As most companies with an online presence already know, your Google+ Local listing is a vital part of your web advertising campaign. But, unfortunately, it’s one of the trickiest to handle. With Google’s quality guidelines undergoing constant revisions, your listing is at risk for receiving a violation—and all the negative consequences that go along with it.
At Prospect Genius, we deal with Google each and every day, and, with the help of our in-house Google expert, we’re able to stay in the loop about all of Google’s updates and how they might affect your online advertising efforts.
Perhaps one of the most important steps you can take to ensure your Google+ Local listing is active and displaying the correct information about your business is to make sure that your online presence is consistent elsewhere. How can having the same information on other sites affect your Google+ Local listing? Well, because Google uses information from all over the web to check your business’s listing. That’s because if Google only used the info submitted through business accounts, they’d end up with a ton of false and spammy listings. To guard against this, they gather data from all over the web. If this process doesn’t give them a good enough picture of your business, they might even call you up to verify the accuracy of your info!
So, how can you work to make certain your online identity is consistent?

• The first, and most important, step is simply ensuring that you’re promoting all the same information online. That means using a consistent URL, phone number, company name, and address in all of your web marketing and online advertising efforts—and making sure that your online advertising company is doing the same thing.
• You’ll also want to make sure that the information displayed on your website and the information on your Google+ Local listing is the same. It may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised! We come across this problem with clients all the time!
• Stay on top of company changes. If your business has moved, changed its name, switched phone numbers, etc., be sure to update that information everywhere it appears online. Having conflicting info on the Internet will only undermine your chances of online advertising success.

It’s for these reasons that we routinely emphasize the importance of having the same person or company managing your website, Google+ Local listings, and directories. Many businesses run into problems with inconsistent information when they hire more than one online advertising company or switch from one to another.
Don’t know what type of information is floating around about your business? If you’re like many companies, you’ve worked with so many different online advertisers, you don’t know what info is out there about your business, or where to start to find out… The first step is actually pretty easy: search for your business right in Google! But if you don’t have the time to sit down and seek out what info is floating around about your company online, Prospect Genius can actually do it for you. Our convenient WebFax® Report combs the web and creates a report of all the listings related to your company. Rather than sifting through pages upon pages in Google to find this info yourself, you can let us do the work and then just look over one simple report.
Dealing with a mess? If you’ve discovered that your online presence is anything but consistent, it can be hard to know how to go about cleaning it up. Unfortunately, the process of removing inaccurate information from online business listings can be a huge drain on your time. Many directories don’t allow you to simply delete old listings, and others use a written removal request process that can take weeks. But you can save yourself time and hassle by letting PG do the leg work for you. With our CleanSlate™ Program, often used in conjunction with a WebFax Report, we will slog through all of the necessary steps to remove your business’s old or inaccurate information from the web. Once we have completed our job, we’ll even provide you with a report summarizing the results.

Why It’s Worth the Trouble

Sound like a lot of effort to go through just to maintain a consistent online identity? Wondering why you should bother?
Well, the answer is easy: Not only will a single online identity help your Google+ Local listing, but it will also assist your customers, so it works doubly to help your company.

• Once you have a single online identity, Google will give your business more value. That’s because they’ll have less trouble verifying that your Google+ Local listing is accurate and that your website is a quality resource for searchers.
• By maintaining consistent information everywhere on the web, you’ll also benefit because potential customers will no longer be directed to old phone numbers or dead URLs. Think of all the business you could be missing out on!

With a single, consistent identity on the web, your online advertising tactics—and your company as a whole—will simply have a greater chance of success!