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Are Duplicate Listings Hurting Your Small Business?

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Duplicate listings are not innocuous; they should be eliminated.The Problem: Duplicate Listings

Duplicate listings are one of the biggest negative ranking factors in Local SEO. If your business has more than one listing for a single location in an online directory, those are duplicates.

You may think duplicates increase the chances of someone finding you online, but just the opposite is true.

How they hurt

  • Confusion: often duplicate listings display old addresses or phone numbers, or odd variations on your business name.
  • Betting on Chance: which of your duplicate listings will actually be presented to a searcher is up in the air. You hope they see a current, accurate listing but it’s a gamble which one they’ll see.
  • Google's Local Stack displays three listings prominently along with a graph showing where they're located.Reviews: if any of your listings have reviews, they may be split up among your duplicates. One listing may have most of your reviews and the other few or none. If the one with lots of great reviews is not the one shown, those reviews are wasted.
  • Contagion: depending on what site the duplicate listing is on, it can be picked up by others, spreading the bad information even further.
  • Google’s Local 3-Pack: whether you show up as one of the three listings beneath a map in Google is largely dependent on the number and consistency of your citations across local directories. Inconsistent duplicate listings hurt your chances here.
  • Organic local listings: if search engines find your NAP data (name, address, phone) inconsistent across your citations they may not be able to tell which is right. And they may not show you in the organic rankings at all.
Duplicate listings are one of the biggest negative ranking factors in Local SEO.

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Do you have duplicate listings?

Search Engine Land, in their Definitive Guide to Duplicate Research for Local SEO, offers instructions on how to identify duplicate listings. The identification process is an eleven-step manual procedure involving online research and working with an Excel spreadsheet.

If you subscribe to our PowerListings service, we solve that problem for you and automatically discover and highlight potential duplicate listings. You can easily review the potential duplicates and if they’re true duplicates PowerListings will suppress them for you.

Ask us how easily you can sign up for PowerListings.

How to deal with duplicate listings

duplicate listingsThe goal with duplicate listings is to get rid of the one with bad information. Or, if both are accurate, to get rid of the one with the least information about your business. In most cases you can claim the duplicate listing and then you can delete it. (You should also claim the remaining good listing.) The procedures vary somewhat among local sites, but it’s not a very complicated process and is usually easy to accomplish. It takes a few steps, including responding to a phone call or an email from the local site.

PowerListings saves you that trouble and lets you suppress duplicates with just a couple of clicks but admittedly that convenience comes at the cost of a modest monthly fee.

Not showing up when people search locally for what you do? Rank Magic can fix that.

What’s been your experience with duplicate listings? Join the conversation below.

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  • October 18, 2024
    Dr. Anthony S
    Bill provides an excellent service. He is very knowledgeable and very thorough with his SEO audits and he gives clear instructions on how to improve your SEO rankings. Bill is very detail oriented and also very easy to work with. I highly recommend him for SEO services.
    Rank Magic
    Thanks for your kind words, Dr. S. I'm looking forward to continued improvement in your visibility, traffic, and patient growth.
  • April 3, 2024
    Phil C
    Bill Treloar is very knowledgeable about SEO topics. He gave me a ton of information and a To-Do list to make my website better.
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  • May 24, 2023
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    Bill and his team are awesome very thorough and efficient and great following up /customer service.
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    As a website designer, I value the depth and breadth of knowledge Rank Magic offers to give a client the very best Search Engine Optimization results. They not only know this field inside and out but are a pleasure to work with!!
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  • January 16, 2023
    Jamie F
    Amazing Service! Bill and rank magic took my business to the next level by cleaning up my business information across the internet. My google search referrals went up 39 percent in just months of using RanK Magic!
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How to Handle Bad Online Reviews

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Bad online reviews can really hurt.Ouch!

Bad online reviews online may have the power to cost you new customers. And if you’ve ever received a bad review, you’re painfully aware of how that stings — especially for a small business.

Do you have any bad reviews?

The first step to dealing with the problem is knowing it exists. You can check for yourself at the most common sites that post reviews like Yelp, Google Places, Angie’s List, Judy’s Book, CitySearch, and so forth.

One approach we handle for many of our clients is PowerListings. That’s primarily a service to ensure that your NAP (name, address, phone) information is correct and consistent across more than 50 local search engines, directories, and applications. One of the more valuable features is that it lets you check reviews at any of those sites as well.

Contact us to get started with PowerListings.

Oops! You have a bad online review!Gulp! You found one or more bad reviews.

Your first reaction is likely to be angry denial. Stifle that. In a helpful article in Small Biz Trends, Megan Totka discourages your gut reaction to

  • Argue about it
  • Pay people for good reviews to counter it
  • Ignore it

Instead, she suggests that you be objective. If the review is a flamingly irrational rant, it maybe best to ignore it: the tone will convince people it’s not worth serious consideration.

Otherwise, you should respond tactfully and positively. If it’s a legitimate complaint, apologize and try to make it right. You’ll be seen as sincerely wanting to help. That can actually turn a negative review into a positive experience that more than compensates for the initial review.

Oh, no! You’ve got a bad online review! How do you deal with it?

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Become proactive

There are a number of ways you can become proactive and at the same time encourage happy customers to write positive reviews and discourage disappointed customers from posting negative reviews. There are a number of “reputation defense” organizations that purport to fix a problem review reputation, but we haven’t worked with any of them so can’t vouch for them.

Need some personalized help with online reviews? Rank Magic can help!

How have you dealt with negative reviews, and how well did it work? Tell us in the comments below.

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How Reviews Affect Sales for Your Small Business

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Customer online reviews can influence sales.Online reviews are increasingly being consulted by consumers before making buying decisions. It’s important to appreciate how online reviews affect sales.

Here are a dozen reason they can affect your sales.

  1. Local sites featuring reviews are more prominent in search than in the past.
  2. Two thirds of local directory traffic comes from people searching for products & services. (source)
  3. Regardless of your SEO, local sites drive visitors to your site. (source)
  4. Each star in a review translates to 5-9% impact on revenues. (source)
  5. Local independent businesses are the most affected by reviews. (source)
  6. 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision (source) and Forbes says it’s as high as 90%.
  7. People are 63% more likely to buy from a site with user reviews. (source)
  8. Reviews are 12 times more trusted than your web site itself. (source)
  9. More reviews lend credibility to the ratings, driving visitors and sales. (source)
  10. The Harvard Business Review says that good reviews can increase sales 32%-52%.
  11. Negative reviews can cause a drop of 15% in sales (source)
  12. But for an unfamiliar product, even bad reviews can sometimes increase sales. (source)
12 ways online reviews affect your sales

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Do you have a process in place to increase the likelihood of getting good customer reviews? If so, let us know about it in the comments below.

Need better rankings or more visibility in local directories? Rank Magic can help!

If you like our blog, please share that with the buttons on the left or the Click-to-Tweet above. (Thanks)

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Yext Location Platform – Local Visibility on Steroids

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Local Listings Drive Business

Some of the top local sitesLocal listings are vital to all businesses that deal with customers on a face-to-face basis – nearly everyone consults them before choosing a local business. But they’re almost impossibly time-consuming to manage across dozens of different sites. And manage them you must. You may be listed at many local sites you’re not even aware of, because they populate their listings from a number of different sources, and whether your listing is correct or not may be a crap-shoot.

Being Listed Is Not Enough

Too often we see local listings that are incorrect: old phone numbers, confusing variations on your business name, inconsistent addresses. One in every five local searches returns false information, and that hurts your business. Getting them all current and correct is important to do, but time consuming.  And since the information there comes from multiple sources, it can easily change back after you’ve fixed it.
Run a free scan to see how accurate your own listings are.

Yext To the Rescue

Important sites for local search.The Yext location platform automatically syncs your business listings almost instantly across our network of premium sites and mobile apps. You can take control of your listings from a single point to get your basic NAP (Name, Address & Phone) information listed and/or corrected. It happens almost instantly, compared to the common industry turnaround times of days, weeks, or months for changes to appear. And Yext will make sure your corrected information doesn’t get changed back to incorrect versions.

Easily manage your local listings on 70+ local sites.

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It’s More Than Just NAP

We can help you differentiates your business listings with rich content on search engines, mapping services and mobile apps. Many local listings can allow additional information to help your listing stand out from the crowd: photos, logos, staff bios, enumeration of your products and services, promotions and special offers, events and more can be custom tailored and controlled by you. You can update this enhanced content in real time, giving you an unprecedented amount of potential customer engagement through your local listings across all platforms.

And Yext offer tracking and reporting on searches and profile views across our network as well. You can also keep an eye on any customer reviews on these sites so you can address any less-than-stellar reviews.
If you’re a local business, ask us how the Yext platform can help you.
Share your experiences with local listings in the comments below.
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Local Listings are Essential for Local Businesses

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Google’s Pigeon algorithm

Pigeon

The newest Google algorithm update, Pigeon, has put a larger emphasis on local SEO and search. Well-known local listing sites like Yelp, CitySearch and SuperPages are seeing a boost in rankings, which means having listings on these sites is now more important than ever.

The biggest factors in SEO remain unchanged and you should still focus on site structure, content, link popularity and authority. But now a presence in local listings with links back to your website is an increasingly valuable supplement to organic SEO.

Too many local sites, too much inconsistency

Too often we see local listings that are incorrect: old phone numbers, confusing variations on your business name, inconsistent addresses. It’s been reported that one in every five local searches returns false information, and that hurts your business.

Getting them all current, correct and consistent is important but time-consuming. And they’re subject to being changed as the publishers collect information from multiple sources; keeping them correct requires frequent attention.

PowerListings addresses that incosistency

We’re now offering PowerListings — a service to ensure you have an effective and consistent presence on more than 50 local directories, search engines and mobile apps. It: can:

  1. PowerListings local sitesMake sure you’re listed on 50+ local sites
  2. Synchronize them all so they show the same name, address and phone (important for Google rankings)
  3. Allow for detection and removal of duplicates and near-duplicates (also a ranking factor)
  4. Provide you a dashboard where you can see any of the listings anytime and add updates whenever appropriate
  5. Synchronize display of additional information like logos & photos, payment methods, office hours, events, special announcements and more
  6. Monitor your online reviews at about a dozen and a half local sites that publish reviews
  7. Prevent unexpected changes to your listings as the publishers gather information from other sources; always keeping your listings current and accurate

Want to find out how many local listings you have and accurate they are? Run a free scan to see.

Want to explore this in greater depth? Learn more here.

We encourage your feedback in the comments below.