Fri, May 20, 2022, 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM PT

Local SEO Guide’s CEO, Andrew Shotland,  and VP SEO STRATEGY, Karl Kleinschmidt, are holding a live event on LinkedIn this Friday to discuss some exciting new LSG research findings that provide opportunities for optimizing how effectively directory listings rank. This live event & research has SEO strategy implications for:

• Directory sites
• SEO stakeholders
• Multi-location businesses

Viewers can expect to come out of the SEO Office Hours session with a better grasp of how to optimize the rankings of directory listings. In addition to a review of the research and three case studies, the event will also feature an AMA portion to answer questions from the audience. You can register for the event and/or submit questions about SEO in general as well as more specific research-related questions for Karl & Andrew to answer during the live stream.

What is Name Consistency Theory & what will we be talking about?

Local SEO Guide has discovered new data insights which suggest that directories gain more search volume when the titles of their local listings match Google Business Profile Knowledge Panel titles. During the course of conducting research, Karl Kleinschmidt analyzed over 500,000 listings and noticed a key association between these two very interesting elements. 

We’re calling it Name Consistency Theory.

The initial hypothesis

• A certain percentage of the directory’s search volume stems from people looking for the businesses in their directory via Google Search.  
• So, if your directory listing information matches what Google has as the business information then you will likely rank higher when someone searches for that entity.

To test this hypothesis we looked at the data for different business directories…

What we found out

In the first pass, we looked at just one business directory and the results seemed to support the hypothesis. We found a correlation between an exact match in the listing and GBP titles and the position they ranked for in Google SERPs. On average, the listings that were a match tended to do much better than those that didn’t match the title and address. 

But, this was only looking at one directory so we had more work to do to follow up on this insight with different directories in different industries. We’ll discuss these findings in more detail during the LinkedIn live stream and walk through all three case studies to reveal what this means for SEO stakeholders, businesses that use directories, and directory websites.

How important is this discovery?

Well, for the first directory alone, LSG found 8851 opportunities where the information found on the Google Knowledge panel didn’t match the information in the directory and impacted rankings.

The findings could be very impactful on the ability of different directories & businesses to seize new opportunities to rank better. What’s more, is that the data so far suggests that few of the directories & businesses examined are noticing or prioritizing listing name consistency. This is costing them visibility across thousands of locations.

Live event registration information

LIVE Event Registration: Join us for the fun on Friday, May 20, 2022, from 10:00 AM-10:30 AM PST. And, don’t forget to submit any questions you may have for the AMA here.

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