1. Navigate to the Google Local Business Center

2. Click on ‘Add a new business’

Click on image to enlarge

3. Fill out the required information about your business. Use keywords in your description and, if possible, in the name of your business.

Note: At this point Google may detect that your listing already exists within the Google Maps index. If this is the case, be sure to claim your listing and verify that all of the information is correct.

4. Choose your category. You can choose up to five and I recommend that you do so. Here are a few of the categories available for dentists:

• Cosmetic Dentist
• Pediatric Dentist
• Dental Clinic
• etc

5. Fill out all of the additional information, including adding an image of your practice. I am a believer that the more informative the Local Business Listing, the more trustworthy your practice appears.

6. Choose how you would like to validate this listing. You will either receive a phone call or validate via post card. This is intended to ensure that there are not false claims made on businesses.

Click on image to enlarge

As always, let me know if you have questions by leaving a comment or contacting me in person by clicking here.

This post will give you the information you need to get listed in Yahoo! Local. Yahoo! Local commands a big piece of the local search market. At the very least you should be taking advantage of the FREE Local Basic Listing.

How can this help market my dental or physicians practice?

Yahoo! Local Listings is an advertising network using the Yahoo! Search Network which gives business owners access to millions of searchers looking for local products or services. In other words, when people are searching Yahoo! for:

‘dental practice osh kosh wi’

-OR-

‘family physician springfield il’

you need to be listed in the Yahoo! Local index to be displayed.

Yahoo! Local Listings is made up of three products:

Yahoo! Local Basic Listing (FREE)

Yahoo! Local Basic Listing is available to any business owner. In fact, chances are that you are already in the Yahoo! Local Basic Listing index. You need to find your listing and “claim” it. Verify that the information is accurate and enhance the listing. Simply query the Yahoo! Local search engine for your business.

The Local Basic Listing allows you to list all of the following information:

1. Address, phone number and fax number
2. Website and email
3. Business category
4. The hours of your practice
5. Payment methods (Visa, Check, etc)
6. The products and services you offer

Click here for an example of a Yahoo! Basic Listing

Yahoo! Local Enhanced Listings ($9.95/month)

In addition to what is offered in the Yahoo! Local Basic Listing, the Local Enhanced Listing allows you to provide:

1. Dental or Physician Practice logo and tagline
2. Up to 10 photos of your busines
3. A detailed description of your business
4. Select up to five separate business categories to be associated with (i.e. dentistry, orthodontics, etc)
5. Ability to create two links that lead to customizable coupons

The main difference between the Enhanced and Basic listing is the ability to list in up to five categories. If your practice provides several different services that cross categories this may be a good option for you. Otherwise, you are better off keeping and enhancing your free listing or upgrading to the Featured Listing.

Yahoo! Local Featured Listing (Starts at $25/month)

The Featured Listing includes everything from the other two packages in addition to the following:

1. Guaranteed placement in Yahoo! Local on queries that match your category and region
2. Monthly, automatic billing
3. Customizable business listing/details page
4. A free 5-page basic web site

The Featured Listing is a finite resource. Once the Featured Listings for a particular category and particular region are purchased, they are SOLD OUT. You will not be able to acquire one of these listings until someone else leaves the program.

The Featured Listing includes Featured Ad Text which is a short blurb about the most aspect of your business. Consider what differentiates your dental or physician practice and include that in your Ad Text.

For example: “Family Physician of 25 years offers free initial visit.”

The Featured Ad Text is limited to 50 characters.

To purchase a Featured Listing, navigate to your Basic or Enhanced Listing. Click on the ‘Get Guaranteed Top Placement’ link. See the image below.

wedc

If you do not already have a Basic or Enhanced listing you can sign up here for any of the listings described in this post.

Let me know if you have questions by leaving a comment or contacting me directly here.

dental practice albany ny

Check out the Local 10-Box for this search:

Let’s dissect that first result:

First, the keyword is King. Remember that our query that was originally used was: dental practice albany ny

The first dentist that is listed is Albany Group Dental Practice

Notice that they have three of the four keywords in their Local Business Listing name. You do not have to use your business name as the Local Business Listing, you can choose to use any keyword string you like as long as it is relevant to your business.

Best practice when conducting dental marketing online – When you register your business with Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, etc be sure to include keywords that people are searching for when looking for your services.

Second, let’s go deeper into this Local Business Listing:

Albany Group Dental Practice has 22 Citations that verify the location and phone number of this dental practice. These citations are found on other people’s websites and build trust with Google. By trust I mean that Google feels very comfortable with the accuracy of the address and phone number that they are displaying because they see that 22 other websites are verifying this information. This is huge!

Best Practice online dental marketing - Find out where your competitors have “Citations” and be sure that you are cited as well. Verify the accuracy of the information that is listed already for your practice. You can use Google Alerts to do this. Look for a future post about Google Alerts.

Remember that the search engines are in the business of returning RELEVANT and ACCURATE information. The relevance is the keyword part. Albany Group Dental Practice contains three of the four keywords that were searched. The accuracy is taken into account by the number of Citations for that the Local Business Listing.

Let me know if you have questions or comments by posting in the Comments section. I will be happy to help.

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Place refers to the distribution channel by which a customer can acquire your product or service. It could be your brick and mortar store, a catalog, or a virtual store on the internet. Small businesses with physical locations will need to sit up and take notice of the trends in local search and mobile technology. Consumers are increasingly demanding information wherever and whenever they want it. Mobile technology will factor in heavily in the Local Search arena. Will your business appear on the tiny LCD screens of mobile handsets?

Imagine This:

A woman is driving home from work in Cleveland, Ohio speaking to her husband on her cell phone.

“I am too tired to cook dinner tonight, let’s just order a pizza.”

“Sounds good to me, I will pick one up on the way home.”

The man proceeds to log onto Yahoo.com with his handset and do a query:

pizza cleveland oh

“Ah, Tony’s Pizza is right on the way… that was easy!.” He says marveling at the speed at which he arrived at the information.

On most handsets you can select the phone number you see on the screen and choose to call from your mobile device. Incredible. Although Tony’s Pizza is probably not picking up a lot of business from this yet, this will become a major source of new and repeat business for them. Just ask any marketing professor, the easier you make it to do business with your company, the better the experience.

So the question is, how did Tony’s Pizza appear on that man’s mobile phone? That, my friends is what this entire blog is about.

Do: Take notice of the trends in local search, mobile handsets will be one of the ways that customers will find your business.

Don’t: Stick your head in the sand and allow your competitors to take business away from you.

Notice that both the #1 and #5 result are from the same insurance agency and will both direct you to www.amfam.com. What should be immediately troubling to Mr. Robert Ware (the unfortunate owner of the satellite branch of American Family Insurance in the #5 position) is that, although he is undoubtedly closer to the city center he is not ranking higher than Mr. Paul Manganelli’s branch located in one of the northern counties of Saint Louis. Additionally, Mr. Ware (the 5th result) is enjoying 13 citations from different sites including most of the 7 citations that Mr. Manganelli (1st result) has wrangled.

How can we explain this?

In David Mihm’s exhaustive post on the factors of local search, the importance of having the product or service keyphrases in the Local Business Listing. In this case we have the following Local Business Listings:

Paul C Manganelli Insurance Agency

and

American Family Insurance: St. Louis

The presence of the term ‘insurance agency’ in the Local Business Listing catapults Mr. Manganelli’s insurance agency into the Local-10 pack spotlight.

Do: Include targeted phrases in your Local Business Listing.

Don’t: Use generic phrases that aren’t being searched by your potential customers.