The Internet today offers customers and potential customers many different ways to come in "touch" with a local business. This might be through a website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, business directory, Chamber's portal, association's website, supplier's website, search engine, banner advertisement, forums and other online channels. Most businesses are not even aware of the many places their business may already be mentioned across the Internet. Worse yet, most businesses have not even come close to tapping all the touchpoints they should have online.

For sake of keeping this simple and short, I will focus on the local business data providers. These are portals and search engines that provide basic information about all types of local businesses, meaning: business name, address, phone (NAP) and more, such as your website address, business categories, description, etc.

Often times business information is shared between some of the major data providers with the search engines and secondary business directory portals. For example, Google Places & Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Business Portal are said to pull local business data from Localeze and Infogroup, two of the major data providers, as well as other data sources. Acxiom is another data provider helping to power many business data portals. Major data providers also help power many of the yellow-page type business directories. Often times businesses are listed without the business doing anything or even knowing where it exists.

Having your information appear on all of these websites and portals can add up to a lot of additional touchpoints for your business. Every time your business information is mentioned online, called citations, improves your exposure to potential customers and many marketing experts believe (including myself) it also helps improve your Google Places/Maps rankings.

This all sounds great except often the data is wrong or missing information. Having the wrong business information listed can cost you potential sales. Common problems are wrong phone numbers, wrong addresses, closed stores listed, showing up in the wrong business categories, and missing website address. Making matters worse, your business information may be different from data provider to data provider or portal. It's extremely important to ensure the information about your business is consistent across the Internet.

Fixing these issues can be frustrating and very time consuming. It is best to hire someone knowledgeable to manage, verify, validate and track your digital touchpoints and make sure the information about your business is accurate, consistent and complete. Whether you have a website or not these touchpoints, if done correctly, can definitely help a business's online reach and generate new leads.

Confused? Have questions? Feel free to drop me an email: john@webstreamdynamics.com.