Google My Business listing is the Yellow Pages of the internet. It has gained prominence with users favoring “near me” searches. Hence, this list has become important for local search SEO as it presents businesses an opportunity as well as a major challenge for local businesses. You should ensure that your Google business listing is accurate and complete to enjoy ranking in the local pack.
Can Your Customers Find You in Their Hour of Need?
Duplicate and inaccurate listing can wreak havoc with local SEO. In fact, these are the two most common problems that prevent searchers from discovering you. This has made it essential for local businesses to find and correct duplicate and inaccurate Google business listing to increase local Yellow Pages search ranking.
Why Google Business Listing Matters?
If you are looking to give your child a haircut, you can easily feed in the query “hairdressers near me”. This will give you a list of the local hairdressers in your neighborhood. Looking at their address and rating, you can then decide which hairdresser is best suited for your need.
As a part of your SEO plan, you should realize that people who perform local searches for services and products in their neighborhoods are ready to spend. They expect that when they click on a local listing, it will give them the necessary information that they need to decide if the business is right for them. Also, the Google business listing allows them to see whether the business is open or closed at the time of doing the search, and how they can get to the location of the business. Furthermore, these searchers may also want to get in touch with the business to find out whether a certain product is available or call to book an appointment or get a query answered.
Duplicate and Inaccurate Google My Business Listing Impact Your Brand
- New listings are created by those who are not part of your SEO marketing team and you will not know which listing the searcher will be shown
- Inaccurate listing reduce the trust of search engines and as a result, it adversely affects your search engine rankings
- Incorrect listing means prospective customers will not be able to find you and this offers poor customer experience. Hence, you lose revenue and traffic
- Duplicate listings that are inaccurate can easily multiply manifold as online Yellow Pages and directories get data from each other
- Google can penalize you for duplicate listing as it is treated as spam and violates Google’s guidelines. This can result in the whole account being taken down
- Multiple online Yellow Pages means that review equity get divided instead of being focused on a single listing
- Consumers will not know which listing is correct when there are duplicate listings
How Does Local Listing Get Duplicated?
Duplicate listings at a local level can get created in different ways. While you can control some of them, the others are not under your control.
Internal:
Sometimes, different departments of the business end up creating an individual listing as a part of the SEO plan. So, those dealing with social media may submit information to Facebook while the e-commerce and SEO marketing teams may submit the same information to Google, resulting in the duplicate listing.
Aggregators:
Google verifies your location directly, but it also gets data from third-party sites. If there is a conflict in this data, it leads to duplicate listing as each data is treated as a new listing.
Searchers:
Sometimes, even users can create a listing if they want to leave a review, but are unable to find your free business listing. These listings often have minimal data that tends to conflict with the data that you publish.
Finding Duplicate and Inaccurate Listings
To find duplicate Google My Business listings, it is best to use a reliable and free tool like Moz Check Listing. This tool is easy to use and requires you to enter your business name and zip code combination, select the listing type (Google My Business) and finally hit enter. You will find the duplicate listings aggregated in the Duplicates tab.
You can also conduct a manual search of different databases. This is time and labor intensive process as you will have to create variations of your business name, address and phone number to find if there are duplicate listings.
Once your find duplicate listing on Google, you can do the following:
- Close down the listing manually by getting in touch with the platform. You will have to follow the protocol prescribed by each platform.
- Get an automated service, such as Moz Local, to ensure duplicate listings are closed on all major platforms. This method of handling duplicate listing helps you save a lot of time.
Bottom Line
By ensuring that duplicate/inaccurate listings are closed down, you can positively affect your local SEO and search engine rankings, boost user experience, attract organic traffic from search engines and increase your revenue.
