Local Listings as a Mobile Strategy

You must have a mobile-friendly website. The fact is, more people are searching for your business from their phone than from a desktop. This isn’t just for brick-and-mortar, B2C businesses either. More and more B2B searchers are using their phones along the way to purchase.

What are you going to do about it?

For one, you need a mobile-friendly website. This is a non-negotiable. If you’re not already moving in this direction, stop reading this and get started (if you need a recommendation, contact me).

Even if you’ve already started, this will take time. Sure, you could hire someone offshore and do it quickly, but I wouldn’t recommend that. Your website is your gateway to new customers; don’t cut corners. Take time and do it right.

While you wait, will your business suffer? Yes. Customers using mobile are not finding you. Even if they find your website, they might have a hard time using your site to reach you.

I have a suggestion that will help bridge this gap. Use your business’s local listings as a mobile web strategy.

What Is a Local Listing?

When I say “local listing,” I mean a website dedicated to listing businesses. Often, companies are categorized by location and type of business. Sometimes people call these “business profiles” or “local directories”. Here are some examples:

• Google Business Profile (Google Maps) Pro-tip: ChatGPT seems to be pulling from Google’s profiles when recommending businesses in response to queries.
• Yelp
• Bing
• Facebook (has a local listing product)
• Superpages
• Apple Maps

My suggestion: getting listed in sites like this will help your business, even if your mobile website isn’t ready yet.

Local Listings Help You Get Found in Google

There are a couple of ways multiple listings can help you get found in Google search results.

Stack The Deck

Many local listings will appear in search engine results. This helps customers reach you, even if they can’t find or use your website from their phone.

Sometimes, local listings appear in the SERPs for non-branded terms. If you optimize your listing, you’ll find customers who aren’t yet acquainted with your company.

Of course, the more listings your business has, the easier it will be for customers to find you.

Address Citations

So you’ve created your Google Business listing? That’s a great start! Just having that listing isn’t enough for people to find you. You must reassure Google that your listing is correct. You do this by using consistent addresses and phone numbers across multiple listings. Don’t just stop by submitting your business to Google. Update: while this is less important to Google than it once was, it is CRUCIAL to AI chatbots.

Get Found by Customers through Mobile Apps

I once met a lawyer who had a mobile app. He had spent thousands of dollars to create an app, but nobody used it. I am NOT suggesting that your business needs an app. Your business needs to get submitted to the most popular apps on the web.

When your customers search for your location from their iPhone, can they find you? Can they find you from their car’s GPS? If not, submit your company to these services as well. No need to make an app; use the apps that are already out there.

The Easy Way or the Hard Way?

There are two ways to submit your business to local listings. The hard way is manual.

• You need to find every website that could list your company and submit it.
• You need to find every website that has your incorrect address or phone number, and update it.
• You’ll need to submit your company to various app databases.

This takes a lot of time. Trust me, I’ve tried to do this manually. Want to see how hard it could be to do manually? Here’s a tool that will give you an idea.

The easy way is automated. Several services can help you with this. Two kinds of services might help you.

1. Submission Services. You can give a service your business information, and they will syndicate it to several databases. From these databases, websites, and apps, we will create a listing for you. The problem: once you’ve submitted them, you can’t make changes to your listings. You can pay to resubmit your business with updated information. Then you’ll create duplicate listings. Remember, consistency is key when it comes to Google Business. Multiple submissions can hurt your efforts to reach customers.
2. Maintenance Services. You can pay for a service that not only submits your business listings but also lets you maintain them. This means you can update your information in a single dashboard, and the changes will apply to all your listings. This helps provide fresh information to these listings. That will help you show up more often in Google (Google loves fresh content). It will also help keep customers updated with holiday hours or seasonal specials. In my experience, the best maintenance service I’ve found is Yext.

Continues to Help After You Have a Mobile Site

The best part of this strategy: it continues to help even after you’ve launched your mobile site. Customers will keep looking for you on their apps. People will still click on other listings (besides your site) in the SERPs. Investing in local listings now isn’t wasted effort later.