How to Claim Listing for Local Business | Local SEO

Updated by Chima Mmeje — December 9, 2024

A business listing is an online directory entry that contains essential information about a business, such as its name, address, phone number, and hours of operation. These listings are a crucial component of a business’s online presence, helping customers find and learn more about the business. Business listings can be created on various online directories, including Google My Business, Yelp, and Bing Places for Business. By ensuring your business is listed accurately across these platforms, you can enhance your visibility and attract more customers.

Claiming a listing is essential for business owners to take control of their online presence and manage their business information effectively. By claiming a listing, business owners can:

• Verify their business information and ensure accuracy: This helps in maintaining consistent and correct details across the web.
• Respond to customer reviews and feedback: Engaging with customers shows that you value their opinions and are committed to improving their experience.
• Add photos and videos to showcase their business: Visual content can attract more customers and give them a better understanding of what to expect.
• Update their business hours and contact information: Keeping this information current ensures customers can reach you easily.
• Improve their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts: Accurate and consistent listings can boost your rankings in local search results.

How to claim your local business listings

Claiming a listing also helps business owners establish trust with their customers and increase their online visibility, making it easier for potential customers to find and choose their business.

If you’re building and managing your local business listings manually, you’ll need to go through a claiming process for most of them.

Claiming a listing online verifies that you’re the owner of a valid business and are authorized to maintain its presence on the web. Business owners may need to fill out a claim form to provide additional details for approval. Each online local business index has its own claiming process with unique steps to verify your listing.

The listing claim process typically involves the following steps:

• Search for your business on the directory website: Start by entering your business name or phone number to find any existing listings.
• Most places will first ask whether your business already exists in their index. Don’t be surprised if it does, even if you’ve never created a listing there! Unless your business opened its doors today, chances are there’s some record of its existence on the web. A listing of your company may have resulted from the process via which data flows from one platform to another. In general, you’ll be prompted to enter your business name or phone number to discover any existing listings.
• Click on the “Claim” button or “Already Claimed” link: This will initiate the claiming process.
• Sign in or create an account to make changes: You may need to create an account if you don’t already have one.
• Next, you’ll review any existing information, fix incorrect information, and provide any new or missing information about your business name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, and other details. Remember: You want your core business details (name, address, phone, website) to be as consistent as possible on every listing. This would be a good time to read our guide, The Core Components of Local Business Listings.
• Verify your business information and provide evidence of ownership: This could involve submitting documents or other proof that you are the real owner of the business. You can verify your business through postal mail, live video chat, phone call or video recording.
• Wait for the directory website to review and approve your claim: The approval process can vary in length, so be patient.

Once your claim is approved, you can manage your business listing and make updates as needed. This ensures that your business information is accurate and up-to-date, helping customers find you easily.

If you’re verifying via postcard, alert all staff members who retrieve mail to be on the lookout for the postcard. These typically arrive within a couple of weeks, but are rather plain and small. You don’t want them to get lost! Check your mail carefully each day.

The time between completing verification and seeing your listing appear online varies widely from platform to platform. In some cases, your listing will be live in a matter of days or even minutes, but other indexes have a lengthy manual review process, meaning that it can take several months for your listing to be approved for publication. While you wait, don’t make any further changes to your submitted listings. This will help you avoid additional delays. Just be patient and check from time to time to see whether your listing is live.

In certain indexes (such as Google Business Profile), any future changes to core data such as the business name or phone number may trigger the need to re-verify. However, you can typically edit fields like business descriptions and photos without having to go through the verification process again.

Here are the top local business listing sites that business owners should consider claiming:

• Google My Business
• Yelp
• Bing Places for Business
• Facebook for Business
• Yellow Pages
• Yahoo Local
• Foursquare for Business
• Super Pages
• Cyclex
• Local.com

These sites are popular and widely used, and claiming a listing on these platforms can help business owners reach a larger audience. By ensuring your business is listed on these sites, you can enhance your online presence and attract more customers.

Managing your business listings is crucial to maintaining an accurate and up-to-date online presence. Here are some tips for managing your business listings:

• Regularly review and update your business information: Ensure that your name, address, phone number, and other details are always current.
• Respond to customer reviews and feedback: Engage with your customers to show that you value their input and are committed to providing excellent service.
• Add photos and videos to showcase your business: Visual content can attract more customers and give them a better understanding of what to expect.
• Use email notifications to stay informed about changes to your listings: This helps you stay on top of any updates or issues that need your attention.
• Consider using a single site to manage all of your business listings: Tools like Moz Local can help you manage your listings from one dashboard, saving you time and ensuring consistency.

1. Track manually managed listings in a spreadsheet. If you’re manually managing all of your local business listings, keep track of them in a detailed spreadsheet that includes dates submitted, email/password use, status, links, and anything else you need to know to quickly find the listing again whenever necessary. Tracking claim requests in a spreadsheet helps manage the process efficiently.
2. Only claim your listings under your business account — never a third-party account. While it’s fine to have a staff member or third-party consultant create and manage your listings for you, don’t enter into an arrangement in which someone is claiming your listings under any account other than the account of the business. For example, Jim’s Plumbing Co. shouldn’t authorize ABC Marketing, Inc. to claim the plumber’s Google Business Profile listing under info@abcmarketing.com’s Google account. Should the relationship between the plumber and the agency end, Jim may find that he doesn’t control his local business listings and can’t manage them — a situation that should be avoided at all costs.
3. Don’t confuse claiming with owning. While claiming validates that you have the right to manage a listing on a platform, you don’t own that listing — the platform owns it. They maintain the right to take the listing down if they feel it violates guidelines, to filter out reviews if they’re deemed untrustworthy, and to approve public/community edits to the listing’s data, all without the business owner’s approval. While this may not be ideal, it’s important to know that your listing on a third party’s platform is their content, not yours.
4. Find automated services to save time. While manually claiming all your local business listings was the only option in the early days of local search, do be aware of timesaving modern alternatives. Now there are automated services that manage your local business listing data, providing solutions that remove the need to manually claim every single listing. Services such as Moz Local partner with listing platforms, distributing data to them rather than claiming each listing. Because the listings are not claimed, you’re still able to manually claim them later on, should you cancel the automated service. These automated solutions are valuable in that they establish and monitor the accuracy of your data all from a single dashboard and diminish or remove the need to manually claim a listing. They can also alert you to inaccurate or duplicate data that needs correcting. Automated services often provide on screen instructions to guide users through the process.

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