Your business name has never been more important. Not only because it identifies you as a unique brand to consumers, but because search engines display your business name, address and phone number (NAP) on local search results pages. As a result, having a managed online business listing is not only critical to ensuring your business name and address are displayed correctly, but managing your listing is literally the only way to ensure you rank high on local search results pages.

To really understand how important your managed business listing can be to your business you must have a basic understanding of how local search engines work. Google Places (Maps), Yahoo Local, and Bing Local are the big three local search engines. Each one of these search engines has its own database and encourages people to open an account and post their business listing for free. What the search engines don’t explain very well however is that there is more to ranking on search results pages then simply listing your business on the big three search engines. Since each of these major search engines wants to provide the most accurate and relevant information possible on search results pages, they do not rely solely on their own databases for search results. They pull in data from third-party sources at least every couple of months and compare it to the information they have in their own databases. If the comparative data doesn’t match properly or doesn’t exist at all, the search engine thinks the data they have might be wrong or less important and therefore less relevant. As a result your ranking on results pages can be dramatically affected.

In addition, all the major search engines use programs that scan the Internet collecting data. When these programs find your business listing on other sites it adds credibility and value to your listing within their own database and will cause your ranking to move higher. There are hundreds of local search platforms and other search engines that can become very valuable in helping your business listing rank higher in search results and driving traffic to your website. These other local search platforms and search engines work in essentially the same way as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

To get the most out of your business name remember that your name represents your brand, be proud of it and promote it.

You can learn more, manage and distribute your business listing all across the Internet from here: www.clickfirst.com/biz