What are online directories, digital knowledge, and listings? Should I care?

Posted May 28, 2017

When you’re looking for a new restaurant to try – what do you do? What about when you need to find a cute pair of shoes? Most likely, you go to a search engine (and most likely that’s Google) to find that restaurant or the best deal on shoes. Search engines are the go-to source for information and – whether or not you know it – they use the digital knowledge available about your business to rank you in searches.

What is digital knowledge? Digital knowledge includes all the public facts about your brand (including name, address, phone number, hours of operation, products and services), that all live online for customers to search. Most of this information stems from your website. At a minimum, this is one of the places the public facts about your business live.

But it’s not just potential customers who are searching for your business online. It turns out that businesses’ websites are the place where search engines as well as customers consider the most trustworthy when looking for facts about your business. Makes sense, right? No one knows your business better than you. So, your first step in managing your online knowledge is getting your facts right. And for the last 20 years, this was pretty much the only step, because websites were the main place where businesses interacted with your business online.

But those facts about your businesses now live in a few more places. They live on Google, and Facebook, and Yelp, and Apple,and 100 other places. When you add up the total visits to all of these “directories” about your business, they get 2.7 more views than your website. If you don’t manage your online listings, that can be a scary statistic. Read more about that in this article from Entrepreneur.

Long story short, there is a lot of information available online about your business but it is mostly information you can control.

We get it, all this information can be overwhelming. That’s why Mauve partners with a company called Yext to help us manage the online directories out there that contain information about your business. For the “DIYers” our there (do-it-yourself), we have self-managed options. We give you a dashboard that allows you to update your business information and push it across the web to over 70 of these online directories. It’s that easy.

For those who like a more structured approach, we offer fully managed services. We monitor and update your business information for you (whether you want to update your menu, add photos to sites like Google and Yelp, or update special offers available on social media). Whatever your needs, big or small, we probably have a solution that works well for you and will help you get a grasp on your online listings ASAP.

Ready to start? Contact us today. Still not convinced? Check out this article on Yext about the rise of digital knowledge management for more information. Happy listing!