Get your business on Google Places
In the previous post Has Your Website Search Ranking Dropped Lately? we briefly mentioned search localization emphasizing the fact that today’s search engines tend to give more priority to local search results over general search results. A search term like “London pizza” on Google UK will give pizza restaurants based in London more priority over the rest as Google displays a map with highlighted London-based pizza stores at the top of the search results. To take advantages of this change and trend in search, you can and should list or claim your business with Google Places.
If Google Places has already had your business information in its database, you’ll need to claim your listing. If it has not, you’ll need to add your business info. Either way, you’ll benefit from getting your business listed on Google Places – Google Local Business listing.
Google Places Benefits
- Your business can be listed in Google local business directory and displayed from or for local searches
- You can manage your listing information including adding business description, product/service details, photos, videos, etc. You can even add special promotions and coupons to attract more customers and add a status post of 160 characters long, which can be updated as often as you want, to let people know what’s going on with your business.
You can get insight about your listing traffic such as how many times your listing shows up in search and how many times people click for more info
You can direct your customers to your Google Places profile to leave comments about your business, and even better, you can respond to what other people got to say about your products/services, especially respond to negative feedback
The list of benefits will probably get longer and longer as Google improves its technology and responds to users’ feedback and changes from its competitors.
Claiming/Adding Your Business to Google Places
If you’ve already used gmail, your next step to claiming your business from Google Places or adding your business to Google Places will be visiting https://google.com/places and following the steps as instructed. If you haven’t used gmail, you’d need to open a gmail account and then go to Google Places site.
Google also has lots of support articles and support forum to answer your questions.
Things to remember while adding/claiming your business with Google Places
- Choose your first/main category carefully. For the first category, you must select from a [long] pre-populated list that Google provides, so spend a little more time to see what category is best suited for your business. This is very important as it’ll help Google decides whether or not to display your business for certain search keywords.
- After you have selected your first category, you can add four more categories. You can use the categories Google provides or create the category names yourself. Whatever you decide to do, you should list all five categories.
- Add photos and additional information such as product names, descriptions, and all other information that you think can better market your products/services
Again, hope this is useful!
Hello! I own a website with no actual physical address yet, will this still work? thanks.
No, it won’t. Google Places is for local businesses, without a physical address you won’t be able to sign up and use it.
Attractive section of content. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I get actually enjoyed your blog posts.
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an extremely long comment but
after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again.
Anyhow, just wanted to say excellent blog!
Google Places is good. The only thing I don’t like about it is people, random people can write review on your Place page and you can do almost nothing about it. But you know, without Google Places, random people can still go to Yelp! or other sites to trash your reputation if they want to.
Very good information and facts. I’m happy I found your web site by accident. I have bookmarked it for later on!
Great post. Get your Google places listing.
Thanks.. Funny, I actually had this on my mind a few days ago..
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Major thanks for the article post. Will read on…
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Local Search is BIG and Google knows it: Welcome to Google Places…
Pay attention small businesses everywhere. Google Places is where you need to be. Right now! In the fall of 2010, Google Places released the search functionality for 50 million places. When Google made the release they stated, “Today we’re …
Great and helpful blog post you’ve got. It has been several times since I read your blog posts. It helps me know a lot more. THX
Great article. Waiting for more.
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I’m glad that I stumble upon your page, I find helpful information here that I really need.
I’ve written a article outlining how the new Google Paces integration in serch results affects SEO, check it out. http://bit.ly/amkG0a
Good Job!
I always wanted to put my business on Google Places, and now I’m finally getting around to it.
I liked this article and I will definitely check back on your other blogs.
Take Care
Wow, Google Places just gets better and better. The last time I used it for my business, it doesn’t even let you respond to feedback left by your users/clients.