Does anyone use web.com services

[Marketing_Today]

Just wondered if anyone had any thoughts on the services offered with web.com, particularly the local listings service of 525 local directory listings?

Have you had success with using their service like this or not?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There!

I'm so sorry, but I have no experience with this product. Maybe others in our community will?

In the meantime, just a word to the wise: modern Local SEO has moved away from the idea of building hundreds and hundreds of citations as a smart use of time/funding, as when you start talking numbers like that, you are likely talking about very low-quality directories that your customers will never see and that will have little or no effect on your local rankings.

Rather, these days, a typical approach to citation management would look something like this:

First, audit your existing citations by a) doing a lookup of your name/zip on a free tool like Moz Check Listing to discover where you have accurate, inconsistent, missing, incomplete and duplicate listings on the most important general local business data platforms, and, b) do direct searches in Google for your brand name and your industry/geography to see which platforms are coming up in the first 3-5 pages for your searches, again, to discover any missing or problem listings. This combination of efforts will turn up the platforms your consumers are seeing and that are most like having the greatest impact on your local rankings. Likely, were talking about 50 or so citations - not 500 of them, as you can see.

Next, once you've identified all problematic listings from the above 2 steps, you have 3 choices:

1. Correct everything manually, keeping track of all of these listings in a spreadsheet, including columns for the data they contain, their location, their status and any user/passwords you were obliged to create to set them up. Then, on a regular basis, you will want to manually monitor these listings for any changes that might occur (automation of bad data or third party edits).

2. Pay someone to do everything in option 1 for you, including the ongoing monitoring of the listings.

3. Use a citation management service. You might like to check out Moz Local if you've not done so before, as this is our product designed to manage your citations and monitor them on an ongoing basis for any changes. Moz Local covers the most important general platforms, and you might want to back this up with manually managing a handful of other citations if there are major industry-specific platforms in your industry (like Avvo for lawyers or ZocDoc for doctors). Using Moz Local tends to represent a major savings in effort on your part, and does contain that vital element of notifying you if your listing data changes (as well as other really cool features like review notifications). You might like to compare it to some of the other citation management services out there, like Whitespark or Yext.

In any case, you should not have to worry about hundreds and hundreds of citation regardless of how you approach their management - it's just not going to move the needle. These days, you want to get those core citations accurate, be sure you've dealt with any rank-draining duplicate listings and that you're monitoring your listings for changes. Then, move onto other areas of marketing that require more creative investments: content development, earning and building links, managing your reviews, social participation, offline marketing, etc.

Hope this helps!