I recently signed up to list my business on Google's Local Business Center (LBC). The Google LBC is a free tool that allows individual business owners to list themselves, at no charge, on Google Maps, which the company is marketing as its equivalent of the Yellow Pages. The concept is relatively simple…
- You visit the LBC and enter your business contact info *and* any additional “enhanced information” (e.g., hours of operation, # of years in business, specialty)
- Google will post this information on a “Profile” page for you. Your website address will automatically be placed on this page by Google’s crawl technology.
… and the benefits are vast: Consumers find you not only when they search on Google Maps, but also on Google.com.
This is a tremendous benefit, because I would assume that the vast majority of people search for realtors on Google.com rather than Google Maps. Google is smart enough to know this, and so they “trigger” local results on a map when people search on Google.com. For example, try a search on Google Maps for “realtors in Your City, USA”. Now, try that same search, but on Google.com. Notice that the local results on Google.com are the same results as those on Google Maps. This underscores the importance of getting listed on the Google LBC! Getting listed on LBC means that you get listed on Google Maps, which in turn means that you can show up when people search on Google.com.
Note that your listing may get distributed beyond Google.com, on to other websites as well. Google has major partnerships with websites like AOL in which Google provides its search results to the partner. One can imagine that Google would want to partner with other sites as well to distribute Google Maps and would provide its local business search results as part of such a deal.
Signing up is easy – it takes less than 5-10 minutes and well worth the time in my opinion. Plus, should you move offices or change numbers, you can change the contact info ASAP, rather than rely on the Yellow Page company to update the information at some later point in time. Diagram from Google LBC below:
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