What do Localeze, InfoGroup, Factual, Acxiom …. and Yahoo Local have in common? They don’t seem to support Puerto Rico based businesses. For a typical United States ‘mainland’ client, we would use our standard tool set to publish and/or correct online business listings, however, for companies doing business in Puerto Rico, this IYP correction task gets more complicated.
Online business listing management companies such as Yext and Moz Local do not (yet?) support PR based companies… probably because (most?) of their partners do not support it either. The UBL website allowed me to sign up and even pay for a Puerto Rico business address, but when I wrote support a few weeks later asking why I didn’t see any listing URLs in the CSV export report, they told me they will need to refund my payment, since they don’t support Puerto Rico. I suggested that their dev department remove ‘PR’ as a selection from the State drop down menu. The strange thing is that some of these aggregators have PR companies in their database… perhaps from scraping data and buying company lists over the years, but just no way to add a PR business via their dashboards!
One sad thing is that when I have called some of these companies to ask if they allow for companies with Puerto Rico addresses, their support staff often say “Uhm… we only support companies in United States.” (DOPE!) After a few of those, I starting asking if they can handle companies in “Puerto Rico, USA”. 😉
Here are some screen shots of the Localeze, Factual, InfoGroup, Yahoo listing add dashboards showing that Puerto Rico is not in the list of items in the ‘State’ dropdown lists.
How do you get your Puerto Rico based company listed online?
I would start with creating a G+ Local listing and verifying it via postcard PIN. The good news is that Bing Local also supports the addition of companies in Puerto Rico! That would be a good second step.
After that, you should try to get listed in the ‘local’ type websites in Puerto Rico such as SuperPagesPR.com the ‘Caribbean Business‘ directory, the PuertoRico.com online travel and business directory, and the ‘Puerto Rico Index‘.
It is possible that once the major business data aggregators see the listing on these venues, they may pick up the listing in their databases. Remember to always use the same name, address, and phone number (NAP) in every online listing, as that is an important factor in local search engine rankings.
Keep searching for internet yellow page websites that do allow the addition of Puerto Rico companies, and get listed. In general, having more of these citations can mean higher rankings than your competitors in local search, when all other factors are equal.
Please contact us today if you would like help getting listed in Puerto Rico IYP directories.