So while I'd rather be blogging about fashion and the latest jewelry designs, I'm still working on fixing all our information in the search engines. I decided to post about it here not so much to complain, but to help other business owners who may end up with the same problem. It also feels good to vent a bit !
Working at this problem 2 days a week, after the first few weeks I'm already seeing a difference in our search results.So lets start with what you don't want to do.
DO NOT DO THIS
Knowing that we were moving I decided to start creating our new internet presence. We never did anything internet before, so I didn't think there was a lot of information on the internet about our company. I also figured the new listings would overrun the old information. This was a huge mistake. The first thing I did was create a Google Plus page for the new business, and a Facebook page for the new business. What's wrong with that you ask ? Nothing at all, but here's how you should do it. LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES AND SAVE YOURSELF SELF SOME HUGE HEADACHES.
Whether you asked them to or not, Google and Facebook probably have a basic page already set up for your business. BEFORE CREATING A GOOGLE OR FACEBOOK page , do a business search on Facebook, and do a business search on Google and see if they have you listed already. If they do , you want to claim those pages, and not create new ones. I repeat CLAIM THOSE PAGES. If you create new pages the search engines will continue to index the old information and you will have two listings, one with good information, one with bad information. Getting these additional pages deleted has proven to be very troublesome. This took several attempts to fix in Google and I'm still trying to figure out how to fix this with Facebook without overwriting our good page.
Here's what you should do !
Find your business on Facebook and on Google, claim the pages, and edit the pages and correct the information. Doing it this way will save you a lot of time and aggravation.
Now for the mapping services. All the search engines basically feed off each other. I decided to straighten out the mapping services, such as Google Maps, Map Quest, Yahoo Maps etc. This did help but Map Quest isn't very helpful on verifying the business. I'm still waiting on getting the information fixed with them. Once you straighten out the mapping services a lot of the listing services will start to fix themselves. This is where a lot of these companies get there listings from.
Next your going to want to get your new address out on the internet. Create a blog, part of the reason we created this. Leave your address on there somewhere in the description, and add it to a blog post. This will get the new information indexed in the search engines, and help push some of the bad information down a bit. This also works with Pinterest, Facebook posts, Google plus posts, etc. DO NOT GET CARRIED AWAY, if you do this too much the search engines will consider it spam and it will be counter productive to what your trying to achieve. Two maybe three posts like this should do the trick. Add your address to your Pinterest description, do a Google Plus post announcing a special offer with the new address, and maybe a Facebook post in the same fashion. THAT'S IT, you can always do more down the road.
Now here comes the fun part. Go to the search engines and type in your business name. Look for the listings that have the incorrect business information. Your looking for places like the Yellowpages, Superpages, Yellowbook, 411, etc, etc. These are all the companies that were kind enough to list your company on the internet whether you asked them to or not. Now you get to claim each one of these listings individually. Some will have a phone number to call, some will have a page to verify your information, and some will just let you change all the information without anyway of verifying whether it's accurate or not. Isn't that lovely !
This is what I've been doing in my spare time over the last several weeks. There are companies out there that claim they can fix this problem for $400.00 and up. However, I decided to go about this on my own. I'm starting to see results, and with a little patience anyone can do this. We now have about fifty percent of our listing accurate, and I'm going to start focusing on this just a couple times a month. I think within the next 6 months, the majority of this problem should be taken care of.
If your business has run into a similar problem, feel free to post any questions in the comments, and I'll see if I can help.
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