Picture this: a customer in your area picks up their phone and does a search for the exact types of products or services your business provides. Your competitors show up, but your business is nowhere to be seen… spooky, right?
Key Takeaways
- Accurate online business listings help local customers find your business, contact you, and learn about your products or services.
- Incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent listings can hurt your online visibility, confuse customers, and cause you to lose business to competitors.
- Online listings remain essential for local SEO, even as more consumers turn to AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT.
- Consistent business information across directories helps build trust with customers, search engines, and AI models.
- Regularly monitoring and updating your listings helps ensure your business information stays accurate as details and platforms change.
- Hibu's Listing Management solution keeps your business information accurate and consistent across the web as part of a fully managed digital marketing strategy.
This isn’t just a scary story we made up. This is a real scenario for plenty of local businesses who don’t keep their business listings complete and accurate online. That’s because when one listing site shows one thing, and another shows something else, and your website shows yet another, Google (and other search engines) doesn’t feel confident recommending your business to searchers.
Now, you might be thinking that search is evolving away from traditional search engines and more toward LLMs and AI models (like ChatGPT), but that’s only the case for about 37% of searches. Plus, studies show that 21% of ChatGPT users switch to Google to verify information after making local searches.
So, when your listings are missing or inaccurate, your business is essentially floating around the internet like a ghost… It’s there, but most people can’t see it.
[Related: Free Guide: Taking Control of Your Online Reputation]
Online listings aren’t dead
Your online business listings are the profiles about your local business that show up when someone searches for you online. They include things like:
- Your business name
- Address
- Phone number
- Hours of operation
And they can be found on sites like Google Maps, Yahoo!, Bing, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, and even more directories and platforms. And 61% of consumers use business information sites just like these to find information about a local business that is new to them or that they have not used before.
While online listings might not be one of the flashiest parts of digital marketing, they provide essential information that your customers rely on.
And they are most definitely still alive and well.
[Related: What Is Local SEO?]
What happens when your listings haunt you
Becoming completely invisible online is one of the worst things that can happen to your business if your listings are left unchecked, but there are plenty of other ways inaccurate or incomplete information can come back to haunt you:
- Wrong phone number: Say a customer tries to call your business and gets a disconnected line or someone else entirely, they’re likely to hang up and move on to a competitor. Research shows 75% of consumers decide which business to use in under 30 minutes and 28% decide in under 5 minutes.
- Outdated business hours: Nothing frustrates a potential customer quite like showing up at your business only to find the doors locked when your listing said you’d be open.
- Old addresses: If your business has moved but your listings haven’t, customers could end up at your old location instead of your new one… talk about a wasted trip!
- Missing or inaccurate services: If your listings don’t accurately reflect what your business offers, you could be missing out on customers searching for those exact products or services.
- Duplicate listings: Having multiple listings for the same business can confuse both customers and search engines, especially when they contain conflicting information.
- Inconsistent information across sites: When your business details don’t match across different platforms, it can make search engines less confident in your information and leave customers wondering which details to trust. And 62% of consumers said they’d avoid using a business if they found incorrect information about it online.
And accurate information is important for LLMs and AI models too. Research tells us that business listings are in the top three local search sources for ChatGPT, but only 68% of business contact information on ChatGPT and Perplexity matches details on Google Business Profiles.
[Related: Why Seemingly Small GBP Errors Have Big Consequences]
Accurate listings help customers find and choose you
When you get your listings right, you’ll no longer be haunting the internet. Your business will be more visible when customers search for what you offer.
Accurate online listings mean customers can quickly:
- Confirm where you are
- See when you’re open
- Determine what you offer
- Know how to contact you
And they don’t just benefit your customers. Accurate listings across the internet give both search engines and LLMs more confidence in recommending your business to customers searching in your area.
All in all, 96% of consumers think it’s important for a local business to actively manage its online presence. It really just makes your whole digital marketing run as smoothly as possible.
[Related: Hibu is Making Sure Your Small Business Stays Visible in AI Search]
Your listings need more than a one-time setup
Something to remember about your online listings is that they require some upkeep in order to stay accurate. Going to be closed for a holiday? Your listings need updated. Changed your hours for the slow season? Change your listings to reflect that. Moved your business to a larger space? You guessed it… Your listings need updated with the new address.
And it’s not just your business that’s changing. Search engines and online directories are also constantly updating their platforms. Information can be changed, removed, or duplicated without you even realizing it.
Which is why setting up your listings and forgetting about them isn’t enough. You need to regularly monitor them and keep your information up to date to make sure customers can find you, contact you, and trust what they’re seeing online is accurate.
You don’t want to just disappear without a trace.
Check to see how your info is showing up across the web.
Hibu can manage your online listings, so you don’t have to
If you want to make sure your local business doesn’t pay a visit to the internet afterlife, keeping up with your listings is absolutely essential… even now when AI and LLMs are changing search.
But we know you already have a lot on your plate as a local business owner, which is why Hibu can handle correcting, protecting, and managing your listings for you.
Better yet, Listings Management is just one part of the Hibu One platform. When you partner with us, you get a fully managed digital marketing strategy that also includes:
- A custom, professionally built website
- Review and reputation management
- Automated email and text marketing
With the option to add on:
- Search, display, and social ads
- Organic marketing
When all your marketing is managed in one place, you don’t need to worry about disappearing when customers come looking.
Ready to learn more about Hibu One? Take a self-guided platform tour now or contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation with a digital marketing expert.
