Did you think that your local business information was the same across all of the local listing sites? If you didn’t set it up yourself (and sometimes even if you did), then it’s probably not. In a recent overview, it was found that Google was not the most reliable source of local business information. It was beat out by both Superpages and Yellow pages. The folks at SearchEngineLand describe the test like this:
Roughly a month ago I spoke with Marc Brombert, the CEO of Implied Intelligence. His company provides a range of data-related services (e.g., enhancement, cleansing, de-duplication) to marketers and publishers. At the conclusion of our call I suggested that Implied Intelligence test the accuracy and completeness of the business listings data on several of the leading local search sites.
Surprise: Yellow pages beat Google for local search
Several weeks later Implied Intelligence sent me the results of its test. They’re a bit unexpected and illuminating. Google, which has probably devoted more effort and resources to local search than any of its competitors, did not come out on top in the test. Overall it placed third. Two yellow pages sites beat it.
Implied Intelligence crawled and hand checked 1,000 independent local business websites in the US (no chains or franchises were included in the test) and compared the information it captured to the data contained on the following sites:
- Bing Maps
- Citysearch
- Dexknows
- Foursquare
- Google Maps
- Mapquest
- Superpages
- Yellowpages.com (YP.com)
- Yelp
What does this mean for your business? It is extremely important that your company is represented accurately on the internet. Nothing deters business quite like calling a disconnected number or showing up at a building that has since been changed into a completely different business.
Directory work can be daunting, for sure, but it is extremely important to get all the right information in the right places.
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