Insight Into Local Search Listing Management - IAB White Paper

[Linda Buquet]

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) just released a white paper titled:
"Local Search: Managing Listings Across Digital Platforms."


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"Ensuring a business appears in local search results is not an easy task, yet it is crucial for both small-medium business and multi-location enterprises alike. Beyond the fact that there are multiple publishers providing a local search service, there are multiple sources that publishers leverage to populate their business listings databases. This means local listings come from structured data sets, versus the standard organic search results that come from extracted website information. While these sources are all working hard to have accurate, complete data sets on local businesses, the way they obtain, clean and normalize the data and their process for providing it to publishers vary.

This complicated ecosystem makes it unclear to marketers what they need to do in order to make sure a business is represented accurately across all the places users are searching. Understanding where consumers are searching, what types of results they encounter and how to work with the different sources that provide business listing information is the first step towards having a quality local search presence."

Overview info here. Download the IAB white paper here.