Local Listing Submissions: Best Bang for Your Buck

[capsquare]

I have a client that has ~30 office locations. Normally, if a business has 1-2 locations then I just submit through Moz Local. However, the marketing director won't approve a $1000+ annual local submissions package.

My question: What strategy or service do you recommend that would allow me to submit these 30 locations to the best directories that I can without spending an excessive amount of budget and time?

More specifically, if you had around 4 hours and ~$300 to spend on submitting 30 locations, how would you do it?

[JoyHawkins]

If it's just submitting new listings and not NAP cleanup you could hire Whitespark to submit them: https://whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-service/#prices

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There Capsquare!

Joy's suggestion of Whitespark might be a good one. They're a very fine company. However, if you've got 30 locations, and let's say you want to submit them to 7 basic places (Google, Bing, Acxiom, Localeze, Infogroup, Factual and YP), at $4 a citation, I'm getting an $840 price tag, so that's not really within your client's budget. And, it doesn't include finding and permanently closing duplicate listings (which, with 30 locations, it's a good bet they've got), remedying existing listings with misinformation, and ongoing monitoring (pretty essential for a good-sized enterprise like your client's). And, of course, 4 hours of your time isn't going to cover citation development/management. So, your client is pretty much putting you in a rather difficult position, because their expectations aren't commensurate with the requirements for managing their business online.

I've been in your shoes, Capsquare, trying to find the right way to educate owners as to the importance of investing reasonably in location data management. It's a necessary investment, and given how search outperforms so many other mediums as a driver of traffic/transactions, it's a smart investment. A single component of citations - reviews - can truly blow away other forms of traditional marketing investments. In fact, I'd suggest you show this recent GetFiveStars post to the client, to give them a sense of why revising their budget to stretch to citation management could result in greater profits for them: https://www.getfivestars.com/blog/google-as-the-new-home-page/

But, I know ... sometimes clients don't get this, despite statistics. It's always worth a try, though.