We all know that the vast majority of people who are looking for local businesses in your area will be using Google; but how can you make sure that it’s your businesses name that catches their attention?

Before you start to wonder if this is really an important issue when it comes to the promotion of your business, here are a couple of simple facts for you: 97 percent of the people looking for local businesses will start by checking online. According to Google, 73 percent of all of the searches conducted online will be to find local content. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Naturally, this means that the search engines play a large part in the success of small local businesses. This could be in terms of them being able to find where you’re located, the sort of things that you do, or just as a way of creating brand awareness. The thing is, not everyone realizes just how much of a part the internet can play in their company’s growth; and those who do tend to, go about creating “visibility” in the wrong way. They will put all of their advertising budget into SEO strategies that change daily, or search campaigns that can be tricky to get right, and they miss the one glaringly obvious (and FREE) way to get the ball rolling: Google Places.

In a nutshell, Google Places was a replacement for Google Local Business Center, and it was first rolled out in the September of 2009. At the time it was hailed as “a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.”

The thing is that even now – several years after its launch – companies are still trying to find the right way to get it to work for them.

The co-founder and chief marketing officer of Everspark Interactive, Chris Watson, said “It’s a very difficult and delicate ecosystem,” he added “In the beginning; we spent 12 months thinking we had the variables right only to find that sometimes we got it completely wrong.”

The good news for small local businesses, though, is the fact that Google Places is free to sign up for, and it’s a relatively painless job to get it all setup. On the flipside, there is still some work to be done to get those paying customers through the door. While it may be easy to set up, maintaining it should be done by more experienced campaigners.

Setting Up Your Google Places Account:

This can be done in just three steps:

• Enter your company’s information, i.e., basic contact details, photos, and video etc.
• Verify the listing on the telephone, or by postcard.
• Sit back and wait for the listing to go live on Google.

Google will have one of its bots crawl the web to find out other information about your business, from reputable third party sites like the Yellow Pages, and Yelp. This information will then be used to create your Places page.

Be sure to fill in as much detail about your company as you can, i.e., the businesses opening hours, your payment options, and all other information that will be relevant to potential customers. The more detail you give, the more reassured people will be about visiting you – and it helps to achieve a better page rank, too.

Common Mistakes that You Need to Avoid When Using Google Places:

Chris Watson points out one of the things that many non SEO savvy businesses need to remember when creating a website, “Don’t go keyword stuffing… The biggest mistake I see are businesses that go into their Places account and put in 20 different categories for their business. They think that because they can do it, it’s appropriate. You should nominate just one category.”

Watson also goes on to explain that, “People don’t realize that Google Places is predominantly about a phone number. That phone number has to be a local phone number, and shown on your website in a format that the Google spider can see.” Which effectively means: if your phone number is tucked away inside an image, then Google can’t do anything to get it listed for you.

“Citations” can be a problem for your Places account, too, as a “citation” is simply a third party site’s affirmation about your company’s Google Places listing.

As one blogger puts it, “In order to get a valuable citation, the referring website must list the company information as it appears in the Places Profile.” They further explain that, “That means that the company name and address have to be identical. While that doesn’t seem too difficult a concept, consider this – if your business is listed at 300 S Main Street in the Places Profile, but someone cites the address on their website as 300 South Main Street, the value of that citation is diminished. One could believe that such a difference as negligible (S. vs. South), but in the realm of local search every detail matters.”

The biggest hindrance to successfully setting up a Google Places campaign is too many people having a say, “It’s a not place where everyone can contribute,” says Chris Watson. “It has to be very closely monitored.”

Using Optimize Rankings with Google Places:

According to Ken Horst it’s, “Not surprisingly, marketing on Google Places has gotten very competitive.” The SEO expert goes on to say, “It used to be you could simply fill out your business listing on Google and see it in the seven pack a few weeks later. These days, if your listing doesn’t have a 100 percent score, you can forget about being listed in the first seven local businesses that Google displays for local results.”

Of course, there are a number of ways that you can use to get into the all-important top seven places. Chris Watson suggests uploading videos, using barcodes, including photographs, but most of all you should try to encourage people to leave reviews.

Also, when you are composing a company description, you should try to “think outside of the box”, and avoid clichéd expressions like, “proud to service the community”, “the best cheese seller in town”, and “outside of the box” (unless you’re a box manufacturer). To increase your page rank you need to be more specific in your descriptions.

Local Business Photos and Google Places Listing:

One of the updates that Google made to places was the ability to add 360-degree business photos. These photos not only show the exterior of your business, they can give potential customers a look inside before they visit you.

Google noted upon its release. According to Google, “Millions of users visit Google Maps every day to learn about new places.” They added that you can, “Showcase your business to these potential customers by signing up for a photo shoot by Google trusted photographers. The images will appear on your business’s Place page, and as 360-degree imagery using Street View technology.”

While Business Photos is still gaining a foothold, it is being rolled out in the United States, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia. This is a time-intensive process, and a few people have queried Google’s ability to do this World Wide, but some people, like Chris Watson, are still excited about its implications for the small business owner, “We don’t know whether or not it’s going to be that significant,” he says. “But if you look at it from a strategy perspective, it’s always better to show more. You can go ahead and upload your own pictures, but I would suggest that there’s something rather significant to being a Google Business Photo ‘chosen one.’”