Report: Google Planning Fresh Assault On Local Ads With 'Business Builder'

[engine]

I can see how G+ would come into this. Every business would need a G+ account to be able to manage their local ads.

Report: Google Planning Fresh Assult On Local Ads With 'Business Builder' [online.wsj.com]

Google Inc. has repeatedly tried, and largely failed, to crack the market for local business advertising. As early as next month, the Internet company will try anew, as it trains its largest-ever assault on the roughly $20 billion market.

Google plans to have its newest small-business service—which at one point it was calling Business Builder—up and running as early as July, said a person familiar with the matter.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

No shirt, no shoes, no Google account, no service.

Google is fast becoming the creepy social network, has Google CEO Mr Schmidt even joined it yet?

which it hopes consumers will use to interact with local businesses that now have special Web pages on the network. Those Google+ pages will draw traffic from the company's Web-search engine.

With the new "shopping" layout moving all but the top two results below the fold on many product searches where do they think that traffic will come from? Have they thought this through?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Seems like divide and conquer of the search 'problem'. Credibility & positive feedback to play a bigger role in ranking rather than links and anchor text. If google can automatically take you to a froogle like search rather than generic search when it's relevant, you can see why they'd want to.

Alternatively they could just send searchers to their country's Yellow Pages who already do reviews, rankings etc.

The lines of Google products and solving the search problem are always being pushed.

[aleksl]

The ONLY way I am going to participate if there's any respect given back to local businesses.

Such as - there's a Google rep that can look at site and in minutes say, for instance, why it was penalized by some new update.

now, THAT would be a novel idea, and a REAL small business problem they can EASILY solve (and choose NOT TO).

Otherwise, I don't see them solve any business problems that hasn't been already solved without them.


Someone who thinks "immediate feedback" is a business problem clearly is out of touch with business world. The real problem is that business can disappear in Google just as quickly as it appears in it, and there's noone to give that business a feedback as far as WHY and WHAT TO DO.


The other novel idea would be to fix free search. Apparently, since Panda, "people became curious and are searching more [webmasterworld.com]"...

[lexipixel]

Today I got one of the $100 Free ad cards in a junk (USPS) mail.

The card is in a folded brochure.

In big block letters, the front says:

How to get
your small
business to
show up on
Google.

...in smaller font below it says:

Even with a Places listing, people in
[name of my town] may have trouble finding what you
have to offer.

Let's make sure they can find you.



..open the folder, and the next page says:

Run an Ad

..the rest of the piece explains, "Why", "How" and "The Details".

The piece is "mass customized" -- with a mass-customized cover letter -- all template type boilerplate text that incorporates my name, what I do for a living and my town within the text.

(I got it because I have a Google Places listing for myself, under my own name address as a "local" web developer).

[Web_speed]

How to get
your small
business to
show up on
Google.

They should have added.... "now that we have penguins and pandas jumping all over the place and blocking your customers view..."

Cheap and sleazy...

[lexipixel]

They should have added, "Now, after we've spent years telling you how to do SEO to Google's liking, and you've either spent countless hours or dollars, or both -- forgetaboutit... it all means nothing now -- just pay us, and if your competition doesn't outbid you, and no big brand wants the market your in, we'll get some traffic to your site".

These days GOOG Reminds me of the old Lilly Tomlin phone operator character "Ernestine", (on Laugh-In), when she'd say, "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

...that was before the FTC broke up AT&T's local phone company monopoly.

[backdraft7]

Good one lexi - I had to dig that one up, and it rings true for Google too - [vimeo.com...]

(somebody should do a mash-up of that video and a few Matt Cutts videos)

[Web_speed]

Good one lexi - I had to dig that one up, and it rings true for Google too

LOL.... spot on lexi!