Posted by David Mihm

Today, I am excited to announce the release of a new version of GetListed.org. While no new functionality is included in this update, the team and I hope it provides a dramatically improved user experience on several fronts.

The best way to get a sense of what’s changed is to run a business search for yourself, but I’ll run through a few brief highlights here.

Faster business lookups

GetListed is now waaayyyy faster (that’s the technical term used by our engineers) than it used to be. Previously, lookups averaged around 20 seconds. We’ve cut the average response time in half to about 10 seconds, and we’ll be working to make it even faster as we analyze usage of the app and further optimize our response times. We hope this increased speed provides a big value-add for those of you who use GetListed in your on-the-spot client meetings.

More consistent results

Previously, GetListed’s Listing Snapshot displayed a composite listing based on the data points returned by several search engines in our list. This led to unnecessary confusion among business owners, and made it difficult for some of our agency users to identify which search engines were returning incorrect information about clients’ listings. It also made tracking Listing Score progress over time more difficult, since this score was dependent on the order of results returned by our search engine partners, and this order sometimes varied week-to-week and month-to-month.

The new version of the site asks users to establish their canonical NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information prior to running a full query for a given business, so that the new Snapshot page and Listing Score are no longer based on “best guess” composite listings.

Please note: this update means you may see changes in your listing scores, including for those businesses saved to your Dashboard. We suggest re-establishing these scores by running your listings through the new site. When you do, you’ll have a fixed data point against which you can measure your progress over time.

Cleaner Listing Snapshot interface 

When we started GetListed back in January 2009, only four search engines were displayed on the snapshot page. As our app grew in popularity and we established new relationships with data providers and other search engines, that list grew ever-longer and the formerly-simple interface grew clunky and overwhelming. The goal of the site (to get business owners to update erroneous information and add missing information) became muddied.

We hope the new interface makes these calls-to-action much clearer–to create listings on search engines where they don’t exist, and to update information that doesn’t match reality. The new app consolidates the old Snapshot, Accuracy, and Details pages, bringing accuracy front-and-center, and makes it easy to see listing details inline without jumping from page-to-page.

Cleaner Dashboard interface

The new Dashboard removes the clutter of favicon-style search engine logos (another problem created by our gradual expansion to include more listing providers over the last four years). The new Dashboard provides a quick way to assess listing scores at a glance, and easy access to the details page for your listings from clickable business titles.

U.S. version only

Over the past couple of months, we’ve noticed GetListed UK and GetListed CA returning an unacceptably high number of errors on business queries. As part of this release, we’ve decided to temporarily suspend these versions in order to focus on the backend and interface for our U.S. audience, which accounted for 98% of all queries run in April. After we’ve had a chance to analyze our domestic audience usage on this new system, we plan to re-release UK- and CA-specific versions (along with more international sites) later in the year.

Looking ahead

Well, that takes care of most of the major changes for this release.  Feedback, as always, is welcome.  We’ve even added a handy-dandy tab where you can submit feedback directly within the app; you can also feel free to email me at davidm@seomoz.org.

I hope I’ve laid out a compelling case above for the rationale behind this release from a user’s perspective. From a development perspective, the goal of this iteration of GetListed was to create a foundation for more frequent feature releases and better integration with SEOmoz tools moving forward. It paves the way for a number of new features we will be rolling out over the course of the summer and fall, which all of us on the GetListed team are even more excited about. Looking forward to sharing those with you soon!

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