What are your online plans for 2013? I’m not talking about reducing your hours on World of Warcraft or YouTube videos of movie bloopers. I’m talking about improving your business visibility on the interwebs.

Let’s make it easy. Here’s what we would do if we were you.

Get found.

There, that’s it. We’re done. Problem solved. Five cents please.

Oh, you’d like to know how? Yeah, can’t blame you. And it does sound a bit simplistic but unless you can be found you might just be the best unknown basket weaver on planet Earth.

Here’s our first tip for your new 2013 plan to get found:

Get listed. Business directories are sooo critical to being found. As in days of old and that big yellow book you need to be where people are looking. But these days that book is yielding far less bang for your ad buck than it used to.

A case study on the Business 2 Community profiled a company who compared the ROI between a yellow pages ad and an online business listing on Google. After taking in four and a half years of data they found that there were over a quarter of a million  visits from search engines vs about 3500 that came from their Yellow Pages ad.

Most online directories let you list your business for free so you it’s basically a can’t lose business move. Your business can be also be listed multiple times on different online business directories at once so you’ve increased the number of times you’ll show up in search results.

And as consumers continually put themselves in danger by looking at mobile phones while we do most everything our businesses stand a better chance of being found than if they have to go home and find the Yellow Pages under the bookcase. Plus, once the search results appear on a phone the number or address can be accessed immediately. You could try and spin your Yellow Pages to see if it points you in the right direction you could try it but you probably have better uses for your time.

So get on it and get listed. Start with the four of most popular web directories, Google Places, Yahoo! Local, Yelp and Yalwa. And if you need help, advice or a company who can guide you in your 2013 Online Marketing Plan just give a call to Turn The Page Online Marketing. As you can see we have Online Marketing in our name so you can be sure we spend our days doing nothing else.

Filed under: Blog, Business Growth, Business Listing, Local Business, local search, Marketing Plan by Lisa Correu