Tell Your Story With A Powerful Business Description

By this point you probably have started submitting to online directories and you know how important it is to have a powerful business description, but what does that mean exactly?

You want potential customers to get the right impression when they see your business description. It is necessary to make a personal connection with them by making it personal – it’s your business. One way to do this is by talking about your community. This is your chance to stand out and be unique.

Ask yourself: “What is unique about my town, city or market area?” Then try to work it into your description – and don’t forget Keywords.

In my community of Missoula Montana we love dogs. So here is what I came up with for one of my descriptions:

“Our mission at Missoula Green Carpet Cleaning is to provide residential and commercial customers with a healthy and eco-friendly alternative to carpet and upholstery cleaning. Some of our specialties include pet urine and odor elimination. This has been especially important to the Missoula “dog-community”. Our pets are part of the family and sometimes these family members have accidents. You can count on Missoula Green Carpet Cleaning to remedy these unfortunate incidences. Give us a call today.”

How To Spy On Your Competition And Capture Their Citations

A while back Google stopped showing the Citation sources on Places pages. This is too bad because it made it very easy to search out high ranking competitor Citations and then try capture them and use them for your own business.

Well, all is not lost. In fact, you can still do it and do it better than before and it’s so easy that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. If you want to spy on your competition, simply enter their phone number into Google and see what comes up. Do this for every competitor that ranks above you and then try to capture as many identical sources as you can. Of course many of their sources may be weak and non-descriptive so this is your chance to do it better than them.

Remember that when creating Citations for Google Places ranking it’s always important to do each one completely,  individually and manually. That ‘s what what Google wants and that’s why automated systems just don’t work well.

How To Clean Up Inconsistencies With Google Places

Having consistent business name, address and phone number listings across the Internet is VERY VERY important for your Google Places ranking. Many times you do everything right and you still can’t seem to rank above weaker competition. Why is this? There can be several reasons why, but most likely your business has inconsistent information and Google is confused and a result you don’t rank as high as you deserve.

Follow these 4 steps to clean up inconsistencies:

1. Do a free checkup on http://yext.com. Just use the free service as a checkup tool. This will give you a quick and easy snapshot of your business across 10 major online direcotires and may reveal incorrect business info that needs to be updated. It is not necessary to sign up for the paid service.

2. Separately Google your business name, address and phone number and make notes on any inconsistencies. This should be an organized list that shows any incorrect information. It’s also a good chance for you to see your current Citations and possibly improve company descriptions and profile data.

3. Register your information with the following info websites. Why do this? Much of the online information about your business is automatically scraped together by different sources on the Internet. These three websites store data that many websites and directories use to compile information on your business. Sometimes you will find information on your business that is incorrect and there is seemingly no way to change it. It’s most likely that the data is automatically being pulled from one of these three sites.

http://localeze.com/ (free)
http://www.expressupdateusa.com (free)
https://www.ubl.org (paid)

4. Wait 90 days, then manually correct ANY and ALL inconsistencies that you possibly can.

Sounds easy right? Well just like most things worth doing, this is hard work. If you hire it out you better make sure they do it right the first time. Sloppy work will result in wasted money and wasted time.