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Best Practices for Setting Up a Listing
Best Practices for Setting Up a Listing

Maximize the performance of your btand's visibility

Kate avatar
Written by Kate
Updated over a week ago

Name

  • The business name should match the correctly spelt, real-life name of the business known to customers. Whether it is a storefront or a legal name, it should be consistent across listings because it will help with the recognition of your brand.

  • Avoid any promotional or location information, store codes, etc., or any unnecessary words that can be found in other fields of the location information.

  • Ensure you follow the directory guidelines that may apply to business names.  

Address

  • The address must be precise and accurate because that’s how the customers can find your business. So try to fill out the address fields as correctly as possible.

  • In the Address field, write the street name and the house number. This field should strictly contain the official address.

  • In the Address Extra field, feel free to include any additional information, such as unit number, suite, floor, location references, corner/cross streets, or location mark.

  • We encourage you to check Google's guidelines for more information on how to represent your business on Google.

Phone Number

  • The phone number should match the country code.

  • It is better to provide a direct phone number rather than a call centre number.

  • If you have a local business, consider using a local phone number instead of a toll-free number.

  • If the number changes, make sure to update it across all directories immediately because it can lead to a poor user experience.

Business Category

  • The category helps the customers identify the type of business they are looking at, so be specific and use the most precise category for your business.

  • The primary category is prioritized and should be aligned with your main offering.

  • Do not use multiple categories that mean the same thing. While it's tempting to choose multiple categories to appear in more searches, overuse can dilute your business's relevance and negatively impact your ranking.

  • Think from the customer's perspective and try to understand what category they would search for to find a business like yours.

Website

  • The Website field serves as one source of truth for directories to validate your location data, so use a location page instead of a homepage.

  • Ensure the website URL has “localbusiness” schema markup to provide important information to search engines.

  • Do not provide URLs that redirect to other landing pages.

  • Avoid any spaces and symbols in the website field.

  • Ensure the website URL leads to a mobile-friendly site. A significant number of local searches are done on mobile devices, so a mobile-friendly site is critical.

Keywords

  • Keywords is a great way to improve the location's SEO to rank higher and make it more relevant for local searches. We recommend using up to 10 keywords per location.

  • Use highly relevant keywords associated with the business. It can be the names of the products or services that you provide.

  • Consider creating long-tail keywords. People use them when they're closer to the point of purchase or when using voice search.

  • As a local business, it would be great to include your city or neighbourhood name as a keyword.​

Opening Hours

  • Opening hours are also an important field. Incorrect opening hours cause a large number of rejections and suspensions on Google and similar platforms.

  • The opening hours must match those on the website and those displayed at the physical store or office.

  • Clearly indicate days when the business is closed. And use Special Opening Hours for holidays or closed days.

  • If your business is closed for more than 7 days or closed indefinitely, use 'temporarily closed'. If your business is closed for less than 6 days, set Special hours.

Short and long description

  • The short and long description fields of a business provide useful information about its services or products. These fields may impact your local optimizations of the location, as they may include important keywords.

  • Google allows up to 750 characters for long descriptions. Facebook allows only 100 characters.

  • Include products and services offered at the location and mention your service area.

  • Keep it simple and avoid over-promotional descriptions that could trigger a suspension.

Labels

  • For multi-location businesses, labels help group and sort locations within PromoRepublic. Labels are not published in directories.

  • Labels can be used to group locations according to meaningful criteria such as region, brand, ownership, performance, services offered, or promotion campaign.

  • Use labels to analyze locations' performance within the label.

  • Schedule posts across all locations within a specific label. This can save time and ensure consistency of messaging across similar locations.

Attributes

  • Customers can identify specific features, services, and other qualities of the business through attributes. This helps the business appear in relevant local searches.

  • Attributes are sent to Google, Apple and Facebook. They vary depending on the primary category of the location.

  • We suggest including more than 1 attribute, as it will give you additional opportunities for visibility, especially if this attribute is popular and commonly searched by people.

  • Choose attributes that local customers might particularly value, such as 'Locally Owned,' 'Free Parking,' or ‘Near Public Transit.’

Photos

  • Have at least 10 local photos of the location to cover a diverse range of aspects of your business, including interior, exterior, products or services.

  • Avoid over-editing. Otherwise, photos will look unnatural and misleading.

  • Encourage your customers to share their own photos. These can often provide a more authentic perspective on your business.

  • Keep your photos up to date, especially if your business undergoes significant changes, like a renovation.

Services

  • In this field, provide all the services available at your business separated by a comma. Please note that they should be relevant to your business category.

  • Provide a brief description of each service to give potential customers a better understanding of what they can expect.

  • It is better not to leave this field empty, as it can decrease your business visibility in local searches.

  • Use predefined services instead of free-form text entry. Selecting services from the auto-generated list can help ensure Google trusts them more than typing them yourself.

  • It's crucial to keep the list of services up-to-date. To maintain accuracy and relevance, include seasonal changes or any other alterations in your services.

We encourage you to read about Required Information for Setting Up a Listing for additional context.

If you have any further questions, please contact us at
[email protected].

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