Over the past week or so, I’ve had the need to search for businesses that sell products that I don’t purchase regularly. When looking for a place to purchase a product I’m not familiar with, I usually turn to Google to find business listings. I have a copy of the yellow pages but I don’t think I’ve opened it in over a year. I use the online version of the yellow pages rarely because their site is poorly designed and it takes too long to find what I want.

I don’t think I am alone in my search methods. People are going online more and more to find the products they want to purchase, even if they intend to make the purchase locally in a physical store. This makes the Google Places listing for your business very important.

Here are some listings for Chinese food restaurants.

The seven listings I’ve marked are Google Places for Business listings. Being in this list of seven is very important because if a potential customer sees a business that is nearby and offers what he or she wants, the search will end there. This person isn’t going to click to go deeper in the local results or look further down the page to find your listing.

The good news is that you can take ownership of your Google Places For Business listing. In my experience, most business owners haven’t done this and this means their business is poorly represented, if it is represented at all.

In a future blog post, I’ll explain how to take ownership of your Google Places For Business Listing.