Manual vs Automated Listing Management: Is Doing It by Hand Worth It?
Sudy, VP of Sales, Synup

Hello, everyone. This is Sudy. I head revenue at Synup. Here, I got an opportunity to cover one of the most asked questions or rather topics that people at a local business would actually think, why should I use an automated listings management platform versus managing my listings by hand? I'm talking about the local listings. Let's kind of take a scenario, like maybe a bakery that sells macarons, right? And there's a searcher that would like to get some macarons in New York City. The journey starts with search and someone literally decides to go to a place within like 60 to 180 seconds after they run the search and then never visit the website of this macarons store, right? So for local businesses, these listings are the storefront, right? The real question is whether to run them by hand or like, you know, use an automated platform.

What are listings, right? Listings, also called citations, are the business data that's put on publishers, maps, directories. They're not just for storefronts, but they're also for the local service businesses like the plumbers, electricians, agencies, or, you know, typical service-based businesses that are doing business targeting the local consumer.

And how the local search actually works right now, it is evolving day by day. And the default is the search engines actually read the intent. Like if the searcher is using keywords, phrases that are with the local intent or not. For example, if I go to Google and search for best bakery without even using the near me, the search results are going to be different. That are going to be more local versus something like best CRM software. That doesn't trigger any local results. You will see a lot of different blue links. But the map pack, if you see it on Google, actually beats those blue links if the search keywords have that local intent. Right. And aggregators like Yelp and Yellow Pages, YP.com or like these kind of sites almost beat a local business's website all the time, even if the search is for local intent when it comes to the blue links. Right. And AI Overviews actually show up more when the search keywords are not local. The intent is not local or if the intent is or the question or the keyword that someone is using is more conversational. Instead of just saying best bakery, if I said best bakery that sells best macarons in New York City, that can trigger an AI Overview, and not a straight like best bakery. Kind of search that still triggers map pack and you know millions of blue links right below

and Google Business Profile alone isn't going to cut it. It's not enough. The reason: search is evolving, yes, definitely, and search is also fragmenting across not just Google but Apple Bing you know ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, a lot of different sources and each of this AI engine, they pull data from different sources. And like example, Gemini almost 100 % depends on the Google data. The others actually depend on Bing, Yelp, Facebook, a lot of different sources, right? And these citations or listings across trusted publishers will also increase confidence on your business on Google, but that's a direct result in a way. And the quality of data actually beats the quantity, to be honest. So the top 10 search sites and maybe the top 100 publishers that really index the citation link on Google search are far more better than just distributing your business information across like a thousand different directories that don't even make sense. The listings aren't just a one-time job. You just create listings for you to be present on the internet when the searches happen. But that's just the starting point. It's more about how well are you optimizing those listings for a lot of different ranking factors like relevance, which includes your categories, subcategories, or additional categories is what Google calls your product services and the descriptions you have. All of this kind of come into the relevance piece of it. Proximity is the default search filter that Google actually applies the moment you do a near me search. It actually usually pulls out the nearest location for that search, but that doesn't always win, to be honest. So there are other parameters that are more important. Other factors, I mean, that includes the reputation or reviews. It includes the popularity and the freshness of your content, right? The moment you use a keyword like best macarons, right? The word best actually filters the results even on maps down to any business with more than four-star ratings. Like that's a default filter that happens. You know, the search, something like best bakery to buy macarons now, for example, is only going to filter the bakeries that are open right at this moment for the searcher. The popularity signals include something like photos, you know, the user generated content, you know, the busy times that Google automatically tracks. So it's not easy to optimize and, you know, check all these boxes every single week, every single day, every single month for you to stay relevant and, you know, stay ahead in terms of your local search game. So that makes it important. So it's not really a one-time job. It's like a continuous optimization task. Creating those listings is just the beginning. Optimizing those continuously to check all these boxes for different ranking factors is something continuous. And like a typical business owner may spend 20 minutes every day to just, or maybe more, like maybe about 30 minutes across, say, Google, Apple, Bing and Facebook.

And that's not easy for a typical business owner. But when we are talking about tens of sources that these AI search engines like LLMs like Gemini or, you know, ChatGPT, Perplexity are going to pull from, you may end up looking at like 20 to 30 of different sources and managing that is going to be a lot more, you know, costlier in terms of the time that you would spend more than 30 minutes. So not really easy. And the data actually drifts on its own on the internet, right? So third-party sites create duplicates sometimes. The suggested edits by consumers or users on Google can actually go live without the owner of the business taking a step in approving those or rejecting those. I think the timeframe is 48 to 72 hours, and if you don't respond to a suggestion by a user, Google might just get that suggestion live on your listing. So that's not easy to keep up if you're managing your listings manually. And every platform has its own reviews. So it's not really easy for you to go through all the reviews coming in across different platforms, monitoring and understanding what your customer is saying and even responding to those reviews. And there's going to be a risk of some manual errors instead of going with an automated platform that can make sure your data is consistent. Like, you know, it's a single source of truth that can publish your business data across all these platforms. Right. And that in a way becomes that hidden cost overall where you're spending a lot more time to manage and optimize versus using an automated platform. And if you are hiring a service provider that can manually manage these listings for you, there's going to be another hidden cost because these manual providers usually charge you to create those listings first. And then every update on those listings that you're going to go back to them asking for is going to be an additional cost. Right. And we did that math comparing with some of our some of these manual service providers. And it ends up being four to five X more costlier than using an automated platform.

Yeah, the automation literally kind of gives you one source of truth and distributes your business data consistently across multiple publishers. You can be at peace because there's not going to be any manual errors first and you're up to date across multiple publishers that really make sense, that help you. And you can check all those boxes in terms of the ranking factors.

And with the advent of AI across these listings management platforms, it's even more easier because they automatically audit and give you suggestions and they can do this work pretty much automatically. One command, you just talk to them and say, pull up all the reviews for the last one week where I didn't respond to. Ask the AIs in these listing management systems to generate responses personalized to those reviews for you to approve, you kind of intervene there and look at those response templates, tweak if you need anything and then go ahead and approve the responses. So your content is going to stay consistent across all your publishers and you can easily solve the freshness factor by simplifying your posting or updating descriptions or offers across your listings easily using the listing manager. So, yeah, just to close it out, a small business owner or local business with multiple locations managing the content, your business data, the freshness, all those ranking factors, including reviews, etc. Manually is one heck of a job that eats out a lot of time every single day, every single week for whoever is managing those listings versus using an automated platform that can make sure everything is consistent. So yeah, wanted to cover this topic. Been pending for long and let me know what you folks think and add any comments. Thanks a lot.