Directory Listings – Rallio – Social Media for Franchises, Small & Local Business

When it comes to reaching local customers, it’s imperative that your online business listings are up-to-date and consistent across the web. That’s easier than said than done unless you have the right technology helping you manage your online listings.

Rallio’s Business Listings technology makes the task quick and painless, letting you update your listings in just a few clicks. Before we get into that, however, let’s talk about why you need your online business listings to be correct in the first place.

What Are Online Business Listings?

Online business listings, aka directory listings, encompass all the different places where your business information — such as address, website, phone number and business hours — shows up online. That includes search engines, social networks, online directories, as well as certain apps and websites.

When your customers conduct a search through one of these mediums, either for your specific business or businesses like yours based on key search terms, naturally you want your business to show up in the related search results. With correct, consistent online business listings for your business, you’re more likely to appear in those results and reach your desired customer right at the moment they’re searching for you — often from their mobile phones when they’re on the go and ready to pay you a visit.

On the flip side, if your business information is out of date or inconsistent — maybe you have a couple of different addresses online — it makes your business less likely to appear in search results and also makes it harder for people to find you.

Clearly, then, it’s to your advantage to make sure that your business information is correct, everywhere it’s listed online.

Why Does My Local Business Listing Matter for Search?

With more and more people conducting searches from their smartphones, it’s crucial that your business is findable in search results. Imagine if you’re on the way home from work and have a craving for tacos. The quickest way to satisfy that craving is by typing a search into your browser or using voice search to locate the best tacos nearby.

The same is true whether you sell tacos, or luxury bedding, or wide-width shoes, or pancakes that look like celebrities, or injectable vitamins. People want to find what they want, when they want it, right then and there. According to a Hitwise “Consumer Insights Report,” “Mobile devices now account for a majority — or near majority — of online searches for almost every major industry.” The Food & Beverage industry alone accounts for 72% of searches conducted from a mobile device. The Health sector is a close second at 68%.

This means that no matter what your industry, your business needs to be thrown in the mix of search results for you to be considered by mobile searchers. Otherwise, it’s like you don’t even exist.

Particularly during the pandemic, when business hours may have been affected, it’s important to have a way of quickly communicating any changes. You don’t want a customer to drive all the way to your store if you’re closed, leave angrily, and maybe even leave a negative online review about you without even setting foot in your doors.

That brings us to another point. Your local SEO depends on much more than just your search rankings in Google. Online reviews, online business listings across the web, GPS services, social networks and more all play into your local SEO success.

In other words, you can’t focus solely on Google and Google My Business — which, while important, are just one aspect of your overall directory listings and local search functions.

Side note: As we discussed back in March 2020 when the pandemic first impacted businesses, GMB isn’t immune to technical difficulties. At that time, Google had announced that some of its GMB features had been suspended or limited, including new reviews, replying to reviews and Q&As. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that you can’t rely on any one particular way of doing things if you want to survive in business. It’s so important to be able to pivot — and, in this case, to continue utilizing other review platforms.

What’s the Answer?

To have the greatest impact in searches across the web and turn local searches into real business, you need all of the following to be true:

You’re listed in as many online directories as possible.
You’ve removed any incorrect information about your business online.
You’ve also added or updated any information about you to make sure it’s the most accurate, up-to-date information available. If your business is operating under limited hours over a holiday weekend, for example, customers can easily find that out through local search.

To make the statements above true about your business, you can’t rely on manual methods of refreshing the information. Oftentimes, business information is added or updated without you even being aware of it — for instance, directory listings may be created from publicly available sources such as tax forms or government records.

To try and manually keep up with each and every instance of a change to your business’s online directory listings would be — well, exhausting, time-consuming and downright undoable as a busy entrepreneur. Plus, there’s a risk of making errors or omitting key details if you manually input the information. As mentioned earlier, having inconsistent information can be just as bad as having no information at all.

Makes Sense. Now What?

There’s a better way to manage your online business listings, and it doesn’t involve wearing down your fingertips as you try to type in your information on every directory listing site or app.

Save your digits and use Rallio’s Business Listings tool to create, correct and optimize your listings across all the different websites, apps, services and social media platforms. With our tool, you can easily:

Manage your business listings across global business locations from your desktop or our mobile app, in just a few clicks — with access to over 30 listing sites
Promote your brand across social media, search engines and voice search
Update your logos and imagery for a consistent brand image
Measure and optimize the channels that have the greatest impact on your customer acquisition efforts

With a partner like Rallio and our technology in your pocket, it’s much easier to find and retain your local customer base. Request a free, no-obligation demo to learn more about how we can help you make sure your online business listings are working hard — so you can focus on working hard for your business.

Take out a pen and paper, please — or just your laptop. It’s time to do a quick inventory on all the things your social media company does for you. Or, if you’re doing it yourself, write down how you’re managing your social media presence.

But first, an analogy. (It’s food-based, of course, because we care deeply about our snacks at Rallio.) Here goes.

When you pour yourself a bowl of cereal, you put milk on top, right? It might be regular milk, oat milk, almond milk or whatever type of milk you prefer — but you probably don’t serve your milk on the side.

That is, eating your cereal and milk together makes perfect sense. If you were to take a bite of cereal and then take a sip of milk, well, that would just be weird. Someone would have to make a Netflix miniseries about you.

It’s like peanut butter and jelly. Spaghetti with spaghetti sauce. French fries and ketchup (or your dipping sauce of choice).

Is anyone else hungry?

Now Think About Your Social Media Company

How does this analogy apply to your social media company? The thing is, you want your social media company to do more than just social media posting. For purposes of this article, we’re discussing why you need your social media company to handle your directory listings, too.

Why is this important? Let’s break it down!

Directory listings in the palm of your hand. — Rallio’s directory listings service makes it easy to update your business information across the web in seconds, with one simple login.

Why You Need a Directory Listings Service

Now more than ever, people are searching for your business or businesses like yours. Somewhere on your list of social media to-dos, you need to make sure that your business listing is correct so they’re able to find you.

With a directory listings service, you can make sure all your information is correct across the web wherever it appears.

This is especially important right now during the COVID-19 crisis as people search for the most up-to-date information about your business. If you have temporarily modified your hours, for instance, you can update your hours using the directory listings service.

Without this type of service, you would need to manually update your information across the web wherever it appears. And that’s assuming you’re even aware of all the places it appears. Nobody’s got time for that!

Why You Need a Social Media Company

Now let’s consider why you need a social media company. Managing your social media presence requires hours of time, effort and resources.

As we point out in our article How to Manage Your Social Media Expectations Vs. Reality, social media management cannot be accomplished in one or two hours a week. Your pages require constant daily attention, and it’s not generally something most business owners have time to manage.

That’s because for a page to be successful — and by successful, we’re referring to certain social media metrics you should be tracking for ROI — your list of social media to-dos should include the following:

Posting and boosting hyper-local content that’s non-promotional and specific to your business
Creating and boosting events
Running page promotions, offers, like campaigns and other promotions
Building relationships with your followers by engaging with them, asking them questions and getting to know them like you would in real life
Responding to comments, questions and direct messages on your page
Responding to reviews

Does that sound like anything you have time to do? Or would that time be better spent focusing on running your business?

By outsourcing your social media, you can lean on experts who eat, sleep and breathe social media on a daily basis. They’re always up-to-date on the latest technology, the trends in social media and any upcoming changes you might need to know about.

Basically, they’re going to stay on top of all aspects of your social media — one of the most important elements of your overall marketing strategy.

A social media company that does directory listings, too. — Does your social media company do directory listings? Visit rallio.com to learn how you can have one login, with one vendor, for all your social media and directory listings needs.

Learn more: Should I Outsource My Social Media? 6 Questions to Ask Yourself

Why You Need One Vendor for Both Directory Listings and Social Media

Last but not least, we ponder the question, why do you need one vendor for both directory listings and social media? Here’s where we get back to that bowl of cereal.

If your directory listings and social media services are separate, it creates a disconnect. Although your listings service might update your information online, it’s not going to convey that information for you via social media.

Let’s say you change your hours. You update that information through your listings service. However, your social media posts don’t communicate to your audience that you’ve made the change, why you’ve made the change and how long this change will last.

When your listings service and social media company are in the same “cereal bowl,” so to speak, they work together on your behalf to make sure your audience has the most current information.

If you adjusted your hours due to COVID-19, for example, maybe now you’re getting back to regular business hours. You would want to not only update your hours across the web, but also tell your followers. With a combined directory listings and social media provider, that’s all handled for you.

With Rallio’s services, you actually can be everywhere at once. You can manage your directory listings and social media from one simple dashboard:

Your hours, physical address, phone number and other details about your business can be easily updated on over 40 directory listings sites, in just a few clicks.
Using that same dashboard, you can create a post for all your social platforms about your changed hours — maybe a photo of you as the business owner holding an “Open” sign, with a caption that reads, “We’re back! We have resumed our regular business hours and made a few adjustments in-house to account for social distancing and proper cleaning and disinfection.”
Another benefit is the ease of maintaining information across platforms. Instead of franchisees having to log in to six or seven different platforms to update their information, they have one simple login and one dashboard to handle it all — streamlining the process and preventing errors.

Boom. You just updated everyone and, at the same time, gave them the confidence they needed to feel safe returning to your establishment.

With your directory listings and social media management under one roof, you have all elements of your online presence working together on your behalf. And just like that, your cereal and milk are working together!

Ask yourself, how many logins does it take to run my franchise? The answer should be one. Schedule a demo with us, and we’ll give you a glimpse of what we can do for your business.