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Duct Tape Marketing Local Search Engine Profile

Don’t Let Your Small Business Get Left Behind in the Local Search Engine Game

Get your local business found online automatically by local prospects with a Duct Tape Marketing Local Search Engine profile.

People are searching for every kind of business, right there in you hometown, using the Internet. Additionally, every major search engine is rushing to become the next local phone book.

Now is the time to get your business listed and take advantage of the growing number of people using local search to find businesses, services, and products of all kinds.

Learn more and Get Found on the Internet Today

Featured Article

Are You Findable? The Google Local Business Center

Back in June, Google updated its Local Business Center (LBC) dashboard. The dashboard is a free tool to help small business owners increase the accuracy of their information and visibility in local searches. The dashboard gives you several pieces of useful information about who is searching for you and how they are searching. Here are some of the main sections of the dashboard.

The Activity panel of the dashboard shows how many times your listing showed up in search results. The green graph shows the number of actions that were taken – clicks for more information, clicks to your web site, and clicks for driving directions.

The next section of the dashboard shows the top search queries that people used when your business listing was part of the search results.

The dashboard also shows you, for those people who requested driving directions, what zip codes those people were driving from. As the diagram below shows, I was popular in Olathe in the month of July : )

When looking at your dashboard, the right hand column will give you an indication of the completeness of your profile along with a summary of the information contained in your profile. In this case, my profile is not quite complete because I still have some photos and videos that I can add to my profile.

Is your business discoverable when people are searching for your goods and services on the internet? If you haven’t set up your Google Local Business Profile, I recommend that you put that on the top of your to-do list.

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Recommended Reading

Can you grow your business by turning your brand over to your customers and giving away valuable information for free? Yes, according to David Meerman Scott. In The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David explains how new web tools & technologies are the best way to communicate directly with your customers.

In his latest book, World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories , Scott explains how to create triggers that “…get millions of people to spread your ideas and share your stories”.

By accepting that we don’t really have control of our message anyway, we can focus on spreading our message by encouraging others to share it with their friends with similar interests.

The book includes several examples of people telling their story to a few select people, and then letting them take over and spread the story from them. My favorite story in the book is about Cindy Gordon, who told 7 Harry Potter fans about a new theme resort. Those 7 people ended up telling 350 million people.

Here are some of Scott's "rules of the rave":

• Nobody cares about your products (except you).
• No coercion required.
• Lose control.
• Put down roots.
• Point the world to your (virtual) doorstep.

The last section of the book provides advice for helping you "get found" on the internet.

By creating something valuable that people want to share and making it easy for them to do so, you can create a World Wide Rave. The question is, will you?

P.S. – after reading World Wide Rave, I took a shot at creating my own e-book. After just a couple of weeks, I’ve had a little over 300 downloads. If interested, you can download my marketing e-book “Saying The Wrong Thing Louder Doesn’t Make It Right” here.