How to Claim Your Online Profiles

Online Profiles Help Build Authority

So this week I’m going to cover “How to Claim Your Online Profiles.” It is the second part in my “Crush Your Local SEO” series. The first video “How to Set Up Your On-Page SEO” touched on the elements you need to set-up on your website to maximize your SEO potential. This week, we’re going to discuss a step that will help increase your domain authority.

SEO Makes the Online World Go ‘Round…

For those of you who don’t know, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process of setting up and maintaining your website in such a way that you are easily found in Search Rankings. I’ve started this series to focus on things you can do to improve your Local SEO, which is a niche of SEO that focuses on your appearance within a certain geographical area.

Why Are There Automatically Generated Profiles For My Business?

So, this week I want to discuss the importance of claiming your online profiles. If you search for your business name over Google, or any other search engine, you will probably find a list of business profiles that you did not set up. These are automatically generated profiles. Websites such as Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other online directories generate these profiles for your business. It is very important to find and claim as many of these profiles as you can. This is important on several fronts:

This gives you control over every instance that your business appears on the internet and allows you to monitor reviews, control your branding, etc.
Claiming all of the different profiles and setting up the “Website” portion of the profile will increase the amount of referring domains you have on the internet.
Lastly, it gives you control over your Citations on the various profiles. This is very important.

It’s Important to Make Sure Your Citations Match

That last point is very important. Citations are anywhere that your business name, address, phone number, email, and website address appears on the internet. It is really important to make sure your citations are the same in every profile. This means you need to claim each profile and make sure the business name, address, phone number, email, and website address are the same. Failure to do so can cause confusion with clients, and lower search rankings on Google.

You Don’t Have To Do It All Yourself, If You Have the Budget

I know this can be a very daunting task. I once did work for an auto dealership group and their presence was very scattered across the internet. It literally took me months to untangle all of their profiles and get everything back on the right track. Fortunately there are a number of services out there who will do the leg work for you. I don’t currently have any that I recommend but a simple search will give you several to check out on your own. They all charge a fee for the service, but it does save you the time of having to do it yourself.

So, in summary, it is very important to claim all your online profiles, as well as make sure your business name, address, website address and phone number are the same in each one. Doing so will help to build your referring domains, which will help increase your domain authority, which in turn helps increase your Google Search Ranking. If you have any questions, be sure to contact me, as I’m always more than happy to help out. In the meantime, stay tuned, as I’ll have more posts in this series coming soon.

Till next time!