If you’re a small- or medium-sized business and you’re not using all the tools at your disposal to help local and regional customers find you, you’re potentially losing out on a ton of revenue.
You also could be wasting money because a local SEO focus helps ensure that you’re actually reaching your prospective customers, thus bringing you a much higher return on your investment.
In addition to the usual good SEO tactics (keyword optimized pages, tags and titles), you may want to consider using getting your company listed on Google Places.
Business Lead Widget 1
This service lets people in your area search for goods and services near them. You can take advantage of this service by creating a profile for your business.
Google Places works when someone types in “Santa Monica divorce lawyer.” Listings of divorce lawyers located in or near Santa Monica then appear first in the results pages.
You can enhance your listing by adding phone numbers, videos, links to your website, driving directions, even coupons. In addition, Google Places will give you a ton of information about how your listing is faring, offering you such information as how many times your listing appears in searches as well as the number of people clicking on your link.
Another benefit is the fact that your Google Places listing also will be displayed in Google Maps. You’ve no doubt seen these in action already — search for that “Santa Monica divorce lawyer” and you’ll see the top seven listings displayed on the first page of results with tiny bubble icons appearing on a map of your area, showing the firms’ locations.
This is great for small and medium-sized businesses for several reasons, not the least of which is that it can get your listing on the first page of Google results without using Pay-per-Click or even traditional SEO.
We’ll talk about how you can get your Google Places listing among the top seven in our next blog post.
