There is a very easy, simple, free and underrated way to market your business. Drive customers from the web to your front door. Make sure that your business is listed on the Google Maps. Adding your business information to Google Maps for local search takes 10 minutes. People in your locality will find you on the top of the relevant search index. Recently Google renamed Local Business Listing to Google Places but the thing remains the same.



Add your business to Google Places

1. Go to google.com/local/add, sign in with your Google Id.

2. Click on the + to "Add New Listing".

3. Fill out the following information in the form

• Country
• Company/Organization - the official name of your company 
• Address
• Main Phone
• Email Address - will be visible publicly
• Website - where customers can get more information/business site
• Description - take time to think and write about your business
• Category - type 5 keywords which best describes your business. If you want to add more than 5 categories you will have to upload bulk CSV file (comma separated value) of each category, learn more about adding the bulk category.

4. Click next, which shows an unapproved / unvalidated business. Click on the validate button. The validation can be done via phone, mobile SMS or even by a postcard sent to your postal address.








5. After the validation, you can fill an optional form to give more information. Here you can add videos, images of your product or your company. You can also add the working hours (e.g. 10am to 9pm etc.) and the payment options of your company, e.g. cash, check, master card etc.








6. That's all but don't forget to verify your business before you log off otherwise it will not be listed.


7. Now you can keep track of the visitor's activity, and try to find out which keyword is driving more traffic and impression



8. For a simple Google search (not even on map), my old site is listing on the top of the search results.





Yahoo too provides the facility of listing business for Yahoo maps try http://listings.local.yahoo.com


Shekhar Sahu




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