Updates are important for every local search site. Giving your customers new toys to play with, or in the case of Local.com, giving them better sustenance with their listing can go a long way to making a local search site more user-friendly and appealing.
I was giddy with excitement today to find out the one area lacking in Local.com’s previous version, the business description’s limit, has been freed from the 155 character shackles and given room to breathe. How much room has yet to be determined, but so far, it’s more than enough to insert the necessary information about your business. With that much space, your description can be given some much needed SEO keywords, phrases and other strategies to call upon a customer’s keyboard stroke against the search engines. Not only that, but the general layout for entering information has dramatically improved, making it easier to fill every required category with ease.
For example, nothing creates a bigger headache than a local search site that completely erases everything you entered from the previous page of your listing. A majority of online directories are pretty good at saving your previous information, but for some reason, there’s a couple out there that love to play Houdini and just decimate the information you spent a good amount of time entering in. Local.com’s new version was never the case. In fact, if you took a break from finishing the listing, the session itself will time out, but one click backwards will happily return your ammunition.
Also, finding an optimal way to categorize your business has been cleared up. Nearly identical to Google’s outstanding setup, Local.com suggests a myriad of possibilities, letting you decide exactly which customers you’re trying to flag down.
Same goes for the Services, Products and Brands sections. The previous version gave you tiny boxes to cram in what your business offers, but the outcome looked like a bunch of fragmented words packed inside a sardine can. Now you have individual sections allowing you to easily see everything you’ve entered. Plus, the space itself is just as liberating as the business description.
Again, the format almost reminds me of Google Local, but imitation is a form of flattery. And seeing how important and effective putting your listing up on Google is, well that’s just another step in the right direction for visibility.
Update done correctly? That’s an emphatic “yes”.
