Marketing for local business can be quite challenging, especially if you don't have a large sum of money to spend in doing the marketing endeavor. Naturally, as a small business, your first priority is to maximize return and minimize cost and time investments. One way to do this is through online marketing. If you are not well-versed in how to do marketing for local business online, you can start by looking for tips to help you make an effective website and drive a volume of traffic to it.
There are actually tons of ways to drive traffic to your website and one of them is through Google Places.
From Local Business Center to Google Places
Google Places has done a lot to improve customer help center compared to the local business center. This includes having updated guides and adding more ways to get in touch with Google representatives if you're having problems. They have also added information on all the new features.
Apart from these, Google has also added a help forum with designated "Top Contributors" to answer your questions if you get stuck. In addition, they're also offering improved training through more Web-based seminars.
Despite all these changes and improvements, the mechanics to get your business listed and how to work your way to get to the top of Google's local listings have not changed.
When you are ready to set everything up, bear in mind that marketing for local business is also about three things:
Location
Location
Location
The bottom line is still to get the search engine to recognize and keep a record of your business. You must remember that at the end of the day, marketing using your local search engine is still one of the most straightforward and cost-effective ways to promote a local business.
Taking the time to set up your listing with Google properly and then moving on to the other local search engines like Bing or Yahoo! will help ensure that your customers find you when they do a search. Who knows? They might be your customers sooner than you expect.