Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes

Yahoo can provide traffic to your site via means other than Yahoo…Even though Google is the big Kaunas.

Fix your Yahoo Listing to fix your Google ranking

If you’ve listed your brick n mortar small business with Google Local (Googlemaps) you’re way, way ahead of the game. If you’ve done so at:

• Yahoo Local
• Bing Local
• BOTW
• Yelp
• Insiderpages

You’re even farther ahead of the game. However: If you’ve moved your place of business (your physical street address), changed your phone number, moved to a new website, changed your url, changed your email address as your company has grown… and failed to update those “lessor” business directories, you could be hurting your Google ranking.

Google does not search the entire globe in .22 seconds, none of them do, they can’t. What Google does do is search it’s Cache and if that cache has the out of date local business listing: well say goodbye to a significant portion of what ever GoogleJuice you’ve built up.

A couple of posts ago I wrote about my problems in getting Bing to update an out of date local business listing, this post is about trials and tribulations of getting Yahoo to fix an out of date Yahoo Local listing.

Yahoo’s a bit  behind Googlemaps when it comes to updating an old or incorrect business listing. So is Bing.

When I first hung my shingle out my place of business was physically located at X, I moved from X to Y, from there to my current location (which is my dream location btw). Along the way I moved from a shared hosting set up on a local portal to my own domain, changed phone numbers  a couple times (am loving my blackberry and looking forward to a Android or Iphone when I make up my mind)

I failed to keep the lessor business listings up to date, and Google is still returning the old data in some of my serps.

Yahoo, Bing and Google all provide free local business listings. Google at least has a halfway decent method in place for you to update/ fix/ appeal if you’ve been demoted etc. Bing has “issues” (they claim to have sorted them out), Yahoo has a method that claims to update in within 5 business days.

To get your business listed at Yahoo Local:
First, head over to Yahoo and click the “Local” button found in the center of the navigation bar.

Check to see if your business is already listed, a customer can add you to Yahoo Local without you doing so. If you aren’t there add yourself, if you do find your company there look for this: “Own this business? Get guaranteed top placement.”

Make sure you fill out every box provided, be as verbose as possible; Search Engines spiders crawl TEXT, they don’t do as well with graphics. Graphics are for the human visitors, you’ve got to please the robot visitors before a human will ever get a chance to see your listing.

You’re going to get a choice of paid or a free listing, if you choose the free listing, Yahoo will send you an email. Yahoo will claim to “review” your listing and get back to you in 5 business days (don’t hold your breath).

If you have outdated information listed and need it updated:

Click on Help and fill out everything they ask, don’t skip anything, remember this is a free listing, don’t give them any reason to ignore your request

Google will spider the old, inaccurate listing and might store the wrong data in it’s cache.

Google has a vested interest in ensuring Yahoo stays afloat: the Obamunists would have a anti-trust field day if Yahoo “went away”.

Search is THE number one ultimate tool that nearly everyone uses virtually every day. “Google It” is now considered to be a verb, everyone knows what that means.

• 80% percent of all internet traffic begins with a search engine; what is more dramatic is that even when users know what they’re looking for many prefer to type into the search box of some search engine rather than type a URL into the browser.
• 73% of internet users perform searches several times a week.
• Local search and local results constitute 84% of total search volume.
• 81% of users begin their internet experience at the search engine.

Astounding Fact: even when people know where they want to go, they still type a query into a search box! The search box seems more inviting than the browser url box, many people aren’t even aware that they can type a url into the browser, the assumption is that a search box is preferable to the browser.

Depending on who you listen to Local Search constitutes between 73% and 84% of TOTAL search volume.

How important is local search to your small business venture:
Old information posted here (from way back in the paleolithic era of internet usage)

Local Search Statistics

• 73% of activity online is in one way or another “related to local content”
  (Google 5/07)
  For every one dollar U.S. consumers spend online, another five or six are going to offline purchases that are influenced by online research
  (MIT Technology Review, April 2005, “E-Commerce Gets Smarter“)
• 97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information online, and of those consumers 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as “Shop Online, Purchase Offline”
  (NPD Group)
• New Research by The Kelsey Group and ConStat Indicates 70% of U.S. Households Now Use the Internet When Shopping Locally for Products and Services
• Findings also suggest the Internet is poised to surpass newspapers as a local shopping information resource.
• 70 percent of online searchers will use local search to find offline businesses.
• The TMPDM-comScore study shows 86 percent of online users will be searching for a local business at some point in time.
  Research by Kelsey Group
• 43%  of search engine users are seeking a local merchant to buy something offline.
• 54%   of search users have substituted Internet/search for the phone book

Source: comScore Networks

The Kelsey Group reports that 74 percent of Internet users perform local searches.

There are approximately 300 million searches per day for information on the Internet
(Nielsen/NetRatings 2005)

60% of activity online is one way or another “related to local content” (Google 5/03)- For every one dollar U.S. consumers spend online, another five or six are going to offline purchases that are influenced by online research
(MIT Technology Review, April 2005, “E-Commerce Gets Smarter“)

97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information online, and of those consumers 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as “Shop Online, Purchase Offline”
(NPD Group)

117 million Internet users accounted for over 3.7 billion searches conducted on the Internet in the month of August 2004
(comscore qsearch, 01/2004-4/2004)

25% of ALL commercial Internet searches are conducted by users looking for local merchants
(Kelsey-Bizrate 2004)

35% of ALL searches are “local”
(DM News)

Source: http://www.skyabovelocal.com/questions/local-search-stats

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