Google Places is Google’s way of giving local business owners an upper hand. There are so many benefits to getting listed in Google Places for Business that any local business owner who’s not taking advantage of it is really leaving money on the table.

Here are some of the main benefits of getting listed in Google Places.

Surpass Other Businesses with More Established Rankings for Their Websites

Search engines are notoriously difficult to rank for. If you wanted to get ranked for “San Francisco Pizza” with a new website, it’ll probably take you at least a year to get on the front page, let alone to the top of the page using organic SEO (which just means using the words and phrases people are searching for on your web pages).

However, with a listing at Google Places, you can quickly leap to the top of the listings even with a brand new website.

Your business has a much better chance to be displayed at the top of local searches for your business type. So, if someone in San Francisco types in “San Francisco Pizza”, your pizzeria would display higher than all the organic listings – even if they’ve been there for years.

Show on Google Maps and iPhone Searches

Let’s say someone’s on their iPhone and needs to find a locksmith. They type in “Locksmith” in Google Maps and find the three nearest locksmiths.

If you have a lock smithing shop and you’re in Google Places, your shop will show up as a pin in their search. If the person searching is nearby, they’ll likely start walking to your shop.

The same works on online searches and Google Maps. The number of people using Google Maps every day is staggering – don’t neglect this opportunity.

Free Photo Shoots

If you’re running a business in a major city, Google Places may be willing to come to your business to take some professional quality photos for free.

Google accomplishes two things with this. First, they improve their listings. Having photos actually improves the quality of their search results.

They also verify that you’re a real business by physically setting foot in your establishment. They’ll often do this anyway even if they’re not taking photos, so they might as well take some photos while they’re there.

Google Places for Business: Local Small Business Marketing Champions

These are just three of the benefits of being listed in Google Places. Google has taken the position that local businesses should be given an edge when it comes to local searches. Naturally, if someone’s looking for a local business in their search, they should find a local business rather than a well-optimized website that’s not a local business.

Getting listed with Google Places will help your website rankings, will put you on the iPhone and Android screens and even has fringe benefits like free photo shoots. Getting into Google Places isn’t hard if you’re a “bricks and mortar”  business.

Why not get your business on Google Places today?

Related articles:

• 5 Steps to Google Places Optimization Zen (hubspot.com)
• The #1 First-Things-First Way to Get More Business: Local Search (socialbizlocalbiz.com)

=> General Analytics

There are three primary analytics platforms that provide a full spectrum of data including referral data, traffic data, content data, search data and more.

* Google Analytics – This is the 300-pound gorilla of the tracking space. Google Analytics provides just about all the data you could every want, 100% free.

The downside to using Google is that a lot of people don’t feel comfortable having all their sites linked together by Google, especially if they’re experimenting with unconventional back-linking techniques or other “grey” areas of marketing.

* GoingUp – GoingUp provides just about everything Google Analytics does, and a little more. GoingUp also provides heatmap tracking in addition to the typical analytics data, meaning you can actually see where people are clicking on a graphical display. This can give you a lot of useful information about your user’s behavior.

* Piwik – Piwik is an open source self-hosted tracking solution. If you prefer to have your tracking hosted on your own servers rather than risk having it on someone else’s server, Piwik can be a great way to do it.

They have a strong reputation for building great software, the code is written by hundreds of dedicated developers all over the world and their platform provides all the functionality that Google Analytics does.

=> ConceptFeedback.com

Want to know what people think of your design before you launch? Why not post it to a group of marketers and designers for review?

ConceptFeedback.com is a free website where people can post their business, marketing and design concepts to be reviewed by their peers free of charge.

It’s a great way to get a gauge of what experienced designers and marketers think before you launch.

=> Compete.com

Compete.com is a competitive research platform that allows you to spy on your competitor’s keywords and traffic statistics.

Though their data isn’t “accurate” per se, it can still give you a very good gauge on where their traffic is coming from, as well as what kinds of keywords are working for them.

Though you do need to pay to get complete access to Compete, the free version gives you a limited number of keywords and traffic sources – enough to get a very good sense of what your competitors are up to.

These are some of the top free web analytics tools available to webmasters today. Most of these tools are easy to use and can provide you with data that will make running your business much, much easier.

Hardware Must Haves

1. Laptop with a wireless modem
2. Cable modem with a wireless router
3. Color printer/scanner/copier
4. Dedicated fax line with Multifunction fax machine
5. Digital camera
6. Professional e-mail server/account. (Not one of popular personal free e-mail accounts like Yahoo and definitely not Hotmail.)
7. Telephone land line for your toll-free customer service number.

What if you don’t have one or more of these hardware essentials? Get started with:

1. A professional message on your home telephone line: Hello, you’ve reached the Williams home and the professional offices of Achieve Enterprises. Please leave a short message and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Your call is important to us.
2. The fastest Internet connection you can afford for the computer you have.
3. The best color inkjet printer you can afford. (Best in terms of quality of the printed page. The paper you use also matters.)
4. A telephone set up that lets you move and talk “hands free.” Use a Plantronics headset so you don’t have to hold the telephone receiver and your hands are free to use your computer keyboard and to write notes–or to gesture freely while you talk.
5. A friend with a digital camera you can borrow.

See more about email accounts and addresses in the section below, Web-based Software Tools

Essential Software Must-Haves

1. Microsoft Word
2. Excel
3. Powerpoint
4. Outlook
5. Quickbooks
6. Adobe Acrobat Reader

What if you don’t have these? What if you’re a Mac user?

Web-based Software Tools

There are ways to get started without Microsoft Office installed on your computer. You can use:

Web-based software from Google. Create a Google account and check out Google Docs. Best part about it? Access to Google Docs is free!

An autoresponder with contact management system built in. Oprius offers this kind of web-based tool. Check it out here: Oprius.com. It’s free to test for 30 days and then it costs $14.95 per month. That’s a great price for this powerful tool. Another feature of Oprius is that you can develop landing pages (or squeeze pages) with sign up boxes easily from within the Oprius software, a boon if you are new to web page development.

Are you more interested in being able to send out email newsletters and surveys? Consider using iContact for email marketing. iContact is affordable and easy to use and has a great following from home-based entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies. iContact includes its survey function in the basic price, a savings over the popular Constant Contact program. Click here to go to iContact’s page to sign up for a free trial.

You will be able to get your Outlook address book into either of these programs by exporting data and then importing into the program. The details of this process are beyond the scope of this post, but I’m glad to help you if you contact me. Your first half-hour coaching session is no cost to you.