Add your Business to Google Local Business Center

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

This is a must do for any business of any-size whether you have a website or not, and the best part it’s Free.

www.google.com/local/add

It requires you to have a Google account but don’t worry if you don’t as you can sign up from this page using an existing email account and making it a google account, so you don’t have to add on another email address to your ever growing list if your like myself.

Google walks you through each step of getting your business listed added and confirmed either by postcard or phone. I won’t repeat the steps here as you will already be on thier site with the directions in front of you, instead I will highlight the benefits.

When someone searches in google for your business or a general term/phrase for your type of business a map will show up at the top of the results displaying the local businesses. As an example you can search google for Saint John Bowling,
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=Saint+John+Bowling&btnG=Search&meta=

Here you can see the map, that shows the different businesses who have used Local Business Center to list their business and it shows them on the map so people can quickly see the location. In this example we did not search for a specific business but a general phrase but these business get prime placement for taking just a few minutes out of their day, and no on going cost.

This is a great way to reach your local audience for both specific and broad phrase searches.

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Bing! Microsoft Search – Still Missing Something

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

I have started using bing and I like how it works and I’m not going into comparing Bing with google as I like both Search Engines. However after using it there is a couple of things that I’d like to touch on as it affects businesses with websites and without.

1. No Auto Map?? – Now I figured this would be standard with any good search engine that if you search for a business name with location information that if there it should show it on the map. I was disappointed to find that when doing this type of search that wasn’t readily available.
The Search – elitegd saint john new brunswick
Bing Result
Google Result

How this effects you? – Well if your like me and you have a website doesn’t really effect you to much as you can see i’m showing in the top 4 returned results directing them to my website. However if you do a search and someone only has the Local Business Listing through Google Maps you now won’t show up at all.

The Search – laundry mat saint john new brunswick
Bing Result
Google Result
If there was any Laundry mat with even a basic website up they would receive 100% of the web traffic from Bing as currently none of them show up at all, even though all three are listed on Google Maps. This is why you don’t want to always focus on Google but focus on reaching all search engines.

2.  Bing Local Listing Center

Now I was very dissapointed when I went to add my own business that being from Canada there is no way to add yourself to Bing’s Local Listing Center, similar to google’s Local Business Center I have tried doing multiple searches to figure out a way for Canadian businesses to add their listing to the Bing Local Listing Center and haven’t found a way. This should be  a staple as well for any real competitive search engines, to at least be able to take submissions if your going to offer local searches. Hopefully this is just in the works and once I find a way I will be doing a post on adding your business to both Bing Local Listing Center, and Google’s Local Business Center.

Recommendation if you are relying on Google Map ( Local Business Center) to deliver your information invest in a small informational website so that you can make sure that other search engines that people use will direct people to your business and not a competitor’s.

Stay tuned i’ll be doing another reaching your target audience for Laundry Mats next after realizing this when researching for this post.

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Adding Google Map The Easy Way

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

You can setup a simple google map on your website through Google maps. No need to get an api key and a developer to customize the features just to get a basic map added to your website.

  1. Just navigate to google maps and search for your own location.
  2. Click on Link in the upper right corner
  3. Click Customize and Preview embedded map
  4. Now just change the different settings and position the map to the view you think is best.
  5. Copy and paste the code into your website.
  6. Your finished.

It’s great that google has taken the time to make a simple option for everyone to be able to use. You can DIYS (Do It Your Self) or you can hire someone for a very small fee since it’s now been simplified to a 5 – 10 min task.

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