Google Places

Get Ahead of Your Competition

As a business owner, you understand how important it is to make sure your business can be found whenever someone is searching. This usually means getting your ad in the local yellow pages, advertising on local television and radio, and putting ads in local publications like newspapers and magazines.

However, most business owners feel the internet can’t be very beneficial to them, because it’s meant solely for worldwide searches. This just isn’t true. The internet can still be enormously beneficial even to very small local businesses.

The percentage of people who have internet access is growing at an astonishing rate, and many of those people are using the internet to research companies in their local area. If you don’t have an internet presence and your competitors do, you could be losing out on a lot of business!

In this article, I’m going to show you why you need to make your presence known online, and the best way to do it.

Why You Should Use Local Search

All of the major search engines are now using some sort of local search technology to display information about companies that are based in one specific geographic location.

You may have heard it can take months for a website to make it to the top of the search engines. If you’re in a highly-competitive niche, you may never be able to make it there. Fortunately, local search makes it easy to grab a top ranking in Google very quickly. Local search results appear at the top of the results, before the standard results are shown. This means that they get a lot of attention, often more so than the actual search results.

If your business is not listed here, but your competitors are, you will be losing a lot of business. In some areas, thousands of people use Google and other search engines to find local businesses just like yours every single day!

It just makes sense to make use of this technology. It’s free to submit your business, and it can make a big difference to your bottom line.

Google Places

Google Places is the new name for their Business Center. Using this service, you can “claim” your business in Google and customize your listing on Google Maps and other important services.

Google is the largest search engine, with an estimated 75-85% market share. Most of your online efforts should be focused on making sure your business has a prominent presence in this search engine.

While this can be accomplished by creating a website for your company and using search engine optimization techniques, it could take several weeks or even months before your site ranks well and starts to see significant amounts of traffic.

The best way to make sure your company has a strong presence is through the use of Google Places. If you have ever done a search for a local business on Google, you’ve probably noticed the Google Places listings at the top of the search results. They appear before the standard results, making them especially lucrative. It is very important to make sure your business has a presence here!

Take a look at this example:

As you can see, the Google Places results appear before the standard listings, making them very prominent. If you were searching for a restaurant in San Francisco, there is a very good chance that you would choose one of those seven restaurants that appear at the top of the results.

As you can see from those results, Google Places shows users a number of different pieces of information about each business. The name of the business, the phone number, the website URL (if there is one available), as well as reviews for the company.

If a user clicks the name of the business of the number of reviews, they are taken to that company’s business page. There is a map that shows the company’s location, reviews and photos, hours of operation, and more.

This feature is especially helpful to users, because they can quickly and easily find the local businesses that have what they’re looking for. It’s also helpful for those businesses, because they can get a top listing in Google without spending months pushing their website there the old-fashioned way.

If you’re not taking advantage of Google Places, you’re missing out on a lot of business. In some cases, a listing in Google Places could even double your business!

Enhancing Local Listings

There are a few things you can do to enhance your local listings, but one of the most important is to have a website. When you have a website, your URL will be displayed in your listing, which will draw attention to the listing. This is very important, because it helps you stand out from the competition.

In most cases, you don’t need a complex website. Unless you plan to sell products or services directly online, all you really need is a website listing somewhat like an ad in the Yellow Pages.

Your site should contain:

* Your business location, including a map and directions

* Information about your products and services

* Hours of operation

* Contact information

Most companies don’t need much more than this on their website, but you can enhance your site’s effectiveness by adding additional features. For example, if you add an opt-in box to your site, visitors can subscribe to your email list, allowing you to send them news about special offers, coupons, sales, and new product offerings. This will help keep your customers reminded to shop with you, and you can offer incentives to keep them coming in.

It costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than it does to get repeat business from existing and former customers. By getting people on your mailing list, you can entice them to buy from you again and again. It just makes sense to do this, because you can turn one-time customers into lifelong buyers.

Why let people drop by your website once and leave, possibly forever, without getting them onto your mailing list? It’s an efficient use of your web space to provide a way for customers to be notified about your latest offers.

Get your Business Submitted

Submitting your business to these three search engines is relatively simple, but it can be time consuming. There is a lot of information required to optimize your listing, and it can be a little confusing if you’ve never done it before.

If you don’t have time to go through this yourself, or you’re uncomfortable doing so, we would be happy to help you get your company listed and optimized in Google Places.  Visit our Google Places services page to find out more about what we can do for your business.

Please contact us at (865) 296-3326 at your earliest convenience so we can discuss getting your site listed as soon as possible. The sooner you get listed, the sooner your business will start getting more customers!

Be sure to also check out our other services, including custom Facebook Fanpages to start taking your piece of Facebook’s enormous success.