The New Year is upon us and this is also the season when businesses
plan their strategies for marketing including budgets and activities. This
exercise quickly becomes a wish list as the needs start to grow larger
than the amount of resources available to fulfill them.
Below are several helpful and no / low cost options available for small
businesses. We promote utilizing every aspect of free services first before
moving to other paid services for marketing.
These services are the foundation of digital marketing for local SEO,
SEO stands for “Service Engine Optimization” and local refers to the
area / community around your business. They are free to implement
but may take a little time to setup. You won’t always need a website for
these services to function correctly, but you will need at least a Google
account and a Google “My Business” Page.
1. Google “My Business” Page: This is my favorite service from Google.
The upside is that it is free, it supports Google analytics, it is easy and quick
to setup, and it can be used as a “mini website”. The downside is
that Google doesn’t act in our best interests and may abruptly
change their algorithm to interact less favorably with the page,
but that is true for anything in the realm of Google. Here is a link to
help with the full details and setup help.
2. Google Maps: This is my second favorite service from Google.
It works hand-in-hand with your Google account and Google My Business
Page and in my opinion is also the most powerful local SEO tool available.
You can easily test your visibility on Google Maps by typing in first, your
type of business such as “restaurant” or “bakery” secondly, the name of
your business, and lastly your name. After each step verify where and how
you are listed in the Google maps search. Do you not show up at all, or are
very far down on the list, or the bottom of the page says “claim this business”.
There is quite a bit more to go for this post, I will add the rest later so stop by again.
The original article was fairly long and written for a local newspaper in my town.
Thanks for visiting our site!
Great article. Very helpful. I look forward to reading the next installment. I'd be interested in knowing more about Google Search, hopefully you will cover this topic in the next post.