Guide to Bing Local Search
Where: http://www.bing.com/maps/
What: Like its two counterparts, Bing Maps offers bothorganic business listings and paid advertising for local search queries.
Paid ads appear at the top of the search results in the left column. These ads are provided by YellowPages.com. My sample “hair salon Fresno, CA” search produced a pair of ads, and both are relevant. To the right of the paid ads and an initial set of business listings is a large map with businesses plotted to match the results on the left.
How It Works: Bing Maps begins with just one text field on its search form, but adds extra text boxes for getting directions. Like Yahoo and Google, Bing’s local search results page uses a two-column approach. One columns shows business listings (and paid ads), the other uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth service to display locations of those listings. Business listings come from publicly available white pages and yellow pages.
How to Market:
A) You can add your business listing through Bing’s Local Listing Center. When you begin that process, the first step is to check if your business is already listed. If not, the process to add the listing is simple. In addition to the basic business information, you’ll be able to choose categories, add additional web page URLs, as well as business hours, payment methods accepted, a tagline, up to 10 photos of your business, and more.
B) At the moment, Bing’s pay-per-click advertising service, AdCenter, does not supply any paid ads into Bing Maps. Instead, the paid listings are supplied by YellowPages.com. While YellowPages.com does offer free business listings and pay-per-click advertising, my guess is their relationship with Bing Maps will come to an end as soon as AdCenter is ready to provide paid listings for local searches. If you want to advertise on Bing Maps, you’ll have to decide if you want to wait for AdCenter to be ready or to sign up now with YellowPages.com and switch later when Bing does.
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