As a business owner, you know you must have a presence on the World Wide Web to be considered a legitimate business. There are thousands of digital touch points out there, and knowing how you or your business appears to the world is almost as important as being there in the first place.
If you are serious about your visibility, leaving it to chance and luck is not good enough anymore. Sure, Google will do some of the work, categorizing it, linking it, but there is so much more to the World Wide Web than just Google, as big as it may be.
The first step is to make sure you appear in the right places and appear with the correct information. Some companies on the web will help you do just that.
GetListed.org
GetListed.org, in existence since January 2009, serves as a resource for small business owners to find out how they are listed. Their goal is “to help small businesses claim and enhance their listings at major search engines”. They provide a clear picture of how effectively you are using the free resources available today. You might be able to compare it to your competitors as well.
The company has created a resource center which includes articles and tips about internet visibility. They accumulated listings of many SEO experts in different areas and will direct you to the right people.
In this one place you can check, for free, how you are visible to the world, learn about other places and other listings you might want to appear on, and participate in seminars held from time to time in different cities around the United States to help business owners learn about SEO and search engine ranking, in a face to face manner.
GetListed.org operated only in the US until Jan. 2010 when the company started beta testing in the UK as well.
AmIvisible.org
AmIvisible.org is another company which offers their services for free. By goin g to their website you can find how visible is your service or company to potential customers and compare that information with that of your competitors in your area.
AmIvisible.org covers millions of pages on search engines, yellow pages directories and local searches, and provides analysis of your business’s online visibility.
The service is fairly new and is in beta testing in several US cities. It will expand to the whole nation soon.
UBL.org
Universal Business Listing (UBL) strives to be a central collection and distribution point for all your business information online. A one-stop location for complete and accurate listing information.
UBL.org offers more than the sites mentioned above; it will list your business, monitor your presence, provide visibility reports and enhance your profile. They are not only aggregating information, they are actively doing things to change it for the better.
They have packages from $75 as an essential payment, which includes checking listings and monitoring your presence, to $599 which includes all the rest. They have an annual renewal fee of $59, regardless of the program.
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Looks like one needs to sign up and pay for these services. These websites look to me like well packaged ways of selling SEO services. I’m not able to tell how they services differ from what SEO companies in general offer. If they have developed some special SEO software then this is interesting.