The answer to the question of why less than 10% of local businesses have claimed their Google Place Page is simple. They don’t know that they can. Many don’t even know that it exist. Even home businesses would benefit from claiming their Google Place Page.You may be asking yourself why this is important for you and your business. The answer is that it is the most inexpensive online marketing strategy to boost your business within the Google local search ranking. There is a new phenomenon happening called narrow casting. This means that individuals are looking for local businesses. In fact, one third of all Google searches include a city, province, state or postal code or zip code. Claiming your Google Place Page will help to merge your web and mobile identity.There is a fundamental shift in the way people are communicating. There are 5 billion cellular phone users compared to 1.8 billion internet users. Moreover, it is estimated that 51 million of these use smart phones. And guess what company was involved with the development and engineering of these androids? Yes, Google.There were 28.6 million unique mobile web users in February 2007. This number skyrocketed to 69.5 million in August 2009. In fact, according to The Nielson Company the statistics showed an increase of 34% from 42.5 million in July, 2008 to 56.9 million in July, 2009. These are significant results. And if you don’t have a smart phone now, just look at your children. What is their preferred mode of communication? Need I say more?Claiming your Place Page is fast, easy and best of all it’s free. Simply go to Google and search for your business. If your business is new, you’ll have to add your business instead of claiming it. Now fill in the blanks. Make sure that you fill in as many categories as you possibly can including pictures, videos, testimonials, reviews, hours of operation, methods of payments. You get the picture. How wonderful that you are in control of the information. Now make sure that you repeat the process with Yahoo and Bing local listings in order to drive your search engine optimization results even further!Google will send you an owner-verified card in the mail with a pin code so that you can owner-verify your account. The advantage to you now is that Google will use your owner-verified Place Page as its resource for your business once you’ve claimed and verified that you are indeed the owner.This phenomenon is here to stay. Facebook now has Facebook Places so that you can communicate with your friends about the places you’ve been. Yelp is another site. You can even become the mayor of Foursquare. Local directories are beginning to abound but the most familiar name in the internet world is still Google and Google is in charge of Google Place Pages. Why haven’t you claimed yours yet? It’s free.