Search

The first step your new customers take is to search for a business like yours. Customers can search by a category (such as ‘beauty salons’), or a specific product or service (such as ‘where can I buy a lawn mower’), or by your business name. If you want them to find your business when they search, you need to properly index your business, products, and services in the most popular search engines.

Map

In choosing where to shop, customers evaluate distance from a location and ease of access as key criteria. Your business needs to show up correctly on the most popular mapping tools, and must provide the information your customers need to select your business (open hours, brands, current photos, etc.) directly from the mapped location to compel choice.

Verify

When a customer knows you offer the product or service they need, they often take the next step to verify your business before walking through the door. New customers may read reviews, check out your website, or search for your business name online to see if the business is legitimate. Bad reviews, or inconsistent information, may cause the customer to look elsewhere.

What is Your NetBizScore?

Take ownership for your business online with Google, Bing, Apple, and Yelp.

Update all address, contact, business hours, and references to be consistent across all search engines, local business sites, and social media.

One of the easiest things you can do that is impactful is upload current and relevant photos to your listings. These photos help customers decide whether or not they will visit your store.

To help legitimize your business you need a current website, using recent design standards and current artwork. If you have a website, and you cannot remember the last time it was updated, it probably needs to be replaced with an inviting, mobile-friendly site that shows your customers you take their business seriously.

Once you have taken ownership for your online presence, you need to keep updating your information to help drive your search ranking and relavance. A listing that has recent posts, numerous reviews, current information will drive more customer visits.

If you are doing everything listed above, you should have a presence in local search, but you still may not be showing up at the top of the list, or even on the first page. You can optimize your content to help improve your ranking and make sure customers see your business every time they search.

You can go far just by managing your presence, but if you are in a competitive market you can invest in digital marketing to drive customers to your business. We are a technology company, but we have digital marketing partners who can help you develop an online advertising plan and we can integrate that plan into your online presence.

I Can Do It Myself

Yes you can! Everything required to properly show up in local business directory services is available to any business owner or manager, and every company that offers search services thinks they have provided tools that make it easy to create and manage your data. However, while anyone can do it, your investment in time often outweighs the value, which is why over half of local business listings go unclaimed online. And not only do you have to invest time to do it initially, you must keep investing time to keep up with changes in technology, keep your data fresh, and keep improving your content.

This is what NetBizScore does for you. For a low monthly fee, NetBizScore will create and manage the digital services you need to score with your customers.

Send Us Your Score

If you score above 5 and you are happy with your results and the amount of time you spend managing your online presence you don’t need the NetBizScore service, but if you need to do better NetBizScore pays for itself by bringing you customers you are not going to get without participating online. Request more information on NetBizScore and we will schedule a free consultation to discuss your goals and a level of service that works for you. 

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    Track the trends in local search on our blog, and learn more about why NetBizScore is a vital part of any small business strategy. 

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