Local SEO Gets A Little Easier

At Catalyst Studio, we’re always looking for great ways to serve our clients. We recently became a Yext partner, which allows us to streamline our clients’ local SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. If your business has a physical, local presence, you probably know that you can make it easier for potential customers to find you by making sure you’ve claimed your business listing on directories. This includes social media networks like Facebook and Google+, as well as tons of local business directories such as Yelp, CitySearch and YP.com.

However, if you’ve tried it, you know that the process can be a tedious one… First you have to create a new account on each site, then wait to receive a PIN by phone call or postcard to verify ownership. Once that’s handled, you must go through each publisher’s slightly different process for submitting location listing information. This includes business Name, Address & Phone (collectively known as “NAP”) as well as other select fields they might make available, such as description, services, hours of operation, payment methods accepted, photos, etc.

Is Local SEO Important?

From moz.com:
NAP / NAP+W (Name Address Phone + Website)
The “thumbprint” of a business online. Local search engines use NAP information found by crawling the web or received from data providers to judge the accuracy of the data in their own indexes. Consistent NAP information is essential to getting more citations and improving search engine rankings.

“Been there, done that…”

Scan your business listing now!

However, once you go through a few of these you probably start thinking about the Pareto Principle, or the “80/20 rule”….Which sites are the 20% you can cover to get 80% of the benefits? And conversely, which are the 80% you can ignore? Of course, this would be great in principle if the search engines didn’t have a problem with finding conflicting or out-of-date business information when comparing directory results. In studies, “external location information” like these directory listings can account for approximately 16% of your local ranking factor. That means that the consistency (part of moz’s definition above) can go out the window and negatively impact your location rankings.

Update Location Listing Info “Auto-Magically”

That’s where Yext comes in. We can run a scan across their network of over 60 publisher sites to find existing listings, determine inconsistencies and get a profile. As a partner, we then have the ability to publish a complete and consistent location profile across all of these publishers, so that everything from NAP to the type of parking available is updated. Need to add a new Toll-free number next month, or update the photos for your business? It’s the same easy process.

Curious about how your business listings look to Google, Bing and Yahoo? Run a scan of your business now.

Tags | automatic, google, local seo, social media

Facebook Status Update Scheduling

Though it’s been out for a couple of weeks, not all Facebook Business page admins have noticed that they got a new, built-in scheduling feature when creating status updates online. Previously, status updates were published immediately, which forced users to look for a workaround (primarily by using extended-feature third party apps or services like TweetDeck, HootSuite or LaterBro).
Read more…

Tags | facebook, social media