Online Citation Building Nightmare

[dalepie]

So i launched my website last week, started building a handful of decent links and getting together all the company NAP citations. Starting to show a little promise and hopefully will rank for the business name on Google soon, a stepping stone on the way to ranking for my money terms.

Had a phonecall from ThomsonsLocal.com an hour ago. To "verify" my listing and make sure all okay. I know that "verify" actually means sell me advertising, been there done that got the t-shirt but good god, I'm not even sure if my listing is approved now?

• I have a lovely website built with backend booking system. Guy trys to sell me "Google official website building" or something.
• Guy trys to sell "Official Adwords" even though i told him i have an account and have 5 years PPC experience!
• Guy trys to sell me SEO even though i told him I AM AN SEO.

Was on the phone 30 minutes and ended up hanging up because i couldn't get a word in edgeways and that's now my problem.

The upshot is that my listing on ThomsonsLocal.com is not live so I can't ping it. Not even sure if i just received a sales call or if that was my verification and the guy just didn't bother updating my details?

Had a similar experience with Yahoo Local Business listings too. Woman was convinced I needed to be in the top 2 listings and ended up hanging up because they don't listen!

Does anyone have any experience with this? Do the listings eventually popup on their own or will i need to re-apply and just sit through the sales pitch again?

 

[fisicx]

Totally confused.

Is it your website or one created by a thompsonlocal?

Nobody uses thompson local or yell or any other lisitng website anymore. It's the search engines you want to be found on.

If you aren't ranking for the business name on Google already then there is something seriously wrong.

Don't pay Thompson a penny - all you are doing is throwing money away.

 

[dalepie]

Totally confused.

Is it your website or one created by a thompsonlocal?

Nobody uses thompson local or yell or any other lisitng website anymore. It's the search engines you want to be found on.

If you aren't ranking for the business name on Google already then there is something seriously wrong.

Don't pay Thompson a penny - all you are doing is throwing money away.

Sorry, i probably didn't explain myself properly.

Ye, i know no one uses Thomsons, Yell or any of the others apart from big G. It's the NAP citations / reviews i'm actually after for Google Mapping (It's a local search term i'm SEO'ing for). Was gonna leave it to just 118information and let the listings trickle down but I thought i'd do a belt and braces job considering the competition i'm up against.

As for my website, it's one i built myself with a little help from a database guy. Nothing to do with Thomsons at all, they wouldn't have the skills to build that kind of site but the sales guy wouldn't listen lol!

 

[fisicx]

OK got it now.

Thompsons et al are a waste of effort. Unless you pay them money your listing is going to be down on page 193. Freeindex is a much better option to investigate.

 

[dalepie]

OK got it now.

Thompsons et al are a waste of effort. Unless you pay them money your listing is going to be down on page 193. Freeindex is a much better option to investigate.

I'm glad of that because this infoserve crowd are a pest!

FreeIndex.co.uk is on the too do list

 

[JonathanSEO]

Still worth submitting to Thompson though just for the NAP like the original poster did. Won't bring traffic but that's not the point.

You get hassle off most of them really to get a featured listing, just got to politely decline.

I wouldn't bother pinging them though.

 

[dalepie]

Still worth submitting to Thompson though just for the NAP like the original poster did. Won't bring traffic but that's not the point.

Just checked and i'm listed. Happy Days

You get hassle off most of them really to get a featured listing, just got to politely decline.

Ye it seemed to work in the end.

I wouldn't bother pinging them though.

Ye i doubt it does anything. It's force of habit really, i don't feel like i've "added" a new link if it's not been pinged .

 

[Lucky7CompSolutions]

I hear alot of people say yell.com is rubbish but if you look at it from a google search point there still there in the rankings in most places postion 1 to 2.
I find people still use yell and if you can get some jobs from it its a bonus.

 

[MarcusMiller]

Outside of the obvious local listing benefits from the citations you can get from these directories we have had some good success with using these listings as a good source of inbound traffic for smaller businesses, you just have to be a little cute in how you go about it.

Firstly, look at the results for the keywords you are going after, are there any listings from yell, yelp, qype, scoot etc?

If so, then you are half way there, just make sure your listing is well put together and spend some time on those descriptions and make sure the listing is put together in a way that you are creating an advertisement for your business and not just dialling in another citation.

if not, then there is chance you could get some additional listings outside of your own business listing in the organic / local results by putting together good listings on the big directories that have some visibility in your niche.

As with anything SEO related, there is a tendency to think about citations from an over simplified perspective where they are just feeding into the local ranking algorithm and that is dead wrong. You don't want to just get more, more, more and you should concentrate on the completeness and quality of the listings. In our experience, if you make some effort with these listings, you can not only get some local improvements but more visibility for your keywords through listings on these 3rd party sites and you can also generate some reasonable referrer traffic and even direct enquiries.

It all comes down to effort. Maintain your primary listings well. Add pictures, solid descriptions, encourage reviews and they can help, especially for smaller businesses with a very specific local area they target. When we see value here for a client we encourage the creation of a review policy where customers are asked if they would not mind leaving a review. Then, for every three reviews that target the Google+ Local page the fourth is directed at one of the relevant directory / citation sites.

Something else we have noticed since the last penguin update a few days back is even more visibility for local results. More seemingly localised organic results and more local listings - be that the traditional 7 pack of local results or even a set of split local results with one, then some organic results, then some more local results.

Many of our local customers have seen a hike of around 20% since penguin 2.0 (4.0?). We have not yet dug into this in any real detail and I am not so foolish as to claim any real insight here into why that may be but certainly, it's a positive for small businesses trying to generate business from search.

As ever, there are a lot of moving parts and every keyword for every business in every area is different but if it seems these listings have visibility or potential for visibility then don't just dial them in and in our experience they can be of great value (especially for the small and hyper local firms).

But, all of that said, yeah, these firms will all try and sell you the premium listing and our take is that in nearly all cases, these are fairly useless.

 

[goomad]

I use freeindex.co.uk it is really good and also freebd.co.uk UK Citations for Local Businesses. Thanks