You run a local business, and you claimed your Google Local listing so searchers would see your website. That's a start, but with Bing and Yahoo together holding more than a quarter of the search market in the US, you're still leaving money on the table. Fortunately, you can easily get onto Bing Local by following a few simple steps.
As Chris Silver Smith explains at Search Engine Land, Microsoft's Bing Business Portal features a “beta” interface through which you handle your business details. It replaces the Bing Local Listing Center. If you want some information about the service before adding your business, you can read the FAQ.
To star using the interface, you'll need to find your listing. Bing Business Portal will ask you to enter your business name (required), address, city, state, and zip code, and then press the search button to see if Bing already has information about your business. If you enter only your business name, be aware that Bing will insist that you also enter either your city AND state, or your zip code.
Once you've entered this information, Bing will return a listing to you if it finds one that matches. You can then click the claim button. If it doesn't, you can add a new listing. Smith notes that “having a business owner claim a listing helps to validate the information and establish that the business is active, helping increase 'trust ranking' factors.” Remember that search engines hate to show stale information to searchers – and businesses fail all the time. If a business owner has claimed their listing, it may show the search engine that the business is active, and could lead to a more prominent position in the search results.
Once you've claimed your listing, you need to check the contact information it displays. Make sure it's correct. At a minimum, it needs to include your name, address, and phone number, in addition to your website's URL. If you choose to include an email address, treat it professionally – check and answer the messages it receives at least once a day. Otherwise, customers will think you're ignoring them, and go somewhere else.
Next, if you can, you should at least consider adding an image to your listing. Smith notes that for Bing Local searches, “higher-ranking businesses appear to more frequently have images associated with their listings!” He was careful to state that this could simply be due to the fact that listings with images are always claimed listings, and they could be ranking higher for that fact alone. Correlation does not equal causation, after all. Smith uses a Bing search on “intellectual property attorneys Chicago, Il” as an example. The first listing past the ads is a box with a map and five options; when I clicked through, I noticed that the top two and the fifth ones included images.
As a potential customer, I think I'd be more inclined to take the next step with a business that includes an image. If users conduct a search on Bing Local (rather than a general web search), those images actually show up next to the relevant listings, drawing the eye and making you stand out. As a searcher, if I don't know any of the businesses listed in my search, and distance isn't a huge factor, I start looking for anything that catches my eye and makes it stand out. Including an image is one approach that can help attract eyeballs; there are others you can use as well.