Your website is probably the first place that people are going to get information about you.  But its very likely that they will first find you through local listings.  There are dozens of sites that index local businesses.  Often those sites scrape the web to build their databases, and they may be old and out of date.

You want to make sure that your listings are up to date and correct.  Also, many of these site are considered high authority sites by google and you want to make sure that they have a link back to your website.  The sites covered include Google+, Foursquare, Facebook, Superpages, Infogroup, Localeze, YP, Factual, Citysearch, BestOfTheWeb, Bing, Yahoo, HotFrog and Acxiom.

Enter a tool from MOZ – Moz Local.  For $84/yr (at the time of writing), they will keep these listings up to date for you.  But, if you don’t want to spend the money (and maybe your information doesn’t change that often) they have a free tool that will check the most popular sites with local listings and give you a report of which ones are inconsistent or which have missing information.   You don’t even have to give up your email address to use it.

Before you use it, you want to get five pictures ready for upload.  Different sites will allow you to upload varying numbers of pictures and five seems to be the maximum, so be prepared.   Then click on this link for Moz Local, enter your business name and zip code and check the results.  From there, you can visit any pages with incorrect information and update it.

Easy!  By adding the pictures, you will look more professional to people finding you on local search nd it will probably give you a nice boost in the search engine rankings as well.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.