How Bad Profile Information Hurts Your Business

Your reputation is crucial to your business, and that includes how you present yourself online. This goes beyond your website or the content you are posting to your social media networks. Your online reputation starts with people and search engines being able to find you quickly and easily across many online profiles, apps and services. If that information is missing or wrong, you may lose out on opportunities. In short, bad profile information hurts your business.

This seems obvious, but life changes lead to different addresses, new phone numbers, outdated email addresses, even career changes. Are you sure everyone and anyone can find you?

Assess Your Searchability

To start investigating that question, Google your business name and zip code. If you’re like most small business owners, your results are probably all over the place. In fact, some of the information may be from previous jobs in other cities.

Pro Tip – Googling yourself regularly is a marketing best practice.

Imagine someone you’ve never spoken to wants to contact you and they search your name and business. Their results are going to be the same as yours. If they can’t be sure what is the best number, email, or address for you, chances are good they’re going to keep looking for more reliable information they can trust before cold calling.

Fix and Update Your Information

Any missed opportunity due to bad profile information hurts your business and impacts your bottom line. Having a consistent, accurate online presence is essential for finding new prospects. If people can’t find you, they can’t utilize your business. If search engines see conflicting information, you won’t come up as often in search results.

When you find outdated information about your business, you will probably be asking yourself a lot of questions.

“How long is it going to take to fix?”
“Which websites do I have to manage now?”
“Do I need to create accounts?”
“Can someone do this for me?”

To add to it all, outdated information isn’t the only issue. Missing information on popular directories is just as problematic as having incorrect information. There are sites out there that see more traffic than you realize. Dozens of these online directories display whatever contact info they find on the web, often perpetuating incorrect information. Many of them require users to create login accounts and charge a fee to access or update information.

Before you know it, hours will have gone by and you’ll barely be scraping the surface. You’ll be tempted to do it later, but the problem with later is that it’s not now.

Increase Your Credibility

Fortunately, the marketing experts at OutboundEngine have a solution to deal with the “later” right now. We know the ways bad profile information hurts your business and ability to show up in search engine results. Profile Reach is our solution: it automatically finds the incorrect versions of your business information, corrects them, and locks them down so they can’t be changed by someone other than you. It then goes a step further by adding your information to any of the 70+ most important sites and business directories where you don’t already appear.

Profile Reach also recognizes and suppresses duplicate pages. This comes in handy when you need to eliminate an old phone number or an address from a decade ago.

You need someone to manage all of this for you. That’s where we come in. We shoulder the burden of updating and maintaining your information and your public image so that you can focus on what you do best—your job.

Want to see for yourself how your business looks online? Use our free business scan tool to know for sure whether you’ve got bad profile information lurking on the internet.

Not an OutboundEngine customer yet? Request your free demo and see how we can help your business.