What are MapQuest Premium Listings?
MapQuest offers two types of premium business listings – MapQuest Only and Multi-site. Both options ensure that your business listing not only reflects accurate information, but also helps your business stand out from your competition with a custom marketing message.

Custom Marketing Message in a MapQuest Premium Business Listing

Benefits of MapQuest Only Premium Listings
For only 27 cents per day, MapQuest Only Premium Listings helps your business stand out from the competition with a bright green tag and up to 50 characters of custom marketing text on MapQuest.com. In addition to the benefits of a free listing, the premium listing can help your business gain more clicks, phone calls, requests for directions, or clicks to your website. MapQuest has more than 40MM users per month and they will see your featured services, discount info or any other marketing messages when they’re searching for that category.

Benefits of Multi-site Premium Listings
If you upgrade to the Multi-site Premium Listing Package, your marketing message and listing information will not only be reflected on MapQuest, but also on 8 or more major sites including: Yelp, Yahoo!, SuperPages, CitySearch, White Pages, Yellowbook, YellowBot and LOCAL.  For about $1 per day, you can control your business listing across all of these sites from one location and ensure that your business information, such as your address, phone number, website and more, are accurate.  Rest assured that your listing is up-to-date and standing out when potential customers are searching are searching for your business.

How to Optimize Your Marketing Message
Here are some tips you can use for your premium listing Special Offer message.  You change the Special Offer message at any time and it will update on the site within four hours. You can also track the total impressions and clicks to your business listing to see how effective it is.

• Use your daily specials, like daily discount, happy hour, and latest products. These can attract more customers who are looking for good deals.
• Add your Featured Products and Services to help you get closer to your target market.
• Use your Awards as tag messages, as customers would always like to choose the business recognized as the best.
• Try your slogan or other messages to separate your business from the competition.

Success Story: Falls Motel
Falls Motel, a motel in International Falls, MN, took advantage of the multi-site premium listing allowing them to not only display accurate information across all the sites, but also highlight their Special Offer marketing message: Clean comfortable rooms at an affordable rate. You can see their listing now on MapQuest.com, Yahoo! and the other popular sites included in the package.

Sign up for a MapQuest Premium Listing today to stand out from your competitors!

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!