We often go about discussing the problems that people and businesses face in terms of website creating and its popularity statistics. We talk about the quality of content and we talk about ranking. There is concern over back links and concern over hosting. But we rarely discuss the basic difficulties, the reality of what goes on behind the screens and how hard those tasks are.
One such task is local listing. It means that the companies need to manage and organize the location data arriving at them from all over the place. And this is not simple either no matter what advice you may read up. It is back breaking and neck craning hours of head bursting work on a screen for a software person.
Making sense of the data is information. Hundreds and hundreds of data arrive continuously and to make sense of any of it, it needs organizing. Only, then is it of any use. The process is tedious as there can be many duplicate listings that need elimination or the inappropriate addresses which would need removal. To top all that there is no guarantee of quality of these listings which would affect one’s website ranking on search engines. And if a change or update in local search springs up, they have that to cater too.
Needless to expand further, the task is challenging enough without the additional haphazardness of the company. There is no way to simplify the process but there are some ways to ease the process:
- The task should start from the top instead of the bottom. Because the last channels of an organization are scattered and hard to manage. Starting from the top will make it easy. If the head executive team makes it so that the organizing location data becomes mandatory and important, those inspired by them and those around them will get included.
- Even if that stage is crossed, there is a general unwillingness among the common folk and scattered parts of the company to adapt to that change. Not every employee or worker or manager would know how to make inputs that will meet the search engine quality requirements. To ask them for such a task without prior knowledge and training will be of no use.
Thus, make sure to conduct educational seminars within the enterprise for everyone from company managers to store managers and workers. Make the long term effect of the change apparent. Let them know the process and provide training if necessary. This will make them aware of the process they need to follow to ease the work of those who organize this data.
- With that done, you can now start pulling and putting all your data in one place. This is essential because all the local listings are spread across various departments for their personal use and across various stores or their personal data. This does not mean that they have to give up their data but one need to put everything in one place.
- Now the process of cleaning, cutting, editing, and organizing can be started. Now the software workers have everything they need to work their magic with help and background support from individual departments and local stores.
The process further is to check manually and visually the pin placement of the location and if needed make necessary changes. All this process is completely manual and there is not a program or shortcut to cut to the chase. And yet by following the above procedure, the task gets distributed and numerous shoulders by the time it comes to the people who are responsible for managing local listings.
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