MapQuest’s free business listings have several features that will help you with SEO and online marketing on MapQuest.com. Listing your business on MapQuest will also help increase your SEO value on sites like Google or AOL Search by linking your website from a large, reliable site as MapQuest.com.   As you might have read in the first post of this series, you can easily add value to your business listing on MapQuest with an accurate title, compelling description, and more. In this post, we’ll share more tips on how to make the most of your free listing.

How does map marketing work for local businesses?
More and more people use online or mobile maps to find local businesses. They search for restaurants, boutiques, hotels, and more in their local area, a travel destination or on the road. Putting your business information on the map improves the likelihood of being found online, especially if you are a small business owner with too limited of a budget to launch a large scale marketing campaign.

SEO Tips for your Business Listing
The “Categories” feature on MapQuest’s Local Business Center allows you to add up multiple business categories to your listing – that is, “keywords” for MapQuest business search.  Here are some quick tips:

1. Choose business categories
When creating your MapQuest business listing, you will be prompted to choose appropriate business categories. Start this process by typing a generic word about your business category and then choose one from existing categories. For example, if Diamond & Design chose “Jewelry Repair”, their business listing will appear when users are searching for “Jewelry Repair” near that area.

2. Add a niche category
Adding a more specific category can help you reach more potential customers. For example, if you’re an Italian restaurant owner, after adding the generic category – restaurant, you could choose “restaurant – Italian” as your second category.  Or, if your business is part of a franchise, make sure to select the category for that franchise.

3. Add secondary business category
Adding multiple types of categories can broaden your audience. For example, if you own a coffee shop and are also a wholesaler of coffee beans, you could add “coffee shop” as your primary category and use “coffee wholesale” as a secondary category. We suggest you choose multiple categories as long as they are all relevant to your business.

Success Story: Diamond & Design
As you can see in the screenshot below, Diamond & Design, an independent jewelry store in California, took full advantage of their business listing by creating five categories.  The five categories they chose – Jewelry Repairing, Jewelry Designers, Wedding-Jewelry, Jewelers-Retail and Diamonds – significantly increase their chances of being found when potential customers look for jewelry stores near Chino, CA on MapQuest.

Stay tuned for our next post about how to make sure your business is being found on MapQuest!