Blue Tent Marketing

La Mirage Resort Condominiums is ideally located only 5 minutes from Port Aransas, Texas and 25 minutes from downtown Corpus Christi.  With such a great location on the Texas Gulf Coast, this condo resort is an attractive place to spend a vacation. La Mirage approached us a few months ago, and we built them a new Drupal vacation rental site. As always, we recommend doing a comprehensive SEO setup along with their web project, in order to ensure that we’ve done the basic minimal items, along the lines of 301 redirects, xml site maps, and the like, that facilitate a new web project’s ongoing success with the search engines.

This is where things get interesting; La Mirage was having some issues with a rogue owner of 3 units in the complex who chose to manage and market their 3 properties on their own. Showing the initiative that sets Blue Tent apart from your average web company, Tim (the SEM Account Manager assigned to La Mirage) decided to tackle this problem as part of La Mirage’s SEO setup. The rogue owner maintained their own site that was ranking higher than La Mirage on the search engine results page for our client’s own name. After La Mirage became our client, these erroneous search results couldn’t continue. As you can tell, this situation was causing conflicts with customers mistaking the rogue owner for La Mirage.

We’ve talked about the power of claiming your local business listing, and this case was no exception.  When searching local or “Places” listings, the rogue owner was coming up with their contact information even though it was La Mirage’s (the actual condo management company’s) guest reviews, and location page.  After some persistence, we were able to get things straightened out and take proper ownership of the “Places” page.  This one small step, among other things, has already made a difference in the battle for top search engine rankings, moving La Mirage up and correcting the previous misinformation.  Let us implore you one more time; claim your local business listings, if not the competition might swipe your traffic!

How often do you whip out your phone book? I’m talking about the paperback issue with the white and yellow pages. I’m guessing that phone book is sitting on the shelf under your land line collecting dust or its been tossed into the recycling bin. The fact of the matter is in this digital age there is a far easier way to find the phone number or address your looking for. Doing a simple search on your computer or smartphone will deliver results faster than turning the pages of the phone book.

With that said, have you taken ownership of your local business listing?

Taking ownership of your listing is essential! From an SEO perspective there are many benefits to taking that extra step to verify your listings.

• Ensuring that you have the control over all the info that is provided in the listing
• Adding photos with descriptions
• Adding your site to specific categories that ensure you business pops up in common searches
• The ability to give an overview of your business

The list goes on.

Local Results in Organic Search Results

Probably one of the bigger benefits is that when a web search is preformed often times your local business listing will show up in organic search results with your location on the Map. It’s all about visibility!

We have seen amazing results with verifying local business listings for our clients. Take for example a local construction company that we recently provided SEO services for. Their business, Schlumberger Construction, was listed in Google Maps, but was buried on the third page of local listings for “Aspen Construction Companies.” By simply taking the time to verify their business listing on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, we saw not only saw a significant improvment in their local listing (to the #3 position on Google Maps) but we also saw their organic search listing jump to the #2 position on the first page results!

The Mobile Factor

Does anybody call 411 anymore to find a phone number? One the biggest and most beneficial reasons to verify your business listing is to ensure that your business pops up when someone does a search from their smartphone. For example: Say you’re visiting us at Blue Tent Marketing world headquarters and you whip out your phone because you have a hankering for some pizza. With today’s smartphones there is no need for you to search “Pizza in Carbondale, CO” you would just type (or say) “Pizza” and your search query is based on your location! Within seconds, you have all of the closest pizza joints near you served up with maps, phone numbers and even reviews to help you make the most informed decision possible!

But wait, in looking at this list, we couldn’t help but notice that our buddies at New York Pizza are not even listed! And we know they are the closest (and tastiest) pizza shop around. If you haven’t verified your business listing on the major search engines, chances are you’re passing on potential sales.  This is a missed opportunity!

The Visitor Perspective

From a visitor perspective, searching for a business in the local listings is ideal for that quick snapshot of the desired business. Find the phone number you need, a map and pictures of the company, and the address are some of the top level features. An added bonus it the ability to read reviews about the company as well. And if you have a rave review, your voice can be heard in the local listings.

If your are interested in Blue Tent Marketing’s Local Business Listing Services please contact us, we would be happy to help!

Tim Hampton – SEM Account Manager