How to Local Business Listings can help your Business Grow

Local business listings are more than just simple placeholders for your business. There’s more benefits that come from local business listings than you might think.
Here are some ways that local business listings can help your business.

Ratings and Reviews
Word of mouth is probably the best way to get quality referral business. Ratings and reviews are the equivalent to word of mouth referrals online. Most local business directories offer ratings and reviews of local businesses. By receiving positive ratings and reviews from real customers, you’ll be able to attract new customers to your door.

Communicate with Your Customers
Many local business directories have gone social. This means that your existing customers or your potential customers can “follow” your business and even send private messages to you via a contact form. This adds another channel for your customers to communicate with you. Some still like to use the phone, but more and more people are beginning to use the other forms of communication online.

SEO Benefit
Most local business directories allow you to add a link from the listing to your site. If you’re not well versed in SEO, you may not fully understand the benefits of a link. A link is more than just a link. A link can actually help improve your rankings in the search engines. Backlinks are what connects your website to the great world wide web. It is a signal to the search engines that your site deserves recognition. One or 2 business listing links won’t give you a big boost in rankings, but imagine if you had a bunch of them. It all adds up.

Traffic Benefit
When you add your business listing on a local business directory, you are essentially creating a profile page for your business. For example, you can create business profile pages on sites like Facebook, Submit Site, Face an Face, Yelp and Manta. Once these pages are created, they then get indexed by the search engines. Once indexed, your business profile page becomes searchable by someone searching for a keyword in your niche and location. You notice that when you run a local search on Google, you end with a bunch of listings from Yelp. Well, this is what I’m talking about. These could be your business listings at the top of Google.
If you haven’t submitted your business listing to any of the major business directories, you definitely should. You have little to lose and a lot to gain.