During the process of local listing creation for your business to target search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! and, Google, you will usually see a prompt for choosing between two and ten categories for describing your business, which is a crucial step. During a 2013 survey, appropriate category associations were cited by experts in local SEO as the most valuable relevance signal of all.
Search engines utilize this categorisation data for the purpose of determining what particular businesses should be shown in response to a specific search. Years ago when local SEO was in its infancy, Shailesh Bhat from Yahoo Local gave a very sound explanation of categorization’s basic function when he said that looking for a degree of concurrence between a variety of sources helped them to determine the correct category for a business when other data was missing.
It's important to remember that the search engines are considering your listing to be predominantly applicable to specific keyword sets directly related to those categories that you choose. When you mis-categorise, you are seriously limiting your local business listing’s visibility, creating an environment where your competitors can easily edge you out because they categorized their businesses appropriately.
Over the past several years, cleaning up glaring mis-categorisation mistakes has been accomplished fairly well by the search engines. Don't forget that appropriate categorization can make a major difference in your search engine results though.
This could be the difference between getting found through search engines, and not! It's common sense that those who are being found online are the one's who are making money, and the one's who aren't, probably aren't making any money... Not online anyway!
If you have any questions regarding categorisation, feel free to get in touch: 01642 931 380
PLEASE REMEMBER: Bizify are a local search engine intended to help make your business more visible across the web. We use specific categories and keywords to do this, and by getting things right, right from the word go, we can help you keep one step ahead of your competitors by allowing you to be found by various words and phrases RELEVANT to you, and the industry you work in.
