Not everything in the world of Digital Marketing and SEO costs a fortune. Google offers a lot of help to local business owners for Free – just look at tools like , and all the advice they give to webmasters via channels like Matt Cutts and Webmaster Tools Videos. The list goes on when you consider Google Maps, Business Listings etc – but by now you are seeing that actually they give away so much but it would take forever to be using them all correctly and for best effect.

This of course is all part of Google’s move to increase local within search, which began last year with the Google Hummingbird Update.

But hold your horses…

Google My Business

Today, Google released a new tool aimed at helping small and local businesses to get found on Google.

The tool which can be found at  brings all of the above together into one place for you to set up, edit and monitor.

And you guessed it, this marketing tool is FREE!

The tool takes you step by step through setting up each area of the services to make the most of them. You can take a full tour of Google My Business here on Search Engine Land. Once set up you get a really cool dashboard like this one for Woodley Massage Practice.

As you can see the dashboard is really easy to understand, pulling in the key data points you need from Analytics, Insights and of course encouraging engagement on Google+.

If you’ve multiple businesses to manage you can create them all by the same method, once you sign in you will see a dashboard allowing you to manage each business. Something to note is that each location of a business will require it’s own maps verification, though doesn’t necessarily need its own business setting up. Also non-local based businesses can set up their listings on Google services using the pages and simply skip the mapping location if they are not location specific.

If you find yourself struggling with any of the set up of a business on google, leave a comment below or get in touch via .