<em>This post is taken from an email response to Brent Gunderson of Gen-Con, who was asking about some easy and cost-effective ways to increase his visibility in some key markets.</em><br /><br />So you want to increase your local visibility in some key markets, while keeping costs low? There are a few tricks that may help drive more traffic your way - including creating a &quot;landing page&quot; loaded with keywords (for example a page listing all counties in your desired market called &quot;Areas We Service&quot;). <br /><br />I can give you an easy one today that should help almost immediately and won&#039;t cost a dime.<br /><br />Have you heard of Google Places? It&#039;s essentially a listing service provided by Google, for local businesses, and it&#039;s free. You set your service range, add a logo and some photos, and you&#039;re done. Beyond the obvious benefits of an additional listing on the most popular search engine, Places are also integrated into Google Maps, which display local listings at the top of Google search results.<br /><br />Though it&#039;s not difficult to create a new listing, Google, by default, already has most businesses listed in its system somewhere. Aquatherm Master Dealer Gen-Con in Portland, OR, for instance, appears here: <a href="http://bit.ly/HwNz97" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/HwNz97.</a> You should see in the upper right corner (above the map) &quot;Business Owner?&quot; - clicking that will take you to the Google Places landing page, where you have the option of signing in or signing up. <br /><br />If you have a Google account, go ahead and sign in. If not, follow the prompts, it shouldn&#039;t take long. A Google login is a good thing to have nowadays, as they do offer a lot of premium services at no cost once you are signed up. You may notice the address or other details are inaccurate, so it is probably best to claim this listing as your own and make any updates necessary, rather than creating an entirely new listing.<br /><br />Places will require &quot;validation/verification&quot; that you are who you say you are. This can be accomplished via phone or by mail.<br /><br />If you have any questions on setting this on, please reach out to me and I can help walk you through it.<br /><br />So, why not spend 15 minutes and give this a go... then, share your experiences here on the forum for others to see.<br /><br />P.S. - Back to the landing page idea, for a moment. If it&#039;s something that can be accomplished with little investment of time on your part, such as sending a list of counties to your web guy and having him pop a page onto the the site, then I say go for it.  I should mention though, that this type of &quot;keyword stuffing&quot; can also be looked at as a bad thing, by search engines like Google. Their algorithm is a moving target, so what can help one day can hurt the next. <br /> <br /><br />-Dan Sizelove, Marketing Coordinator