Google Places - How to Set Your Listing Up and the Critical Category Choice(s)

Most small local business owners who try and do their own listings on Google Places fall into the category of a lawyer who handles his own case. He has a fool for a client. It is rare that I see a new client who has listed themselves on Google Places at all. They may be listed but haven't claimed their listing, leaving it open for others to change it. Or they may have claimed it, but not come close to optimizing the listing.

If you choose to go it alone, this decision may be the most important of all as you do your Google Places Listing. What is your category or your categories.

Invisible Set

Google makes it clear that you are well served to choose one of their categories for the FIRST of the five that you may list. If Google Maps is important to getting your phone to ring, this may be the most critical decision you make. Deciding the main category that your potential customer or client will use to find you is the starting point of this decision.

The first step in this process is to type in possible keywords in the space provided for the first category. As you type the word insurance, for instance, Google Places will automatically provide you with suggestions: Insurance Agency, Insurance Attorney, etc. If none of these suit your best idea of how folks will search for you, change the word. For instance, if you sell health insurance, start over and type in health. Now Google will give you choices like Health Consultant, Health Food Store, etc. Here you find the one you want, Health Insurance Agency.

After you have selected your first category from the Google Places offerings, you are now free to select up to four more categories, and you can make these up. Is it a good idea to make up categories or use 100% Google Places categories? That depends:

A. Can find five categories from Google's choices that are appropriate for your business? Then go with those. This is probably the best plan. If you can only find one or two that work for you, then you may want to get creative.

B. The next best categories would be ones that Google already recognizes, but which they have not bothered to put into their listing prompts. In the previous example, there is no prompt for Health Insurance, but if you search for health insurance Oakland, you are going to find a Places Map with listings. So this may be a good choice.

C. You might get lucky with a good category that Google Places is not yet recognizing. You have five categories, so if you have a special niche, why not use one category for an experiment. Children's Health Insurance does not currently seem to be a category that Google Places recognizes. But Senior Health Insurance comes up. If you do get lucky with a brand new category, you might end up with a stand alone listing on the outside MAP. That is golden.

Use all five categories if you can. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for that. You can decide the order that they are listed. No idea if the order you choose effects how Google Places chooses to give you better or worse placement on the map listings other than the first one. Knowing how Google typically does things, they usually assume that what you say is most important is what they should consider to be most important. Therefore if Children's Health Insurance is the 5th category you put up, and they have 10 other's with that category chosen in your city, but they all have it listed 2nd, you are, in my opinion, unlikely to be in the 7-pack.

Google Places - How to Set Your Listing Up and the Critical Category Choice(s)

Randy Kirk is the president of internet marketing company, Page1Listings. Almost without exception, the company's clients are finding that the phone rings when they are on the outside MAP of Google Places and the phone doesn't ring as much when they are invisible to Google Places. Sure, page 1 ranking in the organic is still a big plus, but this monster tool is effecting business, and will likely effect yours. If you want to be totally optimized on Google Places, and you have the ability to do so in a DIY fashion, go to http://www.GooglePlacesHelp.blogspot.com and the details are all there for the asking. Or turn to a pro to do it for you.

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Kirk is the authors of several business books including Warner Business Books 4.6 star "Running A 21st Century Small Business." The book is available on Amazon.com.

http://www.Page1Listings.com specializes in helping very small companies (1-50 employees) with marketing both on and off the internet.