Why your web page will be seen when you are advertising locally, and how I found the answer.

First of all you should know three things before you apply to Google Places for your listing:

1. It's free
2. Every business listing must have a mailing address.
3. There shouldn't be more than one listing per physical location

Take a tour of the Google Places Web Page

I am passionate about the Internet and have spent a long time studying it and learning how it works. I can tell you now, at first I thought that it was one big secret.

It was very difficult to find out exactly how the system worked, then I read the Google Patent and everything I had learned fell into place. I realised what these two Google Guys had in store for us.

Can you imagine a world where every business has an equal chance of promoting their product or service on the Internet, even against the big boys with loads of money?

Before we go any further let me tell you the secret of the internet. You have to listen carefully because most people already think they know the answer.

Let me first tell you how most people think about the internet, and then I will tell you what is needed to win.

In the past, small businesses got involved in the Internet through people who promised them a web site that would be very well designed, most of these web pages were very attractive, and everyone loved them except the search engines.

I have found out that the design of a web page only plays a very small part in its success as a marketing tool. However, most small businesses still think the design is how to get business from the internet.

Here is a question that needs to be understood before you can learn to master the internet.

Who finds your web page on the Internet?

Most people answer that question by giving a list of the kind of people who are interested in the topic of the web page. However, the right answer is the “Search Engine” it would not be possible for a person to find a particular page without the help of the search engine, unless they had the address of the page.

Most small businesses use the Internet by making a great design then handing out their web addresses to potential customers or they place it in an advertisement when advertising locally.

Web pages can be easily found on the internet when we know the web address. We could find web addresses in magazines, newspapers the yellow pages or on the television. This method bypasses any need for search engine optimisation, and this is how most web designers produce web pages, it works like any other form of advertising.

What is wrong with this method of attracting customers?

If you had asked me that question a few years ago I would have said, “There is nothing wrong with it”. I cannot say that today, because there has been a big change in the way people find our businesses.

Potential customers do not look for web addresses of a particular company in the media as often.

People today simply go online and search for the kind of product or service they need, the search engine then gives them a choice of several companies who supply that particular product or service.

Without the search engine, the Internet is like a very large volume of books with no table of contents or index.

Anyway, we do have the search engines and they are very sophisticated, they know what information we want, they know exactly what we want, and they give it to us, when we want it.

How do they do this?

It is called relevance. Most businesses are not on the first page of the search engine listing simply because their web page is not relevant.

It may very well have an excellent design it might show the company in a very good light but for one reason or another search engines think the page is irrelevant.

Now that we know that search engines rejected pages that are not relevant, let’s see how a web designer can make a web page relevant to searches that people make using any search engine.

If we can make a web page relevant, the page will always show up on the very first page of the search results especially if we are advertising locally .

So, now we know that the secret of the search engine and that being found on the Internet is through relevance, all we have to do is make web pages relevant in the eyes of the search engine and they go straight to the top of the listings.

What is relevance?

When the search engine talks about relevance it means pages which relate to the word a person used to search with. They are pages that the search engine believes give information relating to the information that the person is searching for.

These words are commonly known as keyword but a better description could be “key phrase” because most people find a page by using two or more words in the search query that they use.

If a person searched for “carpet cleaning in London”, the search engine should give them information about “Carpet Cleaning in London”. Do you agree?

However, anyone can say “I’m a carpet cleaner in London” and then put up a web page, but the search engine needs more proof.  The proof comes for Citations.

Citations, when we talk about advertising locally and “Google Places” a Citation tells Google how many other people think that you are a “Carpet Cleaner in London”.

The other method “Google Places” uses is list your web page is “Comments”. “Google Places” wants to see what people think of you before they send them to your web page.

Google has given away 50 million web pages to local businesses and a many of them are in the UK.  All of the pages are live and running just now, but only a few have been claimed.  This makes it relatively easy to have a web page, where you are advertising locally, by doing nothing.

The companies who have claimed their pages and filled out the necessary information will have a better chance of being placed above the other pages.

But don’t think that this will still be the case towards the middle of 2011 because a campaign  is underway to educate small business owners.

The business that takes building their Google places web page properly (the way “Google Places” wants it built) that is, making sure that their listing is playing by the rules, will be the company that dominate the local search engine in the future.  This is because once a business has mastered how to organise “comments” and “Citations” it will be very difficult for late starters to catch up or push below that top position.

Order our free booklet and learn how to get that permanent top position when you are advertising locally on Google Places.