How To Get On Google Places Maps

You have a choice. You can attempt to find new customers by broadcasting on TV, radio, newspapers, and mass mailings. In that case you will be presenting your message to thousands of people who are not likely candidates. Some of them won't need your product. Others already have a favorite supplier or vendor. If you choose a marketing tool that reaches outside your immediate market area, you will be asking new customers to drive by one or more of your competitors. This is okay, I suppose, if you have lots of money, and nothing better to do with it. Or maybe, the lifetime value of your potential customer is so high that you can afford the inherent waste of mass marketing.

The alternative is called narrow casting. In this approach you focus on likely prospects. The easiest, and usually cheapest way to do this, is to be where your prospective customers are looking. To let them find you.

If you have a storefront on the freeway, main street or the local mega-mall, your business signage and overall visibility are great ways to be found by the passersby who comes to know who and where you are. But if your market extends beyond your immediate area or individual mall location, that may not be enough.

The yellow pages are another example of being where people were looking. What was especially nice about the yellow pages is that a very high percentage of the people who took the time to open up their yellow pages were motivated buyers - ready and even eager to do business.

Because of the value of that urgency and the corresponding high conversion rates, the yellow pages became a very lucrative business. They could and did charge quite a bit for their display listings. Charges varied by category and community but ran into the $100's to thousands of dollars a month for many businesses.

The good news is that the Google Places Page approach I am about to reveal to you, is FREE, and has several other advantages as well. But let's not get the cart before the horse here.

A significant change occurred in late 2010 in how Google handles local searches.

For years it had realized that one in five of the searches people did on their search engine were locally oriented. While people wanted specific information about thousands of different topics, a strong minority were looking for local information, often in the form of finding their local butcher, baker and candlestick makers.

Google has long been experimenting with its mapping capabilities and GPS combined with its superior access to the universe of data online. Today, Google is able to identify the physical location of your computer when you do a search. It also knows the physical locations of all the businesses in its data base. As a result, it can plot their relative proximity to you when you (or a prospective customer) do a search.

Google has made its way into the behemoth it is by stressing one particular goal: providing the searcher with the most relevant information possible in response to their search. Google Local Places is just one more major step they have taken to dominate the search market, by giving its users the relevant information they want.

This has been an evolving capability. Until recently, if someone searched for a "chiropractor" on Google, or any of the other search engines, they would get millions of possible results. The first page of results might display a national chiropractor institute, or perhaps individual firms in New York or Los Angeles. Seldom would the searcher see a result from their immediate area. This caused the person searching to modify their search to something like, "chiropractor, Minneapolis." When they did that, the results were much better. Websites would be listed which included both terms, and thus more relevant to the Minneapolitan who was looking for a chiropractor.

An entire industry had sprung up called Search Engine Optimization or "SEO" to help businesses win the battle to appear on that first page of Google results. I and other SEO experts advised businesses to get their web sites to show up for local terms using, 'long tail geographical keywords.' That's why I named my consulting business, Minneapolis Internet Marketing Consultant and picked a url for my web site of www.MinneapolisInternetMarketingConsultant.com

It worked for me and for many businesses. Now those of us in the industry know a variety of additional steps that a business can take to get their web site ranked at the top of the search engine results. These fall into two general categories, on page and off page factors. These still matter when a business wants to get itself or a product line ranked in the organic results on Google and the other search engines. (Organic results are the natural search results that Google finds for any given search as opposed to the paid ads.)

They remain particularly relevant to non local businesses, national brands, etc that cannot take advantage of the local search gambit discussed here. These are beyond the scope of this report. For the most part, local businesses can get on the first page of Google results just by paying attention to the details I will be outlining in the coming pages. They still remain powerful and important in highly competitive fields and markets. For most "main street businesses, mastering Google local places will be enough to get you the lion's share of the available visibility in your marketplace.

I am pleased to announce that my newest eBook, How to Get On Google Maps has been accepted for sale as a Kindle eBook by Amazon.

I am thrilled to have Amazon as a marketing partner. In addition to my work being available there for use by Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android devices, PC, and Mac users.

In addition you can buy and download a pdf copy directly from How to Get On Google Maps.

eBook Summary

Every Business Needs New Customers.

This Kindle book describes the easiest and most effective way to get new customers for main street businesses serving a local area or region. The tools and insights provided are applicable to single establishments and chains with multiple locations.

In this book you will learn how to get your business "Found" by prospective customers by ranking high on the Google Places Pages, which are today's answer to the now obsolete yellow pages of the last century.

Not only will you learn how to claim and set up your Google Places pages properly, you will gain insights into some of the best online marketing tactics of the day.

You will learn how to do effective keyword search using free tools. Tools that will not only allow you to better understand your own customer demands, but also to spy on your competitors and discover their secrets.

You will understand the three main ways to get of top of the search results on Google.

The specific step by step instructions to make sure your Google Places Information is complete, and what is important and what isn't so that you show up on the favored 7 pack that Google Displays on its Map.

You will discover why you need to and how to create videos and learn about a free service you can use to create animated videos with special effects that will wow your viewers.

You will discover which other directories in addition to Google Places you want to get listed in, including Bing and Yahoo and nine others.

You will also learn of an inexpensive short cut you can take to minimize the time and effort required to complete these listings and gain valuable "citation" support for your listing.

As importantly, you will learn what not to buy.

You will also learn about a free Google service you can use to monitor your own reputation and to keep an eye on your competitors so you know what they are up to.

And finally, you will get a quick glimpse at the significant change that will render many of your competitors web pages obsolete. This same change will work to your advantage when you apply the lessons of this powerful "how to" book.