Google Local Business Becomes Google Places

[engine]

Google Local Business Becomes Google Places [googleblog.blogspot.com]

Today the Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.

Google is also adding some new features:-

Show your service coverage or hide your address.

Tag Ads added to Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. and to follow in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco

Free business photo shoots service to enhace the profile.

Customised QR codes from the Places dashboard.

Running another batch of Favorite places.

To keep track of how your business listing is performing on Google, we offer a personalized dashboard within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found your business on Google, what keywords they used to find it and even what areas people traveled from to visit your business. With the dashboard, you can see how your use of any of these new features affects interest in your business and make more informed decisions about how to be found on Google and interact with your customers.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

we offer a personalized dashboard within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found your business on Google

That should read "because of Google Places" not "on Google" since you won't find websites about those places very easily anymore. The search engine is becoming the content provider and it always gives itself top spot in serps on whatever it touches.

Other than that, I like it.

[editsha]

hey is it open in Japan and other east asian countries ...

[weeks]

Newspapers are still considering getting into the local directory market. They are looking at it. Could be big, ya know. Shee...

[Silvery]

Newspapers are still considering getting into the local directory market.

A lot of newspaper sites have already been in the local directory market. Quite a lot of newspaper sites already have their own local business directory on their sites, or they've contracted with 3rd-party companies to provide the directory service on their behalf, white-labelling it.

And, they've just about universally done a horrific job at it. I think five and six years ago, Newspapers all felt that internet yellow pages had somewhat beaten them to the punch, and they were hoping to get things in gear to compete with them way back then.

If they think that they can beat the top IYPs AND Yelp AND Google Maps at this point with a completely new business directory of some sort, I think they must be more out of touch than I realized.

They're so far behind the curve on that one they'd really be setting themselves up for failure. They'd be much better off if they were coming up with a much more viable plan for monetizing their content more directly. For instance, I've explained in articles previously how many of them have simply gigantic untapped potential in the area of their news story archives, if they would just pull those out from behind membership/paid firewalls, and optimize them for search. The amount of long-tail potential, matched up with PPC ads, would likely prove phenomenal and easily beat submission fee revenue.

[bill]

hey is it open in Japan and other east asian countries ...

I don't see this in Google Japan yet. Some aspects of Google Local have made it here, but I don't see these new features on my local business accounts.

[canopenerheart]

I'm currently working on upping the page rank for a client's Google Places page, and I've ended up spending hours just adding content to other sites so that google can feed it into the Places information.

I wonder if this is the future of optimization. If google is just going to make a website for us, we won't really need to optimize for our own sites, we'll need to optimize for theirs. And it looks like that might mean spreading content around the internet to as many places as possible.

Of course, I still haven't determined how Places page ranks are determined. Adding content is just an idea. The next attempt will be changing the title tags.

[anallawalla]

canopenerheart,

Are you referring to Google PageRank or to the ranking within the onebox (7 pack)?

[canopenerheart]

I was referring to the onebox. Why, do you have any tips? :)