Multi-Media Advertising - Have You Claimed Your FREE Google Local Places Listing?

As a small to mid sized business owner, are you satisfied with your web presence? How do you drive traffic to your website? How do people find you? Have you or do you continue to use expensive internet marketing experts or Search Optimization companies to drive traffic to your website? How effective have you found them from a pure marketing ROI standpoint?

Did you know that you are ALREADY a partner with Google in the Local Places Listing space? Google has already preprogrammed and search optimized over 50Million businesses worldwide. The sad fact is ONLY 3% of businesses have claimed their FREE Google Local Places Listing website. Many small businesses continue to spend thousands on Yellow Pages, Newspaper or other offline publications where they have no idea about the marketing effectiveness of their investment. All a small business has to do is CLAIM their listing from Google. And a small business does NOT even have to have a website to be ranked high on the Google Local Places Listing.

The Google Local Places Listing Website is an extremely powerful FREE channel for your business! And if claimed, optimized and mobile device enabled, it becomes a key part of a small business’s multi-media advertising strategy.

Of course, it is always not quite as simple as merely claiming your listing to continue to be ranked on page 1 or 2.  There are several monthly optimization maintenance tasks that must be done to keep your high ranking and also ensure your site is mobile enabled.

So, go to your Local Google Places Listing and search for your company. You might pleasantly find out that you are already ranked BY DEFAULT on page 1 or 2. However, note that as more businesses claim and optimize their sites, you are at risk of falling into oblivion!

And while you are at it, why not ALSO claim your Yahoo Local and Bing Local Listings. By properly integrating and fusing ALL three FREE listings, you should be able to rank high in your local area (town, zip code, city or county, etc). More importantly, you will also be able to determine HOW much traffic you are getting from these FREE sites. And over time, you may be able to save money by shifting advertising resources from inefficient, expensive online and offline channels to more efficient, cost effective channels.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Questions on how to claim your listings or how I may help you are welcome.