Promote Your Business Locally (5 of 5)

Even if your business sells products and services nationally (or globally), you should still reach customers in your own backyard. Today, we wrap up our week-long series about local search marketing by providing instructions for submitting your site – at no cost - to business data aggregators and Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs)

What are business data aggregators? In layman’s terms, they’re companies that compile databases of millions of companies (and consumers). Many of these aggregators started in the direct mail days, and they’ve evolved into the twenty-first century. They gather information about businesses from public records and printed Yellow Pages and resell it.

Most search engines and IYPs rely on business data aggregators to supply the core local listings that they provide. Many of these listings are pretty sparse in nature (and sometimes out of date), so they give business owners the opportunity to correct and enhance the information.

Just like yesterday, when we tackled local search engines and review sites, before you begin, be sure to have the business profile data together that you compiled on Wednesday.

Business Data Aggregators

infoUSA: Start at Directory Assistance Plus (www.daplus.us) and use the “Find a Business” function to find your current listing (chances are, they’ve got some information about you on file already). Print out the page with your listing, because you’ll need to reference exactly how they have you listed next. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Update/Add Business” text link. This will pop you over to infoUSA’s site where you’ll want to click the “Change Business Record” button. Here’s where you enter your current listing and then append more details to beef up your business profile.

Acxiom: Go to http://bcb.acxiom.com/start.pl. Once again, you have to know exactly how your listing appears now before you can make changes. The best place to get this is www.YP.com.

Amacai/Localeze: Go to www.localeze.com/manage.

Internet Yellow Pages

SuperPages: This is the granddaddy of all granddaddies – you can enter tons of information here and it’ll show up all over the web. Go to www.superpages.com/about/new_chg_listing.html. You’ll have to have a credit card whose billing address matches the business address (for verification purposes), but they won’t charge the card.

YellowPages.com: Go to www.yellowpages.com/sp/advertise and click on the “Get a free listing” link.

YellowBook.com: Go to www.yellowbook.com/ContactUs.

There are other IYPs out there, but most pull from each other or one of the big data aggregators. We hope this local search marketing series has provided you with the tools you need to be more visible – and make more money – in your own hometown.

Have you missed any other articles in our series on local search marketing? Monday we talked about why it’s important for every business (even those that do business nationally) to be visible locally. Tuesday we covered a simple on-site change you can make to be found in crawler-based local engines.