As you may have learned, local listing services are not all alike. With annual costs ranging from $85 to $297, who can you trust with your listing? Can you trust the local directory listing results? In short, NO! The majority of the time their results are almost 100% inaccurate. Moz and Yext are companies that often work with very outdated NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) data. For example, we had a company that merged its two business listings into one on Google Plus. Six months later, their listing still shows as a duplicate on Moz.Local-directory-listings

Of course having your NAP listed accurately across all listings is key, and for a storefront, it’s easy. For an online business, not so much. As long as whatever you put is exactly the same across all directories, you’ll be fine. For example, for an online business where an address is hidden, always use the same name, city, zip and phone number. For a storefront, use the full NAP.

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind, if I haven’t scared you off from hiring a local directory listing company:

  1. If you have never created your own local listing with ANY of the local directory listings, then using a Local Directory Listing Service is a good idea.
  2. If you have created your own local directory listings with YP, Yahoo, Bing, Google+, Foursquare, you probably realized that each interface has different field requirements. Google+ allows you to hide your address, if you’re an online business, yet YP does not. This creates different data about your businesses being passed to all of the major data aggregators and creates false negative citations about your business. Signing up with a Local Directory Listing Service will NOT solve this problem, UNLESS the service has partnered with ALL of the 4 major data aggregators, updating the data at its source. Even still, it may be virtually impossible to every local listing directory, because some are created without your input.
  3. BEFORE signing with a Local Directory Listing Service, I recommend that you try to clean up the data first. By going to each of the 4 major aggregators and making the necessary changes so that all your listings match. They are listed below. It’s a pain, but well worth it. Once you upload your location data to their systems, they will feed your business listings across the ecosystem. So what is a major data aggregator? There is an excellent post written on Moz.com that really breaks down what they are and how they work.
  4. If you are trying to correct listings, you must have realistic expectations. There is a convergence of data in the ecosystem, and you will most likely always deal with errors. The ones that matter start with Google+ and go downhill from there.
  5. If you are still interested, when choosing to work with a local listing service,  make sure they have the following aggregators listed on their sites. If they only represent 1 or 3 of the four, the data from those not listed could override the others.
    • Infogroup
    • Neustar / Localeze
    • Acxiom
    • Factual
  6. If you can make sure that you’re listings in the top 30 directories are NAP accurate, don’t worry about the rest! Whitespark offers the most up to date top directories (citations) based on category of your business.