After receiving a lot of questions about the last Marketing Monday blog post, Searching for Strength, I realized it would be helpful to go a little more in depth about the subject.
So, lets address some of your questions and concerns…
How do I get my business listed on the major search engines?
The first thing I suggest is to create an administrative email for your business. Something like yourbusinessname(at)gmail.com. You don’t want to use a personal email address here for a number of reasons. First, it will help you stay organized. Second, if you were to ever leave your company for any reason, you could easily transfer this email address over to the new person in charge.At some point you will retire, sell your business, or pass it on to the next generation. Having a separate email address will end up saving you a bunch of time and headache in the future.
Getting Listed on Google
1. Go to www.google.com/places
2. Click Get Started now
3. Enter the phone number for your business
4. Fill out Basic Information.
5. Fill out Service Areas and Location Settings and Hours of Operations
6. Upload photos, videos and provide additional information and payment options.
The more information you provide, the more information the Google spiders have to pull from to help bring your listing to people who are searching for your services. The process for getting listed on Yahoo! and Bing are very similar. Simply click on these links to get started Yahoo! Local ,
What Directories should I list my business on?
There are other websites out there that are very similar to the local listings offered by the major search engines. These other directories are very valuable because they help your business become associated with the field you are working in – the fitness industry. There are directories that relate specifically to the fitness industry. These are a good place to start. Sites like FitnessLocator.com, and FitnessBusinessNetwork.com.
Then there are directory sites that search engines regularly crawl for data. It is a good idea to get your information on these as well.
At this point in time basic listings will be sufficient. A lot of these sites offer premium listings where you can pay a monthly fee to add more information. The premium listings aren’t recommended. For the most part, people use Google, Bing, and Yahoo! (in that order) when conducting a search. These other listings will help you build more links (which will make you seem more important in the eyes of search engines), and they will help draw a connection between your business, the field your working in, keywords, and your location. Basic listings will help you accomplish all of this for free. Unless you know there is a site that people are searching for you from, it wouldn’t be beneficial to pay for premium listings.
What is a Business Listing Profile Document?
In last weeks post I mentioned that you will want to create a business listing profile document before you start filling out all of your information on the various directory sites. Essentially what I meant by that is, create a word document with all of your business information.
That way when you go to fill out all of the various directories you can simply copy and paste the information rather than re-enter it on each site. This will save you a lot of time, and ensure that all of your information is consistent across the different directory sites. This document will also come in handy when filling out listings for Google, Bing and Yahoo.
What other questions do you have about business listings?
