Summary: In this episode, I look at how you can use Google Places to get more enquires for your small business. We’ll look at what it is, where it ranks and why you’d be mad not to get a free listing!<br> Podcast Transcription:<br> WHY GOOGLE PLACES IS ESSENTIAL FOR A LOCAL BUSINESS TO SUCCEED ONLINE<br> You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck.<br> This is the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is episode five. In this episode, I’m going to have a look at why Google Places are essential for a local business to succeed online.<br> I’d like to welcome anyone who’s just joined us for the first time, and for those of you who’ve been listening for a couple of weeks. Welcome back. If you haven’t subscribed already, please jump on iTunes or Stitcher and subscribe. I’d love to see you receiving this great information every week, and I also enjoy seeing everybody download the podcast. It gives me great pleasure, and also, it shows that at least some people are interested in what I’ve got to say.<br> A couple of updates to get things started. First of all, run through a little personal update. Let’s see, about a week ago, at 3:30 A.M., I got a fire call to a bush fire or a forest fire, which ended up being an all-day fire at a local area. For those of you who don’t know or maybe haven’t looked at the icon for the podcast, you’ll see that, actually, I’m a volunteer fire-fighter. I work on bush fires and forest fires here in Australia. We went out there, and quite a few trucks involved, and a good-sized fire to be ringed and dealt with. Everybody’s safe. No property harmed, and all good.<br> Secondly, I caught tonsillitis and pharyngitis last week, so I didn’t actually get a podcast recorded. In fact, I couldn’t talk at all. I was pretty unhealthy altogether.<br> Finally, my son who is a swimmer, won six golds and broke five records at our state swimming titles last weekend, so that was pretty amazing and great to watch. Here in Australia we have state titles only held once a year. In this case, it was short course titles. That was swimming in a 25-meter pool. Obviously, long courses are 50-meter pool. That’s some amazing times for such a young fellow. I’m very proud of him this week.<br> On the business side, trying out Raven Tools for the first time for reports for clients. They can bring in data from all sources, including AdWords and Analytics, but also social media data and all other different sources. One of the best things I’ve found is some of the information that they don’t collect live from AdWords, I can actually upload as a CSV file. That could be quite interesting and allow you to bring some stuff in.<br> On the Google front, they’ve gone from seven businesses loaded on the homepage when you do a search for a particular topic, such as a plumber or something in your local area, down to three. Next to the map now, generally there’s only three, not seven. That’s kind of cut the competition considerably to anyone who ranks well in Google Places. That’s one of the reasons I’m having a look at it this week, because it is such a great source of traffic for small business.<br> Lastly, a little program that I quite enjoy using called CuteRank, C-U-T-E-R-A-N-K, it’s free for one site; so if you’ve just got one website, you can load it into there, and it will give you the ranking of your site for specific keywords that you enter. You can pay for the professional version, which I quite enjoy, and you can load unlimited sites there. It’s a great piece of software, very quick, quite efficient, and allows you just to track where you’re ranking on those keywords if you want to do that.<br> WHAT IS GOOGLE PLACES FOR BUSINESS<br> In today’s episode,
