Understanding LocalSync

What is LocalSync?

The purpose of LocalSync is to recognize changes that happen on your website and automatically reflect those changes on social channels like Google, Facebook, and FourSquare. LocalSync automatically edits your business’s name, address, phone number, and hours of operation for you, so you’re not relying on a person remembering to do this or risking human error.

This helps your website’s SEO by providing Google with the most up-to-date information about your business. If you do not send this info directly, Google has to retrieve it, which is less efficient and can lead to inaccurate listings.

Why does LocalSync send updates to Google everyday?

Even if you don’t update your LocalSync content everyday, the daily updates may be beneficial. The more Google knows about your business’s hours of operation or menus, the better it can display that information to its users. Google is constantly updating its algorithm, so daily updates are best practice.

The purpose of the robots.txt is to tell which pages on the website Google should NOT crawl and index. This is done in case there are some pages which you don’t want Google to show to the public (or search engines), like the site_admin page, or the /bentobox subfolder which allows a user to login to BentoBox.

What information goes into LocalSync?

When you sign up for Localsync, information about your hours, menu, address, business name, and phone number get sent to Google, Foursquare, and Facebook.

You can update all of this information when you set up LocalSync from “Localsync” under “Website” in the site admin panel.

How Does LocalSync Help SEO?

Consider that Google’s mission is to provide useful, correct information to its users. The more information you provide directly to Google, the less work Google has to do to provide that correct information to its users.

You can also sign up for Google My Business (and Facebook and Foursquare) directly, but Localsync provides a convenient place inside the BentoBox platform to control the most relevant aspects of your Google My Business page.

For more information about how to set up LocalSync, check out our guide. (Note: LocalSync is an add-on service that requires its own monthly payment.)

If you are interested in signing up for LocalSync, contact your BentoBox customer success manager today.