Is Your Local Business Listing Ready For The Holidays?

Local business listings are the perfect tool for the local business to reach the local consumer. Local business listings show up in search results on the first page; they are available to local consumers through mobile search; and, mobile application developers use the local listing databases to make information available to the local consumer in mobile applications.

As a business that has claimed their listing you can inform the local consumer with you holiday hours, coupons, offers, discounts, photos, videos and events and more.

Local business listings give your business the opportunity, for free, to make coupons, offers, discounts, photos, videos and more available to local customers. You can be as big as a Target and as small as a florist to take advantage of local business listings. As long as your business is dependent upon the local economy for your revenue, local business listings is an important local business marketing tool.

: Image via Wikipedia

Local business listings show up in search results, in mobile search results and also in mobile applications. For this reason it is important that you to claim, update and manage your local business listing at multiple local listing websites, search engines, social communities, 411 websites, GPS websites and business directories. There is more to this than just Google.

If you have started to work with your local business listing, here are some tips for the holidays:

- Add photos about your business, products and services
- Add videos about your business, products and services
- Update your local listings keywords, categories and tags
- Create a coupon highlighting holiday specials
- Link to a menu of holiday events and offers
- Update your holiday business hours
- Write a post or add an event to engage with your local customers

These interactive yellow pages are important in your business marketing toolbox and you will have to watch for customer reviews as well. While you are in the process of updating your local business listings, you might as well start planning how to get satisfied customers to submit high ratings and positive comments about your business. You may wish to include:

- Displays cards asking for high ratings and positive comments at checkout or at the front counter.
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- Make a laptop or computer available for customers to add their comments to your listing while they are in your store or office (if appropriate)
- Have cards ready to include with any purchase or perhaps with your invoices that you send out.

Customer comments are important not only for your business listing now, but also in the future. Get a start on managing the customer reviews sooner rather than later!

Your customers are searching for every type of business, in your local area, using the Internet or their mobile devices. All of the major search engines and local Internet directories are providing information to your local consumers. Take control and engage while eliminating the traditional yellow page costs.

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet Marketing providing Internet marketing strategies to businesses including local business listing management services for local business marketing to reach the local consumer through web searches and mobile searches.