Assessing and Choosing a Listing Management Solution

Local business listings management is an essential task for two key reasons:

1. Accuracy and consistency: One of the foundational ranking factors for local search engine optimization (local SEO) is ensuring that the business' name, address, phone number, number, open hours and other key data are consistent and accurate across directories.

2. Protecting online reputation: 52% of survey respondents say the negative local business reviews they write stem from encountering false or incorrect online information on assets like local business listings. Businesses can protect their reputation by ensuring customers aren’t being inconvenienced (or lost) due to inaccurate listings info.

Listings can be managed manually across the local search ecosystem, but it is time-consuming work for any business. If you are marketing a multi-location enterprise, you may find it an absolutely necessary efficiency to automate local business listings management with software.

But how do you decide which solution to use? Because you're entrusting your data and your reputation to a third party, it's essential to vet your options carefully and ask the right questions.

What do you need from a listings management solution? All enterprises have unique goals and needs, but these benefits tend to be valued by nearly all brands:

Positive impact on local search engine rankings

A high star rating is routinely found to be among the top 10 factors that impact the results shown in Google’s local packs, local finders and Maps. By managing the accuracy of your listings, your rating won’t be eroded by customers who negatively review your business after encountering incorrect information. Other important local pack factors include choosing and distributing accurate categories in an organized way across multiple locations, the completeness of your Google Business Profiles (GBPs) and the consistency of your listings (aka) citations across the web. Software makes management of all these factors easier.

Defense against unwanted Google edits

Have you discovered that Google keeps editing your basic information on your listings, like the business name or phone number? This frustrating occurrence is often caused by Google finding mismatching core information around the web about a branch of your business. By managing the accuracy of your listings across the major directories, you’re ensuring that Google’s bots gain a confident picture of your correct business details and don’t think they need to edit your data.

A major saving in time

It’s best to think of this in terms of making one input for multiple outputs, rather than having to manage multiple inputs and dashboards. Any time your business info changes, such as adding a new phone number or needing to reflect seasonal hours across the all your listings, you’ll save considerable time being able to update your data in a single source rather than having to find and manually update the listing set you’ve developed for each business location, one-at-a-time. Automation frees up staff to focus on tasks that require human creativity, like responding to reviews, doing a new photo shoot to strengthen your listings, or writing new Google Updates posts.

Additional features

While the central service offered by listing management software is to distribute your location data across the local search ecosystem, many providers bundle this with valuable additional features. For example, Moz Local alerts you to incoming new reviews across your locations and facilitates fast owner responses to these vital customer communications. It offers sentiment analysis of customer reviews to help you identify structural issues that can be addressed at different locations to improve consumer satisfaction. And it also facilitates social media posting. Other platforms have features like rank tracking, or AI-driven review response automation. Your business should get to know the full feature set offered by each provider so you can make a good choice based on your enterprise’s unique needs and goals.

Dedicated support for when things go wrong

The local search ecosystem has so many moving parts that it’s par for the course for bugs, mysteries, and other issues to occasionally arise surrounding your Google Business Profiles and other listings. While Google does have a volunteer-run support forum, there has been a historical disconnect between local business owners and the search engine when problems arise. If, like Moz Local, your listings management provider has dedicated account management support for enterprise clients, you’ll likely value having a trusted resource to turn to when questions inevitably come up about your listings. Ask questions and get helpful assistance.

If you know your enterprise needs to choose a listings management provider, asking these questions will help you narrow down your options to the right match for your business.

Know the providers

There are at least a dozen well-known, established providers of local business listings management services. Independent articles like this one from Search Engine Journal can acquaint you with your multiple options for further research. It’s important to know that different providers offer different services. Your goal is to find the best option for your brand’s unique needs.

You can also do Google searches for terms like “local business listings management provider” to see what comes up, but proceed with caution on any brand that isn’t well-established or that offers too-good-to-be-true claims.

At this stage of your research, it helps to know that there are at least two main categories of location data management providers: on-going management and one-time service.

In sum, the major benefits of going with a service that provides on-going management are having a single-source dashboard via which you control all your listings across the ecosystem, saving you time and money. Added benefits like bundled features help you get the most value out of your listings. The main negative aspect of this approach is that you must factor the ongoing fee into your business expenses.

By contrast, the main plus of paying for one-time listing creation instead of ongoing management is that you only pay an initial fee. While this can work well for single location businesses that are willing to manage their listing manually or pay their provider again when they need to edit their listings, it’s typically not the right match for multi-location enterprises who need to be able to continuously edit elements of their listings. Manual management doesn’t usually scale to controlling dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of listings, and a chief danger of neglecting your listings is that their data quality will erode over time due to public editing and the ways in which data is distributed across the web.

If you are marketing a large, multi-location enterprise, your service provider candidates should likely be narrowed down to brands that offer ongoing-management, rather than on-time creation.

Compare the features of listings management products

You may encounter charts comparing the different, established providers out there around the web, but the truth is, if they are self-published by one of the providers, it’s hard to escape some degree of bias in this type of content. A better plan is to find the page most providers will have that lays out all the features of their own product, like this page from Moz Local. Then, you can do your own comparison, based on the cold hard facts about each software’s feature set, and your own requirements.

Seek personal recommendations from your connections

Ask your fellow business owners which solution they are using and don’t forget to ask if it’s working for them. If you don’t have a peer operating at the same enterprise level as yourself, you might see if the provider lists out other clients they are currently serving, to see if their list signals that they are equipped to manage the scale of your business. Another alternative is to look at the social media accounts and blogs of the providers you are considering. How good are they at communicating and educating? Are they responsive to questions that come in? Do they have an active and helpful presence? Great communication always matters, and we’ll be focusing more on this in the next section!

Once you’ve narrowed down your search to two or three vendors, it’s time to ask the tough questions and get the answers you need to make an informed decision. The type and quantity of questions you ask will undoubtedly vary depending on your unique business needs, but make sure you at least ask and get answers to these six important questions:

1. How does your platform measure and report success?

If being able to measure growth and analyze results matters to you, ask to see a sample of reporting. For example, Moz Local reports on profile completeness, listing scores, reviews and review sentiment, traffic, clicks and impressions. It alerts you to incoming reviews and Google Q&A. Ask your candidates what they report.

2. What level of customer support do you offer?

If a provider is too large, you may end up feeling that you’re being treated like a number instead of a valued client. Moz Local offers dedicated account management support for enterprise clients. Ask your candidates who will be there to help you if you have questions or problems arise with your listings.

3. What does your distribution network look like?

A listings management solution is only as effective as its distribution network. The truth is that some providers pad out their network with dozens of low value directories you probably shouldn’t be paying for inclusion in. See Moz Local’s different partner networks based on your country here, and compare it to the networks offered by other providers.

4. What is the process of migrating onto your platform?

If you are dissatisfied with your current provider and are considering switching from it, or you have only been managing your Google Business Profiles in the past, ask your candidates how easy it is to migrate? Moz Local makes it as painless as possible to export your existing data via a bulk template. Ask other providers how this process works with them.

5. How do I cancel and what happens after I cancel?

You may have multiple questions regarding this, such as whether you can cancel any time or if you are locked into a contract for a set time period. With Moz Local, you can cancel any time. You’ll also want to be sure the company is forthcoming with how you can cancel. Look for a page like this one that lays out the steps you need to take to cancel and be wary if a company appears to obscure this information.

Finally, you’ll want to ask what happens to your listings after you cancel. An acceptable policy for most enterprises is that the listings management company simply reports to their network that they are no longer managing your listings. This is the approach Moz takes, and you should be clear that any provider does not actively take down your listings if you cancel. You need to be able to claim your listings if you cancel, switch to another provider, or take whatever steps you choose.

Of particular importance is taking the time to ask what happens to any duplicate listings if you cancel. Some companies only temporarily suppress these troublesome duplicates so long as you keep paying your subscription. By contrast, Moz Local permanently removes duplicates so that they don’t come back after you cancel. Don’t overlook the importance of this question and how your candidates answer!

Bear in mind that cancellation means that your listings are no longer managed, and as mentioned earlier, if they are neglected, their data will likely erode over time due to public editing and inputs from data aggregators, resulting in incorrect information about your business being present to customers on the web.

6. Why should we go with you over the competition?

Your goals with this question can be numerous. You may be looking for a specific feature, or it may be more a question of the feel-good factor of your chosen partner – does the way they communicate work for you? You may want to see testimonials for other clients, or case studies, or get a sense of the thought leadership at the company. Make a list of your own priorities and wishes and see how what you learn from each partner ticks off the points on your roster.

Choosing a vendor is never easy, but asking the right questions helps take some of the stress away. We wish you the best of luck selecting the listings management service that best fits your needs!