What to do when taking over for EZ Local

[JCL Marketing]

I was hoping to get an answer on what the members here would do if they were taking over for a roofing company that has been using EZ Local for the past few years.

They don't want to continue to pay the monthly rate so I'm hoping to manually submit their info to top 40 or so relevant sites.

Will it conflict with their EZ Local listings. We'll have the same NAP info so I can't imagine it won't and I don't see EZ being too eager to work with us on removing their listings.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated,

Joe

 

[Linda Buquet]

Will it conflict with their EZ Local listings. We'll have the same NAP info so I can't imagine it won't and I don't see EZ being too eager to work with us on removing their listings.

Hi Joe,

As long as NAP is correct, not sure why you'd want to remove any citations and submit new ones. I would just take inventory of any majors they are not listed in and add them there. Then take the extra time you would have spent doing full 40 and add a couple hyper local and industry citations for good measure.

 

[JCL Marketing]

Hi Linda, thanks for the quick reply but I have a few concerns:

1) We don't have any of the login info for these sites and they all have the simplistic EZ Local website attached to them. We'd really like to be able to add their actual site.

2) I'm not sure exactly what happens to the listings once you stop paying EZ. I've had one othe client in a similar situation and they've been particularly troublesome to get ranked on the maps despite ranking first organically.

Thanks again for your time and response.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Do you mean a package that EZ Local put together for your roofer for getting business listings besides just on EZ Local?

I would have the business owner call and get access to those listings. EZ Local has an incentive (namely their brand equity) to hand those over to him. Keep in mind though they may just be reselling Yext, so then there's nothing to "hand over" and you're kind of in for an uphill battle.

Hi Joe,

As long as NAP is correct, not sure why you'd want to remove any citations and submit new ones. I would just take inventory of any majors they are not listed in and add them there. Then take the extra time you would have spent doing full 40 and add a couple hyper local and industry citations for good measure.

I know at first blush that might seem like a good idea but as we've been going through the process, we've changed our tune on this over at Local Listing Ninja.

In general you want control over all of your listings in case you move, rebrand, change phone, etc.

If given the opportunity between having the correct listing information (for now) out there on an island, with no way to change the information vs deleting the information, I would delete the information. I can at least go back in to those sites (more than likely) and add the citations again and now I can control them.

You also never know when a directory is going to go down or stop offering support and now that listing you thought, "Eh, I'll just delete it later if I need to," about is on that directory permanently & wrong. Case in point is Yellowbot. Their call claim service went down a few months ago. Now everyone who has wrong information on there is stuck with it. And the worst part is Yellowbot, unlike many local search directories, did a very good job with their site indexing. Meaning every wrong listing you have on there is now stuck and Google definitely knows about it :/

Just my $.02.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Joshua has some good points!

Ahhh, you didn't mention the website before and I forget EZ listings work that way. In that case they may take the site they created and are hosting down, so those listings would get a 404.

Dupe citations aren't a great thing either and some directories may not accept the new listing if NAP is the same. Maybe you could edit some of them if he proves ownership? But if EZ won't share logins you may be stuck. But other than a handful of the big boys, I don't think many consumers look for listings in directories so as long as NAP is correct I would not stress too much if you hit a roadblock.