It used to take lots of time to put your local business online. Making the sites, then waiting for the pages to show up in search results – it took time, talent and lots of cash. That’s not the case any more.
In fact, you can be emarketing online today and get a top Google listing in hours instead of months – and you don’t even need to have a web site!
This screen shot is of a typical Google local online search. The tagged business on the map are Google Places listings. You may even already have one of these listings for your business. Google created ~50 million listings, all pulled from the phone book.
If you search and don’t find one for your business, you can create it yourself, and they are free.
These rank extremely well, and you have control of the keywords you want to be found for. There are guidelines you must follow to get the best results, but the small amount of work it takes to tune your Places listing up is definitely a worth-while undertaking.
Other 1st page listing can come from business directories. These are (generally) free sites devoted to listing your business, and many allow you to create ads, post photos of your business, and many will allow you to embed videos on your business listing. Both your listing and specific ads are liable to get to page 1 very quickly – in a matter of minutes in some case.
A third option is the on-line classified advertising. Sites like Craigslist let you create highly visible ads. These ads quickly find their way to the top of searches. One very nice feature is the ads are not just found on Craigslist, they also appear in the Google, Yahoo and Bing. Although the ads only run for 2 to 6 weeks, the indexed listing keeps showing up in searches long after the original ad has expired.
