Help Your Neighborhood Find Your Local Business

posted on May 12 by Tim Conley in the Internet Marketing category

For the last two years, I have been telling any small business owner who will listen to set up a Local Business Center Account on Google.  A Google business listing is a fast and easy way to get your company found by anyone in your area searching for your products or services.  Think of it as a highly interactive yellow page ad.

You are able to set up a business profile with your address, phone number(s), email and website, your hours of operation and many other details wanted by potential customers.  Also, your business will show up on Google Maps when a search is made.  A little flag will indicate your location.

To get the most out of your listing, you should put all the photos and videos allowed onto your listing.  I like using video testimonials of customers and demonstration-style or “how-to” videos of products and services.  I highly recommend that you encourage your customers to post a review on your Google Business Listing.  This will help with ranking within a search, but also helps convert a searcher to a visitor.  Note: your Google listing URL will be very long.  I recommend using a service such as BudURL or ow.ly to shorten the address so you can give a short address to all of your customers when you ask for a review.

To get even more exposure and more traffic to your website or physical location, I recommend you use Google AdWords’ Local Ads.  The best part is you can have your ad show up on Google Maps.  The more ways you have of getting a lead the better.  On top of how cool this is, it is very cheap per click in most metropolitan areas (right now) since few local businesses are using this AdWords feature.

Keep marketing,

Tim

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/timconley

For more reading on related topic:

http://localmarketingmastery.com/2009/05/thats-5000-postcards-i-dont-have-to-mail-social-media-economics-for-local-businesses/

http://localmarketingmastery.com/dominating-google-page-one-for-local-small-businesses/

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