With a little initial effort you can create an online presence that not only improves your chances of getting found in search engines but gives you a diversified network of places where consumers can find you. Some may only bring you a small amount of direct business each year but combined they can make a noticeable (and potentially large) difference to your bottom line.

Listing your business in more places online can improve your Local SEO.  If you are a local business Local SEO is vital to your business.  Local SEO helps you get found when people search with Local Intent, such as “Plumbers in Brisbane” or “restaurant in camp hill“.

When you perform a local intent search a special section appears on the first page called the Google Snack Pack.  Your ranking (and even whether you appear here) is based on your Local SEO efforts.

It’s not enough to just list your business, your business data needs to be as consistent as possible across all of your listings.  Ensure your NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) are as close as possible across all listings.  Getting your business to appear in the Google 3 pack (shown below) for the keywords relevant to your business is gold for your business and conversely dropping off can make a big difference to your ability to be found online.

The free Online Services Explorer at www.mypresences.com/services/  is the best way to find the online services where you should list your business.   It recommends the best services based on the type of business you are and the country your business is in.

Over 2000 online services and apps are supported worldwide. This is the world’s most comprehensive source of information on online services for small businesses.

There are lots of places you can list and many of them are free! You should list on as many of these services as possible to get your business found online more often than your competitors.

Follow these tips to get the most from the Services Explorer.

Select relevant Business Type and Location

We link services to business type and location so that only relevant services appear.  If you don’t select the correct business type or location you will miss services that are relevant to your business.

The Services Explorer works globally. You will find services for most countries especially Australia, USA, UK, Canada and New Zealand.

Recommendation Level

We categorised all services into 6 recommendation levels based on how important that service is for your business.

Focus on services that are Must List first and work your way down the list, do not add your business to any Services below Suggested unless you have researched the service and feel there is an advantage.

Engagement and Popularity

Services that are popular tend to have better engagement online,  this will be reflected in the number of connections they have on social networks and how much traffic their site gets.  This is not always the case however and it is possible that numbers may be inflated based on other factors, sometimes numbers may be inflated because a service has purchased social media favour but this is far less likely the more established a service is.

A great number to watch is Talking About on Facebook, this is an indication of the number of people who have engaged with their Facebook page in the last week.  The Talking About number will changed from day to day based on the previous week and is a great way to see how engaged a services users are.

We also track the Talking About % which allows you to level the playing field and see how many people are engaged as a percentage of the total likers, this is a great way to see those services that are getting a lot of attention from their users right now. This will change every day so checking who is at the top of the Talking About % for your business is a great way to find trending and interesting services to keep your business ahead of your competitors.

Once you have selected a set of services you can then sort them by the following engagement metrics to see which are most likely to be effective for your business based on engagement.

	Company	Models
	OpenAI	GPT 4o, GPT 4, Chat GPT
	Google AI	Gemini 1.5 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash, Gemini 1.0 Pro
	Meta AI	Llama 3 70B, Llama 3 8B
	Anthropic	Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Haiku
	Perplexity AI	Sonar Small Offline, Sonar Small Online, Sonar Large Offline, Sonar Large Online
	Mistral AI	Mistral Large, Mistral Small
	X.ai	Coming Soon. Grok-1.

Delivery Channels

In the last few years we have seen a big move from desktop to mobile computing on phones and tablets. This trend will only continue and the most innovative companies are moving their focus to mobile.   If a service has a mobile option then they are more likely to be forward focused and your business is more likely to be found by consumers looking for businesses around them when their ready to spend.

You should look for services that have a mobile option and make sure your business is listed on their platform.

Free Services

You can’t beat free right!  A lot of services are either free or provide a free option.  Look for free services by selecting the Free filter  and listing on all Suggested and above services.

Filter on SEO to find services that support a follow link to your website to improve SEO. (to help you rank better in search engines).

Business Type Specific Services

These services are only relevant to a specific business types.  Look for services that are specific to your business in your location by using the Specific filter button.  These services are worth listing your business on because some consumers will rely on these niche services when looking to find a particular type of business, they will also allow you to showcase your business better as they will be tailored to your type of business.

Claims

Services are making claims about their performance all the time, but it can be hard to remember which site claimed what and then to know if the claim is relevant anymore.

The internet changes so quickly that quoting traffic numbers from over 5 years ago can be meaningless and often a telling sign that things are not going well.

We collect claims made by Services so that you can see them side by side, we tell you when the claim was made and show you the source of the claim.

The older the claim the less relevant it becomes, if it is quite old it may indicate that the claimed value has not improved since.

In the above example you can see that Styleseat (www.styleseat.com) users have booked over 5.5 million appointments. If you are a hair or beauty salon then this is a good indication you should be listed on this fast growing niche service. On their profile page you can see this claim was made in January 2014 and link to the source.

Always check for recent claims when comparing services.  Some of them may surprise you, that service you had never heard of may be serving millions of customers a month.

Go Deep

Looking for more information on a service?  Each has its own profile page that can be found by clicking on the Full Profile button on the service (or by clicking on a service).  Here you can find very detailed information on each service that can help you determine its popularity and user engagement.

On the service profile page you can:

• Track the trend over the last 60 days on statistics for the service.  This will tell you where the service is improving or whether it is falling away.
• Add your Business to the Service.  Clicking the link will take you to the business signup page .
• Login to the service as a User.  This can also be used to login and access a backend management service if supported.
• See search trends for the service.  Google Trends for the service name over the last 4 years is a good way to gauge popularity.
• See the types of information the service supports and the countries where the service is available.

If you have a myPresences account you can store your access credentials securely for each service.  This is especially useful when an agent is managing your online presence for you and they need access to login credentials.  All access to your credentials are logged and reported back to you.

Check Back

We are always adding new services and updating details for existing services.  To keep on top of the best services for your business check back periodically to see if there are any new services or changes to existing services that make them worth listing your business on.  If you have a free account on the myPresences platform you will be automatically informed when new services launch or there are significant changes on existing services.

Good luck with promoting your business online! Most small business owners are doing very little to promote their business online. A little bit of effort will put you ahead of the majority of your competition.

As more and more consumers are looking online first when finding a local business it will only pay off more and more as consumers continue to move online.

If you are looking for a better way to manage your business’s entire online presence and reputation, please try a free trial at www.mypresences.com.

Managing your business’s online presence can be a big job, and it is complicated when you are inheriting a mess of existing accounts with forgotten passwords and incorrect information.  One of the biggest reasons businesses don’t manage their online presence well is that they have no process and their online presence has been created by different staff members in the past who may have left and regaining control of their lost profiles becomes too hard. Don’t let this happen to your business!

Here are a few tips to make it easier, and once you have everything setup managing your online presence going forward will be quick and simple.

1. Create a single email address for all online profiles

You should use a single email account for all of your online profiles and accounts. Ideally this email address will be on your corporate domain and you should be able to give people access to this email account as needed.

Something like online@yourdomain.com.

A problem a lot of businesses face is employees may create new accounts associated with their own email address or a corporate address that is not appropriate. When they leave the business nobody knows how to access the accounts and recovering them can be time consuming.

If your business has many locations (eg. a restaurant chain) then create a seperate email address for each location. You can use this for services that do not allow more than one business to have the same email address.

Having a single email address also ensures that all correspondence from your online accounts will be recorded in one place and is not being sent to addresses that are not being monitored.

2. Prefer creating an account via email when possible

Many online services allow you to signup with social media accounts which in many cases will be associated with a personal account.  When you have a choice you should signup via the email address you use for the business so that you have full control of the account.

3. Use Google Chrome’s profiles

Google Chrome has an awesome feature where you can use it as a particular user that is seperate from other accounts. This means that when you need to work on the business’s profiles you can switch to your business profile and have much easier access to your business accounts with auto login and other features.

If you try to use your main account you are likely to have conflicting logins, cookies and settings for your personal accounts which will make managing your profiles more difficult.

If you are managing multiple business locations you can setup a seperate profile for each location and switch between them when working on each business.

This article tells you how to setup profiles and switch between them.

If you are not using Google Chrome as your browser it can be installed here.

4. Use your email address for user names

When asked for a username just use your business email.  This makes it much easier to manage all of your accounts without having to remember different usernames. It also helps to improve your chances of having a consistent username across all the online services that you use as it is unlikely that your email address will already be taken.

5. Use a password manager

Use a password manager like LastPass or 1Password with a business account.  This allows you to create strong passwords for all of your accounts and then provide your team members with access to your accounts without them getting access to the passwords.  When they leave the role or the company they can be removed from the password manager and all accounts with one action.

6. Create a single point of truth

When you are creating profiles and listings for your business you want to be sure the profiles created are an accurate, complete and consistent representation of your business.   If you create profiles that contain information that is not optimal then you will be hurting your overall online presence and giving a potentially bad experience to your customers. You may also hurt you rankings in search engines by not sending a consistent message.

You should create a simple list of information for each business you manage that includes things like below and keep them up to date:

• Business Name
• Address
• Phone Number
• Web URL
• Logo
• Tagline
• Descriptions
• Social Media profiles
• Map Location
• Photo and Video links
• Business Categories
• and anything else that may appear on your online profiles

This is also especially important when your team members are creating and updating your online profiles for your business and do not know what they should add to your profiles. When your team can go to a central repository they do not have to find the information themselves or spend time verifying information with other staff members and can be far more accurate and efficient.

With the above measures in place you can:

1. Make it much easier to manage any of your listings in the future.
2. Manage staff transition by not having any of your online accounts associated with an individual.
3. Make it easy for future staff to manage your online presence.
4. Easily remove exiting staff from access to your online accounts.
5. Define a process for the management of future online accounts.

myPresences helps you manage and grow your online presence & reputation, try a free 14 day trial.

Our goal is to be that place for small business owners.

When a small business owner goes online for the first time each day we want them to want to come to us first because we are the site that is analogous to opening their doors and getting started for the day but for their online world.  A site where they can see everything that is happening relating to their business online and everything that needs their attention.

If we can achieve this goal then we have built an amazing service with users who love what we do and are receiving value on every visit.

I see this as a very hard goal to achieve, but it certainly inspires us to create better software and provide better service to our customers. This goal is at the heart of everything we do.

At mypresences we help small businesses take control of their entire online world and give them tools so they can be as in command of their presence and reputation online as they are of their physical location.  Most small businesses can no longer ignore that their online storefront is becoming more important than their physical one, yet most pay little attention and allow their online presence & reputation to fall out of their control.  We intend to change that.

We are now in private beta, invites can be found on our homepage at mypresences.com.

To find some great places to promote your business online now,  try our Online Services Explorer at mypresences.com/services/.

In a future post I will elaborate further on how we help small businesses take control of their online world.