Local Online Marketing – at least have an entry on Google Maps

Some local businesses we know don’t think that a website is going to be cost effective for them to implement. We don’t agree with this view; using WordPress you can get a simple to manage, extremely search engine friendly website at a cost that is nowhere near the value that you will get back from it. However, we understand that we still have a way to go in terms of explaining this to local small businesses! In the meantime we have a halfway house solution in the form of ‘Google Maps‘.

We publish a local community magazine in Hythe, Kent and one of our customers has a picture framing company in Hythe. He doesn’t have a website and until recently didn’t appear on Google if you searched for ‘picture framing hythe’. We suggested that he add his business to Google Maps and now if you search for the same keywords you will see that ‘Fairlight Frames’ appears (at the time of writing) in 3rd position next to the map, as the only picture framing business listed for Hythe.

Given that many people now use Google to search for local businesses before they buy offline, you are really missing a trick if you don’t have a listing on Google Maps.

All you have to do is:

• search on Google for ‘Google Maps’
• click ‘put your business on Google Maps’
• login to your Google account or register to get a free Google account
• add a new listing
• fill in your details
• move the pointer on the map if it isn’t quite correct (it works by postcode)
• click next to add your listing
• add in information about your business including images of your logo or business premises and video.
• confirm you are who you say you are by phone, text or post (we would recommend using the phone or text option as the postal option really does take ages!).

Once Google have confirmed these details your listing should be live and will start to show up for certain searches made on Google depending on the keywords chosen.  You can improve the chances of your entry showing up by ensuring that the wording that you have used on the entry includes the keywords that your potential customers are likely to be searching for.  It’s a good idea to ensure that you have added a reasonably amount of information to the entry as Google likes useful, relevant content, and if you can get Reviews (from your existing customers) that may be helpful too (Google don’t reveal details of their search algorithms!).  We have also read that using the ‘coupon’ option to offer Google Maps referred customers a discount / deal at your business may also help, but we have not tested that one ourselves.

Here is a blog post entitled ‘6 Proven Ways to Increase Your Google Local Business Listing Rank’ that I found elsewhere, which is worth a read.

We hope you have found this useful.  We can’t stress enough how important it is to get your business onto Google Maps.  Have you an example of this working for a local business that you know?

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• How to Add Google Maps in a WordPress Site? (shankrila.com)

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