BrownBook is just one of the sites you will visit when you are catching up on your local listings! One of the most important basic processes for winning the visibility wars in local SEO and search marketing is doing a decent, consistent job of your local citations. Even up here in Carlisle or across in Newcastle, there’s a gajillion different possibilities for these. They range from the well known Yelps, FB pages, FreeIndex and Foursquares to the slightly more obscure, such as Fyple and Yalwa.
Then there are locally relevant listings that might be found on the Cumbria Chamber of Commerce, or it’s equivalent in the North East or over the Border. There are many other local listings that give you relevance. In Cumbria they might include Stanwix.info for north Carlisle businesses, In-Cumbria, Carlisle Ambassadors or maybe the local Cumbria chapter listings of BNI.
It gets more entertaining! Every market has its own set of industry directories from the Society of Will Writers through to the Chartered Institute of Marketers (CIM). It would be nice if they all behaved consistently – but that would be too easy wouldn’t it!
What’s the Point of All These Citations
There are a whole stack of different reasons for getting your business’ local profile on these citation sites.
- First and foremost it’s to spread your footprint far and wide across the Internet
- Second they can send visitors to your website and increase your chance of getting a new customer
- Third for the SEO nerd in me is the fact that many of these sites give you a backlink to your website
- Having consistent citations increases the confidence of the search engines that your business is indeed genuine and located where you say it is
- Up to date and well completed citations also give a message that you are taking care of your digital presence and that you are a serious business
Many of the listing sites give you the chance to upload photos and videos, special offers and richly “crafted” descriptions which can bring your buyers to you and increase the seo value of your digital presence. So don’t lose the will to live as you start working through them – persist and then you can get on with the really effective stuff – winning links!
What’s So Quirky About BrownBook
BrownBook is one of the more powerful and most editable of the slightly “off the mainstream” directories. It was probably built on state of the art software years ago when it was new, but it has been chronically under managed and under funded for years and things were starting to get quirky! A recent update seems to have made it almost impossible to create a descriptive text in the listing and I had stopped using it for new listings or even checking for changes. That was until a couple of days ago. ALmost by accident or possibly through a cunning upgrade by its webmaster I found I was at last – after over a year, able to edit a textbox again. I’m easily pleased – I admit it! 🙂
Anyhoo… the video below shows how to access the fearsome editing capabilities of the BrownBook text box!
Well hopefully that’s made one tiny bit of your online life simpler. If you would like to know how your local digital marketing efforts stack up…
Find Out Your Local Score
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