A great many small business owners are catching on to the massive opportunity right now to steer high quality visitors straight to their businesses, with or without a website, and it comes in the form of a free listing on Google Places (formerly Google Local Business Listings). Google populates its local business listings from outside data sources such as phone directories. All these listings are initially "unverified" and business owners are responsible for claiming their listing before they can edit it.
There have been many reports of unclaimed listings being hijacked by spammers, competitors and crooks. Claiming your listing will help to prevent this happening to your business.
If you're a local business who wants local customers it's the easiest way to the top of the search engines for your keywords. Below are a couple of examples of clients we've helped to dominate the first page of Google for their keywords using Google Places. (Click an image to see full size)
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A local listing on Google for keywords relating to your business can be a very valuable commodity but where there's money to be made, there are also spammers, fraudsters and hijackers.
