Small Business SEO | Small Business Social Media

Although I’m obviously late to the party on this one (original article is from April 2009), Lisa Barone from Outspoken Media put together a great post on where and how to submit your small business to increase its local search rankings. She includes some great sites I haven’t had time to cover yet including Best of the Web Local (BOTW local), GetListed.org, Localeze.com and Openlist.com. There are also over 130 comments discussing the post. Definitely a must read.

In this continuing series of posts, I will be covering the step-by-step process to properly submit your small business local search listings. In this post, we will tackle Superpages.com.

If you haven’t already, make sure to check out Part I of this series on Google Local listings and Part II on Yahoo Local listings as well.

Getting your business listed in the local search engines sites is paramount to getting not only more traffic to your website, but more calls on the phone and more new customers in the door.  Think of local search listings as interactive, detailed Yellow Pages ads of the 21st century – with one clear advantage – local search listings are free!

How to Get Your Small Business Listed on Superpages.com: Step by Step

Step 1 Go to Superpages.com

Step 2 Enter your business phone number to see if you are already listed in the directory. If you are already listed, but need to claim your listing, follow the on-screen directions. If you are not already listed in the directory, click ‘Continue’ at the bottom right of the screen.

Step 3 Enter your business information and select business categories that help customers find your listing.

Step 4 Review your listing & profile.

Step 5 Enter account information and submit.

That’s it! Your Superpages.com listing will go live typically within 5 business days. Stay tuned for the next post in this series to keep growing your small business online reach.

John at Duct Tape Marketing recently posted a great article on how to leverage social media to grow your small business.

He points out several excellent methods to grow your business using social media including:

1.  Creating an online group about your community. Post relevant and useful information about your community and interact with others in your area. A great way to get some free word of mouth advertising, as well as solidifying your roots in your local marketplace.

2.  Posting special offers to your followers on Twitter and Facebook. A proven way to increase the buzz about your business and create goodwill towards your growing group of followers.

3. Creating and enhancing your local search listings. As I have posted about several times, making sure your listings in Google Local, Yahoo Local and other top review sites are current is critical to your success as a small business. If you haven’t created your local listings yet, you need to do this (!)

I’m calling it right now. This warm and fuzzy ‘free as a business model’ or ‘gift economy’ or (insert trendy marketing term name here) marketing strategy has officially jumped the shark.

For those of you not familiar with what I am talking about, in a nutshell, there is a growing group of online marketing ‘gurus’ that continue to advocate giving away full and complete knowledge, solutions and even products for free with the strategy in the hopes that some of the folks you give these freebies to will join your mailing list, buy something from you, or help your company ‘go viral’ by spreading the word of your company on Twitter and Facebook.

Now, while I am a firm believer in helping out your fellow man as much as possible, as my grandfather used to say ‘that ain’t no way to run your sh*t’. In other words, denying the value of your product or service is simply not good business sense. Online or otherwise.

Please don’t get me wrong… creating an ebook or whitepaper to solidify your authority on a subject, or spell out the specifics of how you can help solve a problem for your prospective customers is smart marketing. Giving a free sample or creating free downloadable tool? Sure thing.

Creating a full scale product and then giving it away? Asinine.

There seems to be a growing scramble by less knowledgeable and less experienced business owners (especially Internet marketers) to get on this ‘free’ bandwagon as quickly as possible, and give away their newly created products to as many people as possible. All in the name of gaining more Diggs, Followers and Retweets.

Sure, the social marketers will jump to a quick defense that your ‘building trust’ while ‘increasing your brand’s reach’ and ‘leveraging the web to get free word of mouth advertising’. Oh, and don’t forget you’ll be ‘building your list of prospective customers that will want to hear more from you, and as they grow to trust you even more, they will actually purchase from you’.

Bullsh*t.

What is the value to your small business in a list of people that you have already _given_ your full products to for free? How many of these folks will actually _buy_ something from you? You’ve already set the precedent. You’ve given them something of value for free. Even if you tweak, optimize and supercharge your next product to the hilt, do you really think these folks will open up their wallets for you the next time?

No way.

So, unless you would like to go broke without even really trying, I highly recommend you stay far, far away from this latest nasty little trend and wait for the online world to return back to saner times.