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Need Help and Google Places Tips in Plymouth?

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Here’s a fact worth considering: 97 percent of consumers search for local businesses online. Another: 73 percent of all online activity is related to local content, according to data released by Google.

This has huge implications for small businesses, which often depend on Google—in terms of organic and paid search—to generate phone calls, foot traffic, and overall brand visibility. But while most businesses spend time and marketing dollars perfecting their paid search campaigns and SEO strategies, plenty overlook one of the most valuable (and free) resources that Google has ever offered: Google Places.

Places was launched in September 2009, and ostensibly replaced the Google Local Business Center. On Google’s official blog, the service was introduced as ” a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.”

Two years after its launch, many companies are still struggling to get it right.

“It’s a very difficult and delicate ecosystem,” says Chris Watson, the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Everspark Interactive, a full-service SEO agency based in Atlanta. “In the beginning, we spent 12 months thinking we had the variables right only to find that sometimes we got it completely wrong.”

The good news is that Google Places is free and fairly painless to set up. The bad news is that it takes more than just a couple of clicks to start generating paying customers. Watson notes that maintaining the Places account is just like any other aspect of the marketing mix, and should not be left to an inexperienced office manager to set up.

Marketing Your Business Using Google Places: Set Up an Account

Adding a listing takes just three steps. They are:

Submit your information, from basic contact info to photos and video.

Verify your listing by phone or postcard.

Wait for your listing to appear on Google.

To create your business’s Places page, Google will crawl the Web and find information about your business from a variety of third-party sources, including Yelp and Yellow Pages.

Once you’ve set up the listing, it’s important to fill out all of the relevant information, including hours of operation, payment options, categories, and additional details. This is not merely to help your customers navigate your Places page. It’s to help you, too: the richer in content your listing is, the more prominent your Places organic ranking will become.

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