In part one, we covered designing an email campaign, avoiding the spam filter and improving your open rate. This process is analogous to getting your serve in play in a tennis match—it’s essential if you want a chance at winning the point, let alone the game, set, or match.

And I tried to put email marketing in context by pointing out this juicy statistic from the Direct Marketing Association: For every dollar the average business invests in email marketing, it gets $48 in return. Today we’re going to discuss the following: optimizing your layout for the preview pane. As you read this post, keep that $48 figure in mind!

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When you create a new listing in Google’s Local Business Center (LBC), you may be prompted if there are existing listings for your business. For those unfamiliar with the LBC, it’s where you create a business profile that shows up in Google Maps, as well as the natural search listings. Here’s an example:

Why would there already be a listing for your business? Because Google sometimes creates listings for businesses that have not yet created their own, and it does this by pulling information from sources across the web, including human-powered directories. It’s common that these Google-gathered listings have errors—for example, you may have changed your phone number or relocated since Google gathered its information.

There is often much confusion on what the proper steps are when you discover more than one existing local listing for your business in the search engines. The thing to do is claim and edit the existing listing.

It’s important to remember: For each physical location of your business, you should have only one listing. Having more than one can negatively impact the position of all of your listings, decreasing your visibility among local prospects (bad).

What if there are multiple listings? Google has recommended some steps to take to properly handle multiple listings for their Local Business Center:

1. Choose the listing that you’d prefer to keep in your account. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing and this listing only.
2. For duplicates of this listing in your account (the ones you want to remove), remove all enhanced information. Keep only required information, like the business title, address, and one phone number.
3. Submit these changes and verify as necessary.
4. Now, sit tight for a couple of weeks – just for good measure.
5. Delete the duplicates from your account, choosing Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account.

The key point to remember is that it’s crucial to have one optimized listing for your business. This entry should have all of the additional information and be as close to 100 percent complete as possible. Local search has a ton of potential for small business and creating this optimized listing can dramatically increase your visibility among your target market and create a steady stream of free inbound leads.

Don’t forget to register for tomorrow’s free webinar on SEO:
Dec. 9 @ 2 p.m. ET: SLEEP Your Way to the Top of Google’s Search Results, Pt. 2

We had an excellent turnout for the first installment of our free three-part webinar series on search engine optimization (SEO). We also had some excellent questions at the end. If you have questions of your own, be sure to register for part two now!

In part two, Kutenda’s director of online marketing, James Omdahl, will expand on his novel ‘SLEEP’ method (search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform) for generating inbound leads through SEO.

Part II: On-Page Optimization and Tracking (Evaluate, Estimate)

* How to evaluate your web site and tips to optimize
* What the competitive landscape looks like for your business
* How to measure progress by tracking your results

Why attend?
If your business isn’t ranking in the search results for key terms, you’re missing a huge, cost-effective opportunity to drive leads and fuel growth. Our webinar series will help you seize this opportunity.

Who should attend?
Business owners and marketers who want clear, practical guidance on using SEO to increase leads, sales and revenue. Maybe you need a refresher on key SEO principles. Perhaps you’re brand new to search engine marketing. Either way, you’re guaranteed to learn something you can use to grow your business!

What if I missed part one?
Don’t worry. Each installment is designed to stand on it’s own. Register here.

Yes, it’s true: Some people continue to use phone books.

But today’s consumer increasingly favors that great information repository known as the Internet, and they use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to find what they’re looking for. With this change comes a new mandate for businesses: make sure your web site gets found.

So how does one get found in the search engines? If your business serves a competitive market, just having a web site doesn’t mean you’ll rank for key search terms. Google may list your competitors ahead of you in the search listings, and studies show that searchers rarely even look at the results beyond the top three. If you’re not in the ‘Golden Triangle’ you’ll get crumbs for clicks while your competitors get all the action.

We can help. We’re offering a free three-part webinar on search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your web site’s content and code for better placement in the search results. It also involves off-site factors, such as acquiring inbound links (which Google interprets as votes) from other web sites.

The series will help businesses ‘SLEEP’ their way to the top of the search results. (SLEEP: search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform). At the end of the series, we’ll provide attendees with a free SEO checklist that will help you apply what you’ve learned to your business’ web site. Register for the webinar today!