Jan 19, 2012 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Promoting Your Business Through Google Places

Rarely does a day go by when a small business owner doesn’t ask me how they can improve the visibility of their website.  Usually they are asking about different tips and tricks for getting higher search engine rankings and most often, the search engine they’re most concerned about is Google.

As of this writing there are four differnet ways that you can get your site listed on the first page of Google.  You can pay for placement through their Adwords program. In this case, your ad will appear in the top 3 listings (shaded with a blue background) or down the right hand side of the listings.  Where your ad appear will depend on how much you’re willing to pay for a visitor and a number of other factors that we won’t get into here.

The other way to get on the first page is to set up and promote your site in such a manner that Google believes your site is the best source of information for their visitors and ranks you above all of your competitors.  This is what most people know as search engine optimization and it is as much an art as a science.

The third way to get listed on Google’s first page is to have content you’ve placed on third party sites appear there.  By content, I mean videos, articles, press releases, etc.  This is an often-overlooked area and a huge opportunity for local business owners. A subset of this approach would be renting a site or space on a site that already appears on the first page.  This is an area where I see a lot of growth potential.

The fourth, and what I believe, is the easiest way to get a good Google ranking is to leverage Google Places.  Google Places (or Maps) is a free service provided by Google that is similar to an online Yellow Pages ad. However, it is much more powerful.  Here’s why…

If you do any kind of local search in most cities you’ll notice that some of the top listings have pinkish-red bubbles beside them.  Those are Google Places lisings and if you click on them you’ll go to a one-page site hosted on Google that provides a map to that business as well as other pertinent information.

There are many interesting things to note about Google Places. First, this is a free service provided by Google and anyone can claim their listing.  It is a very simple process and I’ll be posting about how to do so shortly.  Second, these listings are gaining a higher and higher priority on Google so they are often bumping the normal or organic listings down the page.  I’m often seeing search results that show 7 Places results on the first page and only 3 websites.  Think about what this means to the 7 sites that got bumped to the second page.

The third thing about Google Places pages is that you can provide as much or as little information as you wish.  Google allows you to place pictures and even videos up on your Places page.  This allows you to build a pretty elaborate billboard to advertise your business.

Finally, Google Places seems to be driven by customer reviews.  Of course, Google will never tell you exactly what criteria they use to rank Places pages but it is apparent that businesses with more reviews do seem to rank higher.  This is great for good businesses but can be destructive for businesses providing notoriously bad services.

That about covers it for Google Places for now.  Stay tuned to my next few posts where I’ll be covering different ways of optimizing you Places page so that it should get ranked higher.  In the meantime, if you haven’t claimed your page yet you should do so right away. Google shows you how here. The sooner you do, the better jump you’ll be getting on your competition.