March Madness. That time of the year when people frantically jot down their last minute picks for the NCAA college basketball tournament. A time when David slays Goliath, or you get too caught up in David and he wrecks your bracket. It’s also a time that makes me think how some people go about selecting teams, and in my mother’s case, pick schools based off the color of their jerseys (a method which apparently works out far too often for her as she’s beaten me many times). So, if picking someone or something based off vibrant colors works for her, then the same can be said for a local listing utilizing photos and other eye-catching tactics to help shoot their business over the competition.
For example, let’s say you’re a small business trying to break ground in the crowded bottled water market. Your water’s taken from a beautiful local spring nestled up high in the Colorado Mountains. You’ve got your website up and running and want to start syndicating your online directories for more exposure. And on the website, you have a gorgeous layout complete with photos, videos and other tantalizing images for the consumer eye. Heck, even the label’s a wonderful mixture of soft color pallets with brilliantly executed fonts for the business logo. So, why wouldn’t you award the same treatment to your online listing?
The wonderful thing about nearly every online directory is that you have so many options to help increase traffic back to your website. It’s a “Use it or Lose it” option that simply cannot be overlooked. You’ve got a stockpile of photos just waiting to be posted on your Bing local listing. Bing allows you to insert a whopping 10 photos per listing! Not only are your photos compiled into a slideshow (a very useful eye-catching tactic), but you can continually return and swap out old pictures for new ones, which by the way, demonstrates business progression.
Let’s pretend your bottled water website even has a well-produced video capturing both the Colorado Mountains and the cool, crisp water flowing from your natural spring. It’d be a crime to omit this from your local listing. Google, Bing and other search engines want you to use as many resources as possible, because it can help push your listing higher up the search engine totem pole.
Who knows, with a more refined approach to online exposure, that same small bottled water business could be hydrating an eventual NCAA champion.
