About this course
When a customer searches for "pharmacie de garde Sacré-Cœur" (on-duty pharmacy), "garage Thiès" or "restaurant thiéboudienne Plateau", Google first shows them a map and three businesses. The businesses that appear get the calls, the WhatsApp messages and the visits. The others do not exist for that customer, even if they are 200 meters away.
This short course teaches you to take that spot with a free tool: your Google Business Profile. You learn how Google chooses the businesses it shows in your city. You create your profile or claim the one that already exists, without creating a duplicate, and you get it verified. You fill it in the way businesses that get calls every day do: the right category, business hours, a WhatsApp link, services with prices, twenty photos. Then you set up review collection and a twenty-minute weekly routine that keeps you at the top.
Four modules, twelve short lessons, a hands-on exercise applied to your own business after each lesson, and a quiz and PDF handout for each module. The final project: your complete, verified profile, with your first new reviews and your weekly routine. Everything is done from a phone, in one week, with no budget.
You leave with: a verified, complete profile, a correctly placed map pin even without a precise address, a ready-to-send WhatsApp message asking for reviews, template replies to positive and negative reviews, and a tracking sheet for your calls and direction requests.
**Where it fits in the Digital marketing and social media track**: this is level 1, the entry point, and it stands on its own. Next, level 2, "Digital marketing for SMEs", builds a complete customer acquisition system around this profile: WhatsApp Business, social media, your first ad and a dashboard.
Who it is for: Shop owners, artisans, restaurant owners, pharmacists, beauty salons, garages, clinics, schools, hotels and service providers in Dakar, Thiès, Saint-Louis, Abidjan, Bamako or Cotonou who want to appear on Google Maps when a customer searches for their trade in their neighborhood, with no technical skills and no budget.