by Digitopia | Updated Aug 29, 2024
Your business is thriving, your customers are satisfied, and your workspace is great...until you outgrow it. Maybe you found a better location more central to a large part of your demographic. Maybe you’re moving all the way across the country. No matter the circumstance, you’ve decided it’s time for a new space, so you’ve dealt with the tedious aspects of changing your physical address and forwarding your mail.
Here's how to update your business information online.
Updating your business address online
According to your website, you are still located at your old address.
Changing your address isn’t as simple as updating your Facebook page or your website.
- How are your customers going to know of your new address?
- What about the new local demographic? The key is to update your business information to leverage local SEO.
Let’s suppose you owned a flower shop in New Jersey, but decided to move across the country to Santa Monica, California. You found a cozy new home for your roses, but you only updated your Facebook page to tell your customers about the change.
If someone in Santa Monica simply searches on Google for a floral shop, they likely won’t find your newly moved business. Why?
You forgot to tell Google!
So, how can you tell Google about your move?
If you want your new flower shop to show up in search engines when local residents are looking to buy a bouquet, you’re going to have to dig into your SEO.
As a local business owner, you’ve developed meaningful content and committed to the needs of your clientele. But you still needed the help of local SEO to help generate business.
What steps should I take to utilize local SEO while moving my local business?
Keep Your NAP Correct and Consistent
Your business’ name, address, and phone number are your “NAP.”
These are vital for both your business and your customers (future and current!). If you wish to rank well in local organic search results, you need to make sure your NAP is correct and consistent.
If you moved without updating your new information online, you’re hurting your online credentials by having an inconsistency between your real and digital presences.
Search engines need this data when deciding which websites to show for geotargeted searches. The stronger your NAP’s consistency across the web, the better. Google will only rank websites on its first page if they have consistent and accurate NAPs to factcheck across the web for credibility.
Word-of-mouth isn’t enough to attract customers today.
4 out of 5 consumers look to search engines for local information. If you’re not present on the web, you’re not going to generate any new traffic.
If you haven’t updated your NAP to be correct and consistent throughout the web, Google will view you as a less valid business. There is no direct way to “tell” search engines of your move other than doing all the detail work of updating your current info.
Google attempts to fact check your validity by comparing the NAP on your website to the NAP on numerous other directories, like Yelp, or Angie’s List. If Google finds inconsistency, your domain authority could drop, or your new address could populate incorrectly. NAP consistency starts on your very own website and expands to social media, press releases, blog articles, and most important, business directory listings.
Make the Switch
The transition of moving an entire business isn’t as easy as going online and changing your mailing address, or even updating your driver’s license. Fortunately, there are some ways to get started early on and make your transition as easy as possible!
Update Listings
Sure, you have a Facebook Page, but are potential customers going to use Facebook first when searching for a local service or product? Probably not.
Eager customers are going to use the fastest search tool they have, which is likely going to be Google, Bing, or Yahoo from their mobile phones or desktops. If you aren’t recognized as a local business on these search engines, how are customers going to find you? No matter how credible your business is, your ability to bring in new customers relies heavily on your visibility through search engines.
There may be thousands of different directories and databases with your information on file. Unfortunately, you need to update as many as possible because Google sees each one as a vital source of information. You could try and clean everything up on your own, or you could find an SEO service.
Luckily for you, there are plenty of helpful local SEO services that can be used to update and organize the consistency of your listings.
Bright Local is a great tool that anyone with a business name, website, address, and phone can use to easily maintain their listings. In the report you can see a detailed listing of all of you AND your competitor’s current online citations in web directories, with an overall “visibility score” to see how your website performs on search engines.
In addition to the free reporting, Local Marketing Solutions offers services to solidify your online presence with high quality citation building, promotion and management, ensuring your business is among the strongest, most reputable directories out there. Moving the business can be an excellent opportunity to establish a new level of visibility with your new address.
Moz Local helps to ensure your business listings are correct and consistent throughout the web. By pushing accurate location data to all major data aggregators and several reputable online directories, Moz Local allows you to easily update your business listings.
Claim Your Business’ Profile on Google+
How can you dominate local search results? It comes down to knowing and utilizing the resources available to you. Google+ Pages makes it easy and accessible for a business to update and manage its physical location to appear accurately on Google’s organic search results and Google maps.
Be sure that your Google+ address matches the exact one listed on your website and other directories (remember the importance of your NAP). Even a slight error, such as abbreviating “street” can be deleterious to your consistency!
Announce the Move on Social Media
After you have completed adjusting your business’ address and phone number on your all important websites, directories, and databases, remember to announce your move on social media. These days, a complete digital marketing strategy requires attentive social media maintenance that has SEO in mind, and vice versa.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Linkedin, whatever social media you use to connect with your customers, make sure you announce your updated location with several posts. If you change your phone number as well, include that too! Moving is a big deal to you, and it should be to your loyal social followers as well.
Take the move as an opportunity to start connecting to any contacts you have in your new location through social media, and make your presence in your new location known from the start.
Announce the Move on Your Website
You’ve found a new location, a new office space, and made sure to change your billing address. Now it’s time to address your website.
Make it clear, bold, and evident of your new home by creating a banner or sign on your website. Place the announcement on your website with enough notice to attract new customers and alert your current customers.
Whether you’re moving across the country or down the block, your customers need to be informed to be able to find you.
Success in All Forms
Just because you’re physically moving, doesn’t mean you’re not virtually moving as well. Be consistent, do your research, and you’ll expand your clientele even more!
Although modifying your web presence may not seem like your priority during a busy time, you should not overlook it!
Remember, it is going to take time to change everything on the web in terms of your previous information, but it can be done and will help you in the long run, no matter how tedious it may seem in the present.
This blog was written by guest blogger, Luke Harsel. When he's not on the Internet, he enjoys riding his bike and playing musical instruments, but not always at the same time.
