I am always amazed at the number of small businesses centers that do not know about Google Local Business Center. The word is getting out there but slowly.
If you search on a keyword phrase that includes a geographic term, especially a city name, you will likely get a list of several results (often 10) that click into a map results. These are local businesses that have a physical presence and relevance for the term you typed in.
The idea was to give local brick and mortar businesses visibility in the SERPS. Usually these businesses have no or an inadequate web presence and can certainly use the help.
Registering with Google Local Business Center is free. You can add pictures and video to your entry. Make sure you have your physical address on your web site and participate in the verification that google will do when you add a listing into the LBC. Check out the below video for more:
Small and medium-sized businesses alike have been capitalizing on the rapidly growing medium of internet marketing over the past few years. The dawn of the Internet presented a whole new range of opportunities for advertisers through Internet or online marketing.
Conventional advertising mediums such as TV, radio, and print have their own benefits. However, they tend to be so costly that only those with large chunks of advertising budget could make use of them. Internet marketing is relatively cheaper and guaranteed to reach the market segment advertisers are gunning for.
Online marketing entails various activities including but not limited to search engine optimization or SEO, banner ad placements, and search engine marketing or SEM. In any online marketing campaign, the advertiser or the one who wishes to market products and services must plan the strategies he will employ very carefully.
With Internet marketing, it is easy to track the success of each of your campaign strategies so it is easier to decide which ones you should pursue further and which ones you should abandon. Forms of online marketing such as pay per click (PPC), among others, could be traced and tested to find out which ads your target audience found most attractive.
One disadvantage of online marketing, perhaps, is its limiting factor for customers who are not Internet savvy or have very slow connection. Security concerns have also been raised with regards to personal information usually being asked from Internet users. There are also cases when some customers become hesitant to make online transactions for fear that their purchases might not reach them.