Bing Places Adds Several Agency-Friendly Local Business Listing Tools

Agency dashboard offers local listing management, sharing with clients, features for chain businesses and more.

Local SEO consultants and agencies that manage business listings for clients have a number of new, agency-friendly tools at their disposal in Bing Places for Business.

According to Bing’s announcement, the first step is for consultants to register as an agency at BingPlaces.com.

Once registered, agencies will have access to a new dashboard with a summary of all current listings and links to add new client locations — up to 10,000 businesses at once. The dashboard shows both the total number of business listings submitted, how many have been published and how many are in review or were suspended.

Agencies will be able to share access to individual listings with clients.

Another new option is the ability to register chain business locations. Bing says these don’t have to be verified individually, but consultants will need to provide a signed authorization from their client (the chain business).

In fact, Bing is trying to build in a level of security throughout the agency tools:

After you submit your clients’ business listing to Bing Places, your client must verify the listing, which helps us ensure that you are authorized to manage their information. During client verification, a verification PIN is sent by postcard to each of your clients. Either you or your client then must enter that PIN on Bing Places to complete verification.

We’ve reached out to Bing’s communications teams to find out if this is available only in the U.S., or also for Bing Places users in Canada and the U.K.

Postscript: Bing has confirmed that these new tools/features are available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, India, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Austria and Mexico.