We have been providing local business listing service for quite a long time now. We used to get maximum data from the client and do the listings in top 25 local business listing sites such as Google local, bing local, superpages etc. There weren’t much questions about this service earlier from the clients as this service remained unknown to most of the people. With Google revealing the importance of local business listing, our client’s are naturally interested in this service now.

I have received several calls from marketers who want to know whether it is possible to promote pure online businesses through the local business listing strategy. Some of them where even ready to provide a fake address for that. As SubmitinME does only WhiteHat SEO, I rejected all order enquiries. I just had to let them know that a genuine telephone number or local address is mandatory to get the listing activated (Though there is no activation required in many local listing sites). Even after hearing this, some of them where ready to take the service using a fake telephone number (These marketers just want to do something for the sake of doing something).

Overwhelmed with the desperate marketers trying to misuse the Local listing service, I was wondering when I will be speaking to a client who knows the real potential of Local business listing? That day was today. A client based in Texas was extremely interested in the local listing service. She had a brick and motor office for his business of XXX and she had a decent website as well.  Alright, now she had a question that was very reasonable. The information database giants of USA (superpages and infoUSA) share local business information across many other local business listing sites (including Google Local). She had her business listed and active in superpages and Google Local automatically grabbed this info and displayed it in Google Maps for a particular keyword (keyword not revealed due to security issues). Now she wanted to know how our service (local business listing to 25 sites) is useful to the clients? As just one listing in Superpages is shared to 100s of other local listing sites, it can be done by the client themselves (That was her point).

I transferred the call to my colleague Sunil who is in charge of the local business listing service. I listened to him as well. He came straight to the point. He got the keyword from her and ran a search in Google Maps (was in 6th page of Google maps). Upon seeing the listing, there were only minimal data shared about her business through superpages. And now Sunil started firing the answer. With this minimal data shared to other local listing sites, the visibility of the business in the search engine results will be minimal. For instance let’s take Google Local for example. Google allows adding as many information about the business such as coupons, video, images, specials, products, awards, hours of operation, a long description and much more. However, only a very few basic data will be shared to Google Local from superpages. With thousands of businesses listed directly in Google local, this shared listing with minimal will disappear in the crowd.