Every year there is a business expo held in Rockton Illinois that showcases the many small, home-based and local businesses in the Rockton/Roscoe area called “RO-RO” for short. This year there were 101 exhibitors (aside from the public sector exhibitors, food vendors, etc.).
I know because I walked the show floor and spoke with someone in every one of those booths. I asked them all a single question, and I must admit I was a more than a little surprised by the answers I got.
I asked each of them this:
Have you claimed your business on Google, Yahoo or Bing?
I went completely up one of the three aisles and halfway down the second before I came across someone who looked at me like I was a little crazy, shrugged and said “of course.”
That was the reaction I was looking for, the one I had thought I would get far, far more often than I did.
At the end of my walk I tallied only 20 businesses that had taken the 30 minutes time to make sure that their business was properly represented in the maps section of a Google search results page. Only a few of those 20 had taken the additional time to go through the same steps on Bing and Yahoo.
Two years ago there was much ado online about the fact that anyone could claim a business listing. Fears were running high that a competitor could claim your business listing and point your address and phone number to his business, or say unflattering things about you in the business description field.
While that hasn’t happened on the wide scale feared, it did happen. It could still happen to any unclaimed business, though fear of hijacking shouldn’t be your only reason for claiming your business. Here are the reasons that really count:
- It costs no money to claim your business and make sure no one else can exploit it
- It takes only 20-30 minutes on each search engine to do
- You then have a complete business profile on the first page of the search results for your business keywords
- You can link this listing to your full website (gaining backlinks and directing traffic) to boost it’s search engine ranking as well
- You can change your listing at any time to reflect current coupons, special events; anything to enhance your profile
So why haven’t more small, and especially the local businesses, taken advantage of this? That’s not a rhetorical question. I really would like to know what you think the answer is. Where do you think these business people should have found the information they needed to do this two years ago? Where would you suggest I go online to reach the most people and let them know about this? Because they do want to know.
With a few exceptions who were more concerned with letting me know they didn’t need a website, every single business person I spoke to at RO-RO who hadn’t known about claiming their place on the maps said “tell me more!”
I will be publishing a “step-by-step” guide on where to go and how to do this right in April. (If you can’t wait until then, please email me today.) In the meantime, I have a couple of ideas of how I’m going to spread the word, but your comments below on where to go would really be appreciated.
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