If you haven’t claimed your business in Google Maps or Yahoo! Local, you should do so as soon as possible. Why? There have been numerous reports over the last six months of unclaimed listings being hijacked by map spammers where an established local businesses listing is “claimed” and then the listing is pointed to the hijacker’s website. Claiming and verifying your listing will prevent this from happening to your business.
It’s also important because depending on the size of your city and the number of direct competitors, an unclaimed business will get placed behind businesses with websites and claimed businesses. If you are in a medium size market where the 10-packs have multiple pages of listings a page 4 listing (or even worse) makes you virtually invisible.
It isn’t that hard to do and set up will only take a few minutes. The Google Local Business Center gives you control over the way your business listing appears in Google Maps and the Yahoo Local Listings Account Center gives you control over your listing for Yahoo Maps. Bing also has a local listing site but this is currently not one of the strengths of the new and improved MSN search.
Claiming your business becomes increasingly advantageous as more people search for local businesses online than anyplace else. Certainly more than the traditional yellow pages, local newspapers, billboards or even the online yellow page type directories. So not only does this increase your chances of getting found more easily but you ensure that your information is accurate and up to date.
In addition to claiming your listing directly at the Google Local Business Center and the Yahoo Local Listings Center you should also look at updating your information to data providers like Localeze, Universal Business Listing, infoUSA and Superpages. Verifying with these data providers is powerful because they feed business information to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Google in particular uses these directories in determining citations within Google rankings on the local maps.
Claiming you business listing should not just be done at the major search engines and the top data providers. There are also a handful of smaller niche data providers that you want your business listed in and these include Yelp!, Urban Spoon, Judy’s Book, City Search and BOTW Local. These not only provide the power of having their directories crawled by the big three but they also give your business the opportunity to have reviews done by your customers. Claiming your business here ensures basics like your name is correct. This is not something you want your customers setting up for you.
If you business has multiple locations you want to do all this for each location. Claiming your business is the critical first step in your local search marketing arsenal.