A simple guide on the importance of Local Listing Management for Electricians
Customers have many choices when it comes to hiring an electrician, but what is the deciding factor? The answer may not be as simple as you think. It’s not always the company that spends the most on advertisements, or who offers the lowest prices. Believe it or not, it’s usually the company that’s easy to find. What if I told you 97% of potential customers go online to search for home service providers before requesting an estimate. Wouldn’t you want to be listed on as many databases as possible? This guide talks about how important Local Listing Management for your Electrical Contracting Business.
What is Local Listing Management?
Yellow Pages were the main way people looked for businesses before the internet. Today consumers have shifted to using listing directories such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, as well as local listing aggregates, to find home service providers. In fact, there are over 60 directories where customers can search for home service providers in their area, is your business on all of them?
If you’re like most electricians in your area, the answer is probably no. It’s hard to find time between running to service appointments, managing the day-to-day, following up with potential customers to even think about creating 60 different accounts on 60 different sites to list your business. It can take up to 40 hours to list your business’ name, address, phone number, email address, hours of operation, and website on these listing sites.
That’s why more and more businesses are using Local Listing Management to save hours of time so they can focus on their business. Local Listing Management is a single portal where you can update 60+ listing sites using a single form. Not only that but you can also see your ratings and reviews on each of these sites. You can also find and fix inconsistencies and out-of-date information on your existing listings as well.
How Does This Help?
Having the same information on a large number of listing sites increases your business’s online reputation, makes it easier for customers to find your business, and often leads to higher ranking in search results. Consider the following example.
ABC Electric Company has two listings, one on Google and one on Bing.
Google: ABC Electric Co. 123 Main Street. Anytown, FL (800) 555-5555
Bing: ABC Electric Company 123 Main St. Anytown, Florida (888) 555-5555
Can you spot the differences? Search engines would see these as two different companies, and because of this rank each one lower. If the information was the same on both, the search engine would recognize both listings as the same company, see the company as more credible, and rank ABC Electric higher on both search engines. When we increase this number to 60+ different listing sites, this could mean the difference between the second or third page of search results and the first.
The Takeaway
Have you ever heard the phrase “Strength in numbers?” The same goes for local listings. Search engines use listing sites as a gauge for how strong a company’s profile is. In short, the more listings you have and the more consistent they are, the higher your company is ranked in search results. 81% of customers never go past the first page of search results, so you want to be as close as possible to the top. With a simple to use Local Listing Management solution, you can be well on your way to a higher search ranking, better visibility, and more customers!