At Semify, we believe that growing together creates the freedom to be more, do more, and have more. We want to do everything we can to help our partners achieve their goals and scale their agencies. Part of that commitment involves getting the customer in the room. After all, we won’t always know what our clients need or want unless they let us know.
Recently, we met with one of our long-term resellers who wanted more out of their local business listings. They were meeting with clients on a monthly basis but had very little to report. In order to build on their existing customer relationships and provide them with the high-caliber service they expected, they let us know they had a need for monthly activities and updates to be performed as part of their local listings management.
Since local listings can play such a significant role in SEO, we started thinking about what we could do to further optimize our initial Yext PowerListings product and transform it into a monthly deliverable that would benefit our partners and their customers.
Through our innovation process and our collaboration with this valued member of our reseller program, we developed our new Enhanced Local Listings plan. If you want to get more out of your clients’ local business listings, need access to more in-depth reporting options, and are looking to improve both web traffic and overall brand visibility, this can be a great option. Here’s what you need to know.
Why Are Local Business Listings Important?
First, let’s talk about why local business listings matter. Local business listings are just one way to improve local SEO. Since we know that web users are placing more emphasis on finding relevant solutions within their general proximity, it makes sense that Google prioritizes local search results. What’s more, mobile web traffic is becoming more prominent -- which means local SEO plays an important role in your clients’ ability to generate traffic, leads, and sales.
Think With Google reports that around 30% of all mobile searches are location-related. Those searches often come with a sense of urgency, which can be good news for business owners. In fact, Google research shows that 76% of people who conduct searches on their smartphones visit a local business within one day. Not surprisingly, 28% of searches involving something nearby result in a purchase and mobile searches for “store open near me” spiked by more than 250% between 2017 and 2019.
With local business listings, you can provide all the information a customer needs to know about a business and increase the chances that it will appear prominently in SERPs. Not only can this drive foot traffic to the store itself, but it can also drive web traffic to the store’s website. These listings can help your clients make a bigger impact online, especially when local business listings are properly optimized.
Ultimately, that can translate to more profound success for your customers and for your own business, as a result. But how does our Enhanced Local Listings plan differ from our former Local Listings plan? And why should you consider it for your clients?
What’s Included in This New Plan?
With our initial Local Listings plan, clients received initial setup and basic optimizations. Our team ensures that there’s NAP (name, address, and phone number) consistency across the Yext PowerListings, which can play an important role in the business’s ability to rank in local search results. We know that if there are even small inconsistencies in the NAP, this can confuse search engines and make it more difficult for the business to increase their visibility. Because of that, we make it a priority to ensure this information is both accurate and constant across every listing. We also make it possible for our resellers (and their clients) to pay for these services on a monthly basis, rather than an annual subscription. This can improve accessibility for end clients who might balk at paying a yearly fee for local business listings.
However, we’ve come to realize that this deliverable may not be enough for some clients. After the initial setup, there isn’t much work to be done. The listings remain live (and any pertinent updates are made as necessary), but some of our partners may want to have more visibility into their campaigns and find ways to get more out of their clients’ Yext PowerListings.
Our Enhanced Local Listings plan addresses those concerns. This new plan is essentially divided into two parts.
During the first month of the plan, after the initial setup is performed, our team will do a deep-drive into optimizing these local business listings. This goes beyond the basic NAP. These enhancements are determined by the analyst’s recommendations for each individual client.
Because there are hundreds of Yext PowerListings, there are also tons of possibilities for additional information and optimization that can be added. These might include operational and holiday hours, logos, email addresses, alternate phone numbers, social media links, years in business, specialties, accessibility features, products and services, and more. After optimizing these local business listings, the analyst will develop a report that our resellers can use to bring their clients up to speed. The analyst will be able to spend up to an additional 30 minutes on this Month 1 activity.
From the second month onward, our team will build reinforcement links to the local business listings. You can think of this as link-building for Yext. Just as you want to obtain backlinks for your website, you can also benefit from gaining links to these listings.
Not only is this method effective, but it’s also highly affordable. And unlike link-building for a website, Google doesn’t mind if these links have a lower domain rating. Although these links may be seen as a bit less authoritative, this is actually a less risky option when you’re working with directory sites with considerable domain ratings. Also, many of these citation pages are on mega-huge websites. Our experimentation has shown that these links get your pages indexed at a rate of 87% within two weeks (which is fast for Google). We build five of these reinforcement links per month as part of this Enhanced Local Listings plan. Over time, this two-part approach can improve the visibility of your clients’ local business listings in search results.
In addition to optimization and building reinforcement links, our team will also provide more in-depth reporting and analytics for you to share with your clients. You’ll gain access to a Yext API through our white label dashboard, as well as helpful metrics like Google Search Queries (which shows the number of Google searches in which a client’s listings appear in a given week in graph format). This can help you be more transparent with your clients about how their budget is being spent and the progress that’s being made on their marketing campaign each month. In the end, that can allow you to nurture customer relationships -- especially for clients who aren’t yet ready to commit to a larger plan.
How Can I Learn More About Obtaining Enhanced Local Listings For My Clients?
At Semify, we want to support your aspirations. Not only are we committed to delivering high-quality services for your clients, but we care about growing your business in the process. Our newest local listings plan can help you get more out of those local business listings while accessing more comprehensive reporting options. To learn more about including our Enhanced Local Listings plan as part of your campaigns, please contact your account manager or get in touch with us today.