local businesses online. These duplicates can be created by the business owner or someone acting on their behalf (and sometimes both!). The more troubling types of duplicates are the ones created without the business owner ever knowing about it. Data aggregators (databases of business data) or listings publishers (e.g. Yelp) might create multiple listings for a single business with different information. As a business owner, you would not know that these duplicates exist unless you are actively looking for them, or they are brought to your attention. By that point you might have lost phone calls, website visits, or walk-in traffic due to potential customers landing on a business listing that has incorrect information.
Through our partnership with Yext, Ferocious Media is now able to identify duplicate listings on the major business listing directories and implement a solution. Even though duplicate listings can cause problems, they do have some value for link building and SEO purposes. For this reason, rather than just deleting duplicate listings, we use a strategy called duplicate link suppression. This allows us to redirect these duplicate listings to your primary listing and “hide” the incorrect one. This achieves the goal of having the potential customer find the correct information about your business while still maintaining any SEO value you may have gained from the duplicate listings.
If you would like more information on our Local Listings Service with Duplicate Suppression please contact your Digital Media Consultant, or send us an email at info@drivenlocal.com. We will make sure that your business is maximizing the effectiveness of your business listings.
