As fewer and fewer people rely on resources like phone books to find listings for businesses, it becomes more and more important for businesses to ensure that their online listings are up to date. Why? A new study has found the customers who find incorrect information are less likely to use that business.
According to research by Yext, when customers find incorrect information for a business, 15.1% of them end up looking for another merchant. Yext also estimated that when listings are incorrect and customers choose another merchant, it costs retailers and local merchants $10.3 billion annually. Although you might be thinking that your business is safe, you might want to double-check your listings. The study looked at 40,000+ business listings on 50+ local directory sites and found that 43% of the listings had at least one incorrect or missing address.
So, what steps can you take to prevent yourself from losing business?
Double-check your social listings
Start with the easiest listings to check and edit– your social listings. Check out your business profiles on all of your social networks and take the time to make sure that your contact info, address and hours are all correct. If you set up your company page long ago, you may not have even given these listings a second thought. Now is a great time to make sure that they are accurate, just in case any interested customers try looking for your info.
Double-check your web listings
This is more tedious, but it’s essential. You need to doublecheck your business listings across the web. The best and easiest way to find all your listings (complete and incomplete) is to use a service like Yext. Yext finds your listings and lets you know which listings are complete, which listings need some work, and then lets you prioritize and fix these listings as needed. You can even start, and get an idea of what needs to be addressed, with a free scan.
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