InfoGroup Category List

There are two business listings you absolutely can’t screw up if you want to get visible in Google’s local search results: The first one is your Google+Local listing (duh).  The other is your InfoGroup listing.

InfoGroup – AKA InfoUSA – automatically feeds your business info to sites all over the local search ecosystem.  If your InfoGroup listing has info that’s inaccurate or that differs significantly from what’s on other sites, the chances are excellent your local rankings will be lousy.

The data InfoGroup has on your business also gets piped right into Google.   Ever wonder what causes duplicate Google listings to show up?  Or how a business can have a local listing on Google even though the owner never created a listing?   That’s usually because of InfoGroup.

The bottom line is you need to take two steps with your InfoGroup listing:

1.  Make sure it exists and that your vital info (name, address, phone number) is correct.  Do this at ExpressUpdateUSA.com (which is a site specifically meant for building / managing your listing).  Create your listing if it’s not already there.  If it’s in the system, claim it and make any necessary tweaks.

2.  Beef up your listing with as much relevant additional info on your business / services as you possibly can.  This additional info matters to your local rankings.  This includes the “description” and “services” fields you’re allowed to fill out – and that are easily to fill out.  But most importantly it means you have to pick out relevant categories to list your business under.  The categories can be a little trickier.  That’s what this post is for.

As I’ve commented before, picking the right business categories is crucial not only to your rankings but to the range of local search terms you’re visible for.  This is true of the categories you pick for your Google listing, and of the categories you pick for your third-party listings – of which InfoGroup is arguably the most important of all.

Everything I recently wrote about categories on LocalEze is also true of InfoGroup: you have literally thousands of categories to choose from, but they’re not easily searchable and sometimes aren’t called what you think they’d be called.  With InfoGroup it’s hard to know if you’ve even found the most relevant ones.

Many of the categories aren’t even relevant to “local” businesses.  They have categories for bologna makers and yurt manufacturers alike.  If you’re an alpaca farmer, they’ve got you covered.  Wholesale zipper seller?  Yup.  Uranium dealer?  No problem.

That’s why I’ve put all 9,854 InfoGroup business categories into one list.  The benefit of this is you can search it using CTRL+F or Command+F, or even browse it if you must.  You could find the right categories using InfoGroup’s search feature, but it will take you a bit longer.

Plus, you can even edit or process the categories list if you use the Excel or .txt versions – if you wanted to get all fancy.

But all you really need to do is find the 5 most-accurate categories for your business – or at least however many are relevant to your business and what you offer.  Add those categories when you create or edit your InfoGroup listing.

By the way, I highly recommend you use CTRL+F to search the list, at least to narrow down your options at first.  I hope you were planning to anyway.  I suppose you could read through the list from top to bottom, but your head may explode and you’ll have eyeball prints on your laptop screen.

Happy category-hunting!

View or download the InfoGroup category list:

  PDF

  Excel

  Text