You want your business to be visible from everywhere: Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Eventbrite, etc. But what most companies don’t realize is how hard it is to manage all of those local citations. One small update to your company’s information, such as a changed phone number, and in an instant, all of your citations spiderweb into a huge list of incorrect information. Today we are going to discuss three ways you can manage all of your local citations (also called listings/directories). You can have them fully managed, partially managed, or manually manage them. Also, check out our article on five local marketing tactics you need to use today.
Bigger companies have their information displayed all over the web. And emerging companies want as much exposure as they can get. When your list of local citations start to become overwhelming, we recommend Yext.
Yext is a knowledge management platform that helps manage a company’s online presence. You can manage your company’s information, monitor and respond to reviews, and integrate with over 150 data platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc. It also provides voice search optimization for voice searching platforms such as Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant.
This company manages all of your listings automatically. If you make one change – let’s say your company decides to change its business hours – you can use Yext to change that small, but crucial bit of information on all of your digital platforms with a single update on Yext. This way you don’t have wrong business hours floating around on certain platforms on the internet.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you cancel your subscription with Yext, you will lose all of your directories. You won’t be able to keep them after, and maintain them yourself.
Yext offers four different plans for listing management:
The emerging plan costs $200 a year. With this plan, your company’s information will be listed on roughly 40 different directories.
The essential plan costs $449 a year. This plan allows your company information to be listed on some of the most prominently searched websites including Google, Yahoo Facebook, and Bing.
The complete plan costs $499 per year. With this plan, your company will be listed on all websites in the emerging and essential plans. You also get access to analytical tools to help you drive more traffic to your company’s listings.
This is the most expensive, and comprehensive plan. The premium package is $999 a year. Your company will be listed on all the online platforms you choose. You’ll receive analytical tools, and be able to keep track of all of your reviews and ratings on each listing. This gives you full control over your online branding.
Yext is by far the most comprehensive listing management tool, but it is also one of the most expensive. If you are a medium to small business, BrightLocal can save you some money.
BrightLocal is another local citation management tool that is a less expensive option than Yext. BrightLocal offers a citation builder to help you manage all of your citations through the platform.
With this option, each listing you manage is $3. Each submission needs to be done manually, but it saves you time from going to each site individually to manage your listing.
You can also pay $65 to have your listings on four major data aggregators: Neustar-Localeze, Infogroup, Acxiom, and Factual.
BrightLocal has many analytic tools, but the citation building service is a separate service. There are different ways you can pay for the campaign, depending on how many listings your business has/wants. For a small number of locations, the price is $3 per directory that you will select for each location.
If you have multiple locations, then it’s worth buying “credits.” These cost $2 per credit, but you have to buy in bulk of 500, 1000, or 2000 credits. One credit = one submission to the directory per location.
The credits never expire, and you can use them again if you need to create another campaign or update/change the data for any of your existing campaigns. If you cancel your plan with BrightLocal, your directories will remain online, they just won’t be updated.
There are three price plans for BrightLocal:
This plan costs $29 per month. With this plan you gain access to many of the analytical tools, and can run reports anywhere from 3-10 times a month, depending on the report.
For $49 dollars per month, you can have access to all the reporting tools as the single business plan, but run as many as 6-10 reports a month, depending on the report. This plan also provides integrations with Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google Analytic integrations.
For $79 dollars a month, you gain access to all the tools offered by the others plans, as well as Google mobile rank tracking, competitor tracking, and full API access.
Maybe your company is small, just starting to list your information, or you simply don’t want to pay the money to have a SaaS manage your directories. That’s totally fine, if you are willing to put a little more elbow grease into your listing management.
Something as simple as an excel spreadsheet can do wonders in keeping your listings organized and updated. Keep in mind, this is going to take a ton more effort to keep everything in order and updated. Here is a good example on how to keep your listing organized in a spreadsheet:
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Managing your listings is a critical part of keeping your online presence accurate and updated. If you are willing to spend the money, we recommend using SaaS managers like Yext or BrightLocal, but if you want to manage your listing on a budget, there is nothing wrong with doing it the old fashioned way. Just make sure you stay on top of your updates. You can download the template to manage your local listing yourself here.
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