Should You List Your Business Online?
TL:DR: Absolutely
There are hundreds (thousands?) of places online where you can list your business. A relatively small number of these have some relevance to your landscape design business. Should you spend some of your precious time, or money, on them?
Yes, and here are a few good reasons why:
More clients and traffic to your website. Yelp, Houzz, and Bing Places (among others) all send people to my design business. You want to create, or claim, your listing on these sites. Then fill them out as completely as possible, with pictures, video, and whatever other content they allow.
Send Google consistent information about your business. The MOST IMPORTANT of your business listings, by a mile, is your Google Business Profile (GBP). This is the first place you should list your business and the only listing you should actively monitor and update. When people in your area use Google Search or Google Maps to look for a landscape designer, this listing is what you hope they will see. Your other listings should all be consistent with your GBP. Your business name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and services- wherever you list them- should all tell Google the same things. Google isn’t stupid and can handle some inconsistency. If some of your listings say “Garden Designer Inc” and others “Garden Designer”, that is fine. Sending Google a consistent stream of data about your landscape design business can help increase your visibility, so try to keep variations to a minimum.
Reviews for your landscape design services. Hopefully you are asking people for reviews. Even if you don’t, you’ll get them. But different clients will be most comfortable with different sites. If someone finds you on Houzz, they are most likely to review you on Houzz. Clients looking for something very simple are more likely (in my experience) to leave a review on Yelp. Make sure your business is listed anywhere that a client might want to leave a review.
Links to your website. Every place your list your business will also link to your website. Are these links as valuable as one from your local newspaper or Garden Design? No, but they are free and they are not spam.
Spend some time this winter building out your business listings. (Don’t pay to “enhance” or promote them.) You’ll be laying a good foundation for ranking your website, increasing your traffic from non-Google sources, and you might even get some landscape design clients out of it!
Have questions about building listings for your business? Shoot us an email!
