Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Optimized

Yelp's iPhone app finds nearby restaurants using GPS

Mashable posted a good article called HOW TO: Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready.  This is a service that Anchor Wave has been helping business with since Google released their local business results in March of 2004.  Over recent years, geolocation and online mapping has taken off as smart phones and GPS devices begin to make it into our daily lives.

Yellowpages are dead, but you knew that

Imagine that you’re in a new part of town, or on vacation and you’re looking for a place to eat.  Smart phones that are aware of their physical location (through GPS) can scan the internet to tell you what’s near by.

Some of your potential customers and clients are looking for your services, but here’s the catch: They are not doing a Google search, they are not picking up a phone book, and they are not asking a friend.  Instead, they’re using websites and applications like Yelp.com, famous for helping over 25 million users each month find businesses around the US.

The simple fact is: If your business is not geolocation optimized by listing with sites like yelp.com, you’re invisible to a whole new breed of customers.

So, where should I be listed?

Every day there seems to be more places online where you should be listing your business, but we’ve narrowed it down to a short list that you can get started with.

• Google Local Business Center
• Bing! Local Business Center
• Yelp.com
• Gowalla.com
• Loopt.com
• Foursquare.com

Each site requires some basic information for you to get started.  Listing your business with these sites are free (for now), and just requires some time to gather the necessary information and verify your existence.  With services like Google, Bing!, and Yelp, you can lure customers with advanced profiles that include pictures, video, coupons, detailed product and company information to name a few.

As I mentioned with online video, the risk of getting involved with this technology is low.  Not being on these services for many businesses isn’t a big risk now, but soon it will be. As yellow pages and complex Google searches become a thing of the past, and smart phones, GPS and mapping applications become more commonplace, your business stands to be buried among your competitors that took the time to get listed with these sites.

What should I do next?

If you want to take matters into your own hands, visit the sites listed above and begin the process of getting listed.  If you need some help, Anchor Wave offers a “turn-key” service for getting your business Geolocation Optimized.  Contact us for details, or advice.