Google Local Listing For Home Business Owners
Do you work from home? Are you a service business like a lawn service, pest control, alarm company of maybe a wedding photographer? You may have seen the local business listing directory in Google but since you don’t have a business location you didn’t look into creating your own listing.
The good news is that you don’t need a bricks and mortar address to have a local business listing in Google Places! Work at home moms, painters, carpet installers, locksmiths, limousine companies and any local service company can promote their home based business in Google Places.
Google understands that a businesses credibility is not based on the location of the business and since your initial customer contact is by cell phone or maybe a website and your services are performed at the clients home or place of business you don’t need a physical office location to work from.
As a home based business operator you may not want to advertise your address! And in the past a physical address was required so your only option was to go down to the UPS Store and rent a mailbox to get a local Google listing only to find that you couldn’t get a good placement in “Google Maps” with a rented address.
The bottom line to this posting is that you do qualify for a listing on Google Places in the local business directory?
Google has made some improvements and included some new options designed to help out the home based business owner. You’ll want to take a few minutes to understand just how these new changes can have a positive impact on your marketing exposure.
Google now gives you an option to include the geographic areas that you serve. You can do this only if your business requires you to go to the customer to provide the service or make a delivery. As a home business you will still be required to provide a valid physical address when creating the listing but you can make your address private so it is not shown on Google.
You can show your service area in terms of distance, showing a coverage area of up to 50 miles from your home.
So if your local business offers services that take you directly to the customer you’ll broaden your exposure quickly with Google Places.
If you want to know how to add a service area to your existing business listing, just go directly to Google.com/places and create a listing. It’s free and should only take a about an hour to create the initial page.
