Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Local Internet Marketing and Local Listings for Small Business

There are many entrepreneurs whose spirit impressed me the most, and their concern of not being found online keeps me thinking of what I can be of any help. Our auto parts business kingsource.com has been online for quite a few years, and we have been successful in getting customers from all over the United States. However, not until recently have I started thinking of reaching to our local customers. I have been working on getting our Aftermarket auto parts store listed online for FREE, and here is what I would like to share with you who are interested.

The Big three search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing can list your local store free. They all need to verify your entry, so it takes about a month to get your store listed on the Big Three. We already have our store listed on Yahoo, still waiting for the post cards to verify with Google and Bing.

The next source for local listings is Yext PowerListings.  You may type in your business name and address and see how your business appears across the internet. Most likely, your shop is not found in any of those local listings. You may choose to pay for the powerlistings so they fix it all for you or go through those listing sites and do it yourself like I have been doing now. Most of those listings are free for the basic features. What you need to do is to sign up an account and provide your business information. Since there are so many local listings out there (+30), I would like to get some idea by trying those free listing first, and then decide which local listing would work best to our store and move on to premium local internet marketing.

Here are some examples of KingSource Auto Parts Store's local listings.

1. Yahoo: Alexa#4. Listed as Auto King Source.

2. Yelp: Alexa#195. Listed as KingSource Auto Parts.

3. FourSquare.com: Alexa#834. Listed as KingSource Auto Parts online store.

4. EZLocal.com: Alexa#55,974. Listed as KingSource Auto Parts

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