Accurate business listings such as your name, address, and phone number (NAP), are essential for being found online. For local and multi-location businesses, managing these listings across platforms like Google, Yelp, Apple Maps, and Facebook can either drive customers to your door or send them elsewhere.
Inaccurate or inconsistent information creates confusion, hurts search visibility, and damages trust. That’s why local listings management is more than a checkbox - it’s a foundational part of your digital marketing strategy.
This guide breaks down why listings matter, when to invest in software, and what to look for in a listings management platform, especially if you’re juggling dozens (or hundreds) of locations.
Managing your company’s local listings involves keeping accurate, timely, and easily accessible contact information for potential customers. Thirty years ago, most business owners only had to worry about putting the right phone number on business cards and in the Yellow Pages.
These days, entrepreneurs must keep up with Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing, Foursquare, Apple Maps, Facebook, Twitter, and numerous other online directories.
For these reasons, though, it’s worth the effort:
Having a presence on notable listing platforms is associated with increased profits. Being on Yelp, for instance, often translates into a 5–10 percent increase in revenue for most businesses.
Your company’s Google Business Profile may be the only free listings management tool you need in the beginning, but manually updating and maintaining information can get cumbersome as your online presence expands.
We believe that your company deserves purpose-built listing management software as soon as you start to feel overwhelmed. You and your team shouldn’t have to spend multiple hours each week on these one-off listing tasks. If your business has a few dozen or more locations, trying to respond to reviews alone can consume every second of your already limited time.
Fortunately, an adaptable software provider like PowerChord can provide an intuitive listing platform to make your life easier. As you look for your own software vendor, you might want to ensure it offers the following capabilities.
For clarity’s sake, your multi-location business needs a platform with a centralized dashboard that displays key data. Keeping local listings organized and cohesive gets challenging when marketing teams have to shuffle between numerous screens. PowerChord ensures intuitiveness and easy navigation to pages for individual business locations.
Perhaps the most important capability of listing management platforms is the ability to update business information across multiple channels. Without consistent information across your digital properties, customers will have to work that much harder to find accurate information. Most won’t go through the trouble. You can eliminate that pain point by having automatic syncing through your listing management software.
You’re certain to encounter dissatisfied customers from time to time. While you can’t always avoid negative online reviews, you can control your company’s response. The right software can alert your team to reviews that warrant a response and even draft standardized language for certain types of responses.
Local SEO listing management doesn’t have to fall by the wayside simply because your company has dozens of physical locations across the country (or world). It’s essential to find a platform that allows location-based flexibility for search engine optimization while maintaining consistency across all digital assets. Additionally, task automation can become even more efficient if your listing management software can integrate with AI tools.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. While that may be somewhat of a hyperbole, having metrics is indeed essential for monitoring deficiencies in your company’s online listings.
Your marketing team can identify recurring pain points for potential customers and track feedback trends across multiple locations. Those are just a few of the actionable metrics you can observe with PowerChord’s software.
Accurate contact information is a foundational need for businesses. However, ensuring accuracy across numerous online directories for multiple business locations can be challenging without the right listing management platform. With PowerChord, your marketing and RevOps teams can eliminate these potential weak links in your digital outreach efforts and streamline key tasks to avoid time sucks and burnout.
Starting with our centralized, easy-to-use dashboard, you can keep tabs on every business location to ensure brand consistency. We enable you to automate tasks that can be automated, allowing you to focus on nurturing customer loyalty through personalized touchpoints.
Want help finding the right listing solution for your business? Our team can walk you through options tailored to multi-location needs.
Q: What’s the difference between a business directory and a listings management platform?
A business directory is simply a website (like Yelp or Google Maps) where your business info is displayed. A listings management platform helps you control and update that info across multiple directories from one place.
Q: Do listings affect how well I show up on Google?
Yes. Google looks for consistency in your business information across the web. Inaccurate or conflicting data can hurt your local SEO and reduce your chances of ranking in local search results.
Q: How do I know when it’s time to stop managing listings manually?
If you’re spending more than an hour a week updating info, responding to reviews, or fixing mistakes, or you manage more than 5–10 locations, then it’s probably time to invest in software.
Q: What’s the ROI of investing in local listings software?
The return often shows up in three ways: higher search rankings, better customer engagement, and time saved by your team. Businesses with complete and accurate listings tend to see more traffic and more conversions.