Last month, Google Local Business became Google Places and a Local Business Listing became a Place Page. Google also released some astonishing facts on Google Places. There are 4 million Place Pages worldwide, 2 million in the U.S., estimates put this as 10-15% of all U.S. businesses have a Place Page. 20% of searches on Google are related to location, that’s 1.28 billion per month.
Among other things, new additions to Google Local along with the new name were: Reputation Trends, Service Areas and Tags.
Reputation Trends will be another factor in the local algorithm. This takes a moving average from a site called judysbook.com, which is an American site where people rate businesses. Personally I believe this is a bad move to take ranking from just one site trustworthy or not. To be fair to Google I’m sure they will eventually branch out and tap into reviews on other sites and hopefully sites more relevant to the UK.
Service Areas are a fantastic addition to Google Local, they allow people to list their business in an area and radius rather than just a pinpoint location. This allows businesses that rarely use an office and instead travel for their work. Some may think this would mean people listing their business could exploit this by giving their business a massive radius around any city. However this is not the case, (rumors suggest) Google will give less ranking weight to businesses with a larger radius and it will have to be their profile that lifts them higher in rankings if they choose to have their radius covering an entire city.
Tags in Google’s words are ‘yellow markers that allow business owners to promote important aspects of their businesses. Scroll over Tags on Google or click on the sponsored link to view coupons, photos, or other select features’. Each tag is currently priced at $25 and in my opinion is a worthwhile investment until everyone gets one and google maps is littered with little yellow markers.
These are just some of the new features of Google Places, more rollouts are expected every quarter from now on, with Google taking info from Facebook and other Social Media sites expected to be included in the next one.
Google Places doesn’t seem to have matched the massive hype it was supposed to achieve, but Google Places does look to be really moving with the times and will be a major player within the search channels in the near future and for a mostly free service who can ignore it?
This article is taken from the May edition of the Interaction newsletter. In one of the articles, Matt Hallettn wrote a piece on Google Local Business Listings.
