Marketing Monday - Claim Your Business on Google

Alright so the no-nonsense marketing for yourself in the digital age advice starts here.

Step number one!

Claim your business on Google. Search for your business and when it pops up it will have a blue text link on the right side that says "claim this business".

Click that link and follow the instructions. It will ask you to verify that you are who you say you are by either calling your phone number or mailing you a set of instructions through the mail. The real mail. With the guys in shorts and everything. This process will take about two weeks.

In the meantime, add photos of your business. The most important one is going to be the storefront unless you sell a really cool product. This is because most often people want to make sure they're at the right place when they come by. All the other pictures are going to be marketing for you convincing people they should come to your store.

This means you should put effort into the other photos you display. You're going to want photos of inside your store, product shots, and smiling employees.

If you know anyone who even claims to be a photographer, this is when you want to call them. Have them set up nice shots, get the lighting right, do digital color-correcting, and finally - label all the photos you upload with important words that relate to your business. (for instance - name-of-busines-product-name.jpg) This will help people see the photos you want when searching you or your business.

Lastly, do the same for Bing and Yahoo. These search engines are not as important, however, your ranking on these search engines will affect your ranking on Google. Yahoo also has paid service to correct your business info on several other sites. Don't pay for it, but if you look up those sites you can correct your own information for about 80% of those sites. Again, you won't get a lot of traffic from these sites, but Google considers them when determining your ranking.

Good Luck!