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Social Marketing – How to Get Your Local Business Listing to the Top of Google Places

August 8, 2010 by  
Filed under Social Media Marketing

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Social Media Marketing has become one of the most important ways to market your online business over the last year but what many people do not realize is how useful it can be for advertizing your local business as well.

Last weekend my husband was awakened in the middle of the night with a severe tooth ache. He was up all night and by the time I got up at 7:00am he was almost in tears. My heart sank because I know how difficult it is to find a dentist that will see patients on the weekend (most are even closed on Friday) but I knew we could not wait till monday morning for this problem.

So, I went to my computer and typed “emergency dentist near nashville tn” into the Google search engine and was thrilled when the map for “Google Places” came up!

Google places is a relatively new way Google provides results for local searches and it is amazing! There is a map and the directions and even reviews for the search results. Check out this video to see what happened when I did my search for “emergency dentist near nashville tn”.

The end result was we got into see a dentist that day, my husband’s problem was taken care of quickly and that business now has a satisfied customer and raving fan for life. As we were driving home I started to think about how to use this information for my local clients.

Over the next few days I will be going through how to optimize your local business listings in Google Places so you show up as the number one listing for your keyword. Then we will go into how you can use Social Media to get the news out about your listing.

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  • http://www.pinbud.com Chris

    Hi Lauren, I liked your article and youtube video very much. Indeed, Google Local is one of the reasons why Yellow Pages is sinking. However, you still have to contact local businesses one by one if you want to get different quotes or information. Perhaps not in the case of an emergency dentist (you go to the first you find) but if I were to renovate a house for example, I would request quotes from different contractors. Locating, selecting, contacting, and discussing with them can be time consuming. There are websites out there that make this task easier. Again, great video!