Google Places becomes Google+ Local

At the end of May, Google announced a significant change to its Places listings, through a rebranding as Google+ Local. This marks another move by Google to integrate more services into their Google+ social network and therefore to promote and encourage more web searchers to use this tool. The implications for any business – but particularly those targeting a local market – was the way that their details were being presented on Google changed overnight, plus the ways people may interact with the listings also changed.

If you have previously had your business listed on Google Maps – through the Google Places listings – you will see a change in the way your company is now being presented. Although Google Places was particularly important for businesses that target a localised market, we would recommend that every company should claim and verify their business listing on Google, as it gives you better control over the accuracy of the information shown, as well as the presentation and branding of your business. This is just as important now with the Google+ Local listings.

The change to the Google+ Local format is Google’s way of increasing the awareness and use of their Google+ social networking platform through integration with more Google services. Since it’s launch, Google+ has struggled to gain sign-ups and usage against the established position of Facebook, so with much riding on the success of this service, Google is making the most of their network of services to grow usage of Google+. With the Local listings, they claim this recent change is to enable users to get “personalized recommendations, see what your friends are up to, and help others find great places”.

That’s all good if there are enough people using Google+ and sharing with others on this social network. At the moment, this is not significant, but Google is also integrating reviews from Zagat, a US-based review site which they bought in September 2011 and which is also being rolled out internationally. For business owners, the first thing is to claim your listing or check how your business is now being presented in the new format (see below), but ongoing, you need to be aware of how reviews and ratings will be displayed against your listing.

Whether or not this rebranding of Google Places as Google+ Local proves to be a success is yet to be seen. This depends largely on whether the Google+ social network becomes anywhere near as popular as Facebook. First impressions indicate that this may take some time to have any meaningful impact, but the integration could definitely become more useful in the future as business owners and web searchers increasingly use Google+ to share information and post reviews to share within their ‘social circles’.

That’s the critical issue for businesses, as reviews – both good and bad – could become a significant factor on their Local listing and these need to be monitored and managed. If you would like more information about the changes from Places to Local+ and what this means for your business, please contact us now.

As outlined above, this recent transition by Google from the Place pages to Google+ Local requires an increased focus on the importance of these listings, and what businesses are now doing in order to increase their online presence and monitor the information being shared. So if your business doesn’t yet appear within the Google Maps results, or if you need to claim, optimise and enhance an existing listing on Google+ Local, now is the time to act!

To be aware of the level of information sharing through Google’s social media network, and if you’re new to Google Places, it’s important to either create a new local business listing within Google+, or review what is currently being shown for your business and, if necessary, claim your listing and manage the details. That would then enable your local listing to be found within Google+, making it easy for people to review and share your business with friends and across the web.

If you’ve used Google Places before, you’ll still have access to your account page where you can edit and manage your listing. At this stage, the format for this has not changed and it’s just the way that your business is now being presented online that’s different. You can also link your listing to a Google+ account. It continues to be important to add the range of information about your business that you can – description, categories, open times, payment methods, photos or videos and more. However, all this information is not now being displayed in the Google+ Local listing, but they remain important to make your listing 100% complete.

Getting your Google+ Local listing appearing in the search results remains important as well and is dependent on a range of factors, including your physical location, information added to the listing and the use of keywords or categories to help rankings for local search queries. Reviews also remain important, and perhaps more so now that Google is using the Google+ network for these. Reviewers have to use a Google+ account to post a review and ideally you need to encourage customers to post good reviews about your business, to support your ranking potential and to create a good impression of your business.

If you’d like to know more about this, or would like the Web Marketing Workshop to create or edit a Google+ Local listing on your behalf, please contact us now.

Google has recently introduced a significant algorithm boost to the quality of local search results within the main search listings. Codenamed “Venice”, this new update will help smaller, localised businesses to compete in the rankings against larger, national companies and will benefit them as the search results continue to become increasingly localised.

Local search results are becoming increasingly important, particularly with mobile searchers, and so ranking positions on both Google Places and Google’s main organic results are something that any business with a localised target market needs to consider. Having a localised online marketing strategy, whether it’s for just one business location or multiple locations, is a key factor for search engine marketing, and Google’s recent changes make this more important than ever.

Google’s recent “Venice” update uses the signals within the main search results to help trigger relevant local results for the searcher, which is also based on the user’s location so that results should be more relevant to that location, whether or not a location term has been used in the search query. The location targeting is based on the searcher’s IP address location, which is also displayed in the left hand margin on the search results (and can be changed by the searcher if not correct).

This update therefore provides more opportunities for local companies to appear in the search results when relevant to local searchers, and therefore the SEO elements for a website and a Google Places listing become increasingly important. This could benefit local businesses that have previously been disadvantaged by larger firms in terms of their SEO targeting, through some improved optimisation of their sites for localised search terms.

These changes can involve a number of factors, from using the local terms in HTML tags and page content, to including local focused content on the website, and making updates to a website’s pages/architecture and the type of code that is used to micro-format the address. Links to the website that use the local search term in the text link also remain an important factor to support these type of rankings, as does the optimisation of a Google Places listing (which we covered in March 2011).

Therefore, careful localised optimisation is the key for local business marketing through search, as this Google Venice update shows that this is becoming increasing important at levelling the playing field between national and local firms. Businesses need to start developing a plan to deal with it to make sure they stay properly optimised and so take advantage of the opportunities that the updated algorithm change has to offer.

If you would like more information about how we can help to optimise your website to take advantage of this opportunity, contact us now for more details.

In another development for Google Ads (AdWords), the search engine has enhanced the control over the targeting of local adverts. At the end of the month, Google announced that it’s now possible to target adverts based upon a user’s physical location or the location of interest.

What this change means is that advertisers can now target users by the place where they are actually situated, compared to those that just include a location in a search query. In addition to this, extra options have also been included for advertisers to exclude locations that are not required in their local targeting.

Previously, advertisers who were using a regional or local targeting setting would have their adverts appearing to all users who searched for “restaurants in newcastle” for example, regardless of their physical location. Now the adverts can be set to appear to those searchers who are only in Newcastle, by using the new target physical location option.

It’s also now possible to target where the adverts appear by excluding by physical location and search intent. For example, an advertiser with a chain of restaurants throughout Devon but not in Exeter doesn’t want his adverts to appear to users that live there, or others that don’t but are looking there anyway by including Exeter in the search query. He can now prevent that group of searchers seeing the adverts, but still display the ads to people in the area that should see the ads.

Another feature is the ability to exclude by physical location only, so if he only wants to advertise his restaurant in Newcastle to people who don’t live there and are just visiting, this is now possible. Previously, if Newcastle was excluded from the targeting, it would prevent adverts appearing for those living there and those not from there using it in the search query.

So this is a very useful new addition to Google’s ever increasing functionality in AdWords. It reflects the recent emphasis that Google has been putting on local search results and will greatly enhance the precision of the targeting of Adwords adverts.

If you’d like more information about how this enhanced AdWords location targeting can help to improve the cost-effective marketing of your business, contact us now.

In the second of two articles about Google Places, we review the best ways to manage and optimise your local business listing on Google, to help improve your local search visibility and to see how users are viewing your business details. This follows on from last month’s article where we discussed the importance of claiming your existing Google Places listing, or creating a new one to ensure that your business is taking advantage of this feature.

Once you’ve claimed or set-up your new Google Places listing, there are a number of ways to optimise this in order to increase your ranking visibility. Google provides an interface for listing owners to edit and review the performance of their listing, which includes ways to improve the potential visibility of your business details.

The first point is that you should ensure that you have a business listing right away, as Google gives prominence to older, more established listings. Once the listing is created, the address of your business relative to the centre of the designated search location is important. Businesses that are closer to the “centroid” used to have an advantage, though not so much anymore, although searchers are also likely to be looking for companies closer to their search location.

You need to list your business name in its correct format and add your address details, which will also be used to verify your listing (see last month’s article). Include one or more phone numbers, an email address and web address, plus you can add a business description, which should be brief and include relevant search terms in the text.

It’s also important to ensure that the 5 categories that are selected for your business are relevant and keyword focused. You have to choose at least one category from Google’s existing list, but you can also add other relevant category titles that include the keywords that you most expect your local customers to use to find your business.

Another important factor in optimising your listing is to ensure that there are numerous references to your business in local business directories, as these “citations” re-enforce your business as a well-established local one. The number (rather than the quality) of local reviews on your listing also helps its ranking.

An optimised Google Places listing should aim for 100% “completeness” by including photos, opening times, payment information, videos, other information fields, coupons and more. You can track the “completeness” level of your listing by logging into your Places account, plus you can see data on user activity in the past, such as the number of impressions that your listing has received (which reflects search activity) and how many “actions” have been completed (i.e. the number of users clicking on your listing to visit the website or to find out more information about your business).

So as Google Places listings are becoming increasing important, it’s imperative that your business is represented by a fully-optimised one immediately. If you’d like more information, or details about how we can help your business to get the most from a local listing, contact us now.

The recent changes by Google to the way that local search results are being displayed has placed even more focus on the importance of the Google Places listings and, in particular, what local businesses need to do in order to increase their presence. If your business doesn’t yet appear within the Google Places results, or you need to claim and optimise your listing, then it’s time to act now!

Google has been developing their local business listings over the past few years, providing searchers with a directory of relevant businesses in a local area. Initially the business listings are taken from Yellow Pages and therefore the information is dependent on what Yellow Pages holds (which can also sometimes be significantly out of date!). However, Google gives business owners to opportunity to ‘claim’ their listing and then to add additional content to help improve ranking visibility and to provide more information for users.

The best way to check how your business is being listed is to search for your business name and location on Google Maps. If you have some type of listing then your business should appear in the results to the left of the map. If not, it may mean that your business listing is not even on Yellow Pages or Google, or that the information is inaccurate or out of date.

If your business is listed, click on the ‘more info’ link to see the details being shown for the location, and then select the ‘Business owner?’ link to the top right of the listing. You need to sign-in or set-up a new Google account to access this, but once done, you can edit the information or add any new content. Before any of this information is then accepted by Google, you need to verify your listing via a mailing to your stated business address, or sometimes via an automated phone message – both of which will provide a verification code for you to input against your listing to prove that you are the rightful owner.

If your listing doesn’t appear at all, then you can still set up the new details on Google Places, once you’ve logged into your Google account. Again, you will need to verify the details and, as a new listing, you will only be able to do this via a mailing to your business address. However, once done, your listing will be accessible from your Google account and you can add or update information as necessary in the future.

This is the essential first step to optimising your Google Places listing and one that should be done sooner rather than later. Next month we’ll talk about the best ways to manage and optimise your listing, to help your local search visibility and to see how users are viewing your business details. However, if you’d like more information about this before next month, or if you need help finding our claiming your Google Places listing, please contact us now.

Google has recently announced that their Local Business Center has been renamed as “Google Places”, as part of a rebranding process for their maps-based data, and to mark the inclusion of some new features. Every company should be listing their business details on this part of Google’s service, particularly if they target a localised area, and the updated Places service will provide new ways to market to customers through search.

Google launched their Place Pages feature last September to provide users with more detailed information through the Google Maps service for more than 50 million places around the world, with locational information such as restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops, as well as non-business places like museums, schools and parks. The renamed Google Places now coordinates business listings with this branded service and allows businesses to verify and supplement their business information to include hours of operation, photos, videos, coupons, product offerings and more.

The new features being made available within the Google Places service include:

• Service areas – if a business has to travel to serve customers, then they can now show which geographic areas are served. And if a business doesn’t have a storefront or office location (such as a home-based business), they can make their address private but still display a listing.
• New advertising options – for $25 per month, businesses in some cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags – yellow markers that allow companies to promote important aspects of their businesses, such as coupons, photos, or other select features.
• Business photo shoots – in addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which will be used to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages.
• Customized QR codes: businesses in the US can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.

These features are initially being made available to companies in the USA, and in some cases limited to selected cities, but are expected to be rolled out to other countries in the future. Google is also providing more detailed analysis within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found a business on Google, what keywords they used to find it and even what areas people traveled from to visit the business.

If you’d like to know more about how Google Places could improve your business visibility on local searches, please contact us now.

Google has made a number of notable changes to their search results in the past month. The first development has increased the frequency of local business listings being displayed within the first page of the search results, which has a significant benefit for local advertisers. The second enhancement concerns the inclusion of additional ‘sitelinks’ below selected search listings, which offers the searcher more opportunities to enter the listed website at different points.

The recent change that Google has made to the use of the Local Business Listings means that the small map and accompanying business listings for up to 10 companies are now appearing across more search results, rather than ones that specifically include a location within the search phrase. Google is trying to recognise typical search phrases that would have a local search intent (such as ‘plumbers’ or ‘accommodation’), even if the searcher has not included a location term in their search. When this happens, Google will display the business listings below the top 3 ranking results and bases the map and location details on the recognised IP address of a searcher’s ISP (Internet Service Provider).

The intention is clearly to focus the results to meet a searcher’s intended need and although the method of targeting is by no means a perfect solution, this is an important enhancement that may improve clickthroughs for companies listed in the local business listings. Therefore it’s now more important than ever that companies who are targeting a local market ensure that their business is listed on this section of Google and is optimised as effectively as possible to increase the chances of being found.

The second recent change to Google’s rankings concerns the ‘sitelinks’ displayed below selected websites in the ranking results. These have been visible for some time for large websites or when a specific business website is searched for, with the intention of giving searchers an idea of what the site includes and also more opportunities to click directly into a prominent section of the site. Previously these were displayed as a short list below the main ranking result and for the first search result only. Google has now introduced an expansion of these sitelinks into a single row of links, which will be displayed even for results that aren’t in the first position. This will help to show searchers some relevant sub-pages within more sites and potential increase the opportunities for people will clickthrough into the ranked website.

Google says that, just like the previous sitelinks, the new one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users. Therefore site owners can’t tell Google which links to include, but they can block some or all of these links if there is any reason they may not want to show them. This can be done through a Google Webmasters account, but removing these links is not recommended in most cases because the inclusion of these additional links will probably increase the visibility of, and traffic to, a website, whilst also improving the experience of users.

To find out more about increasing the marketing opportunities for your website on Google’s search results, please contact us now for more information.

Google’s Local Business Listings are now regularly shown within the main search results if a user searches for a local business, alongside a small map. In addition, viewing results on Google Maps provides more information and additional advertising options through Google Ads (AdWords), all of which should be used by a localised business to target their potential customer base. Google is now adding new features to this service to help advertisers gain more local business.

We first covered the value of Google’s local business listings and their increasing prominence in Google’s ‘universal search results’ back in our June 2007 newsletter. The local business listings service has developed further since then and remains an important area for companies who are targeting a localised market to gain a prominent listing. Achieving a high ranking in the 10 businesses listed in Google’s main results can be difficult, particularly in a competitive market, but if searchers click through to the more detailed business listings, or search directly within Google Maps, there are additional ways to achieve visibility and to attract searchers to your website.

One of the main ways to achieve good visibility is through the use of a local business advert, which is created as part of a Google Ads (AdWords) campaign. This allows advertisers to create a specific advert to appear on Google Maps searches, with a small icon, address and contact details. In addition, Google has now announced some additional new features for these adverts to help companies attract prospective customers faster and to gauge how well their adverts are performing.

The first addition is that Google’s local business ads will now feature new interactive links within the panel that is displayed for the business. These panels are designed to provide more information for users and to connect them to the business quicker with a link to their website. Now users will be able to see more information from this panel and to take additional actions, such as a “Get Directions” option, a link to “Street View”, and “Save to My Maps” which allows users to personalise their search results.

In addition, Google Ads (AdWords) will also be adding a new interaction report for local business ads in the near future. This report will help advertisers to assess the activity through the local business ads and their return on investment, with such information as how many users opened the info window and clicked on each of the new interactive links. Google says that Maps users are often looking for different information than Search users so that these new interactive links and the reports should help customers connect with a business faster as well as help the advertiser understand how to better target Maps users versus Search users.

If your business could be benefitting more from a Local Business Listing on Google, contact us now for more information on this feature and we’ll be pleased to help. We can create optimised listings and Local Business Adverts to help raise your profile and improve your visibility to your target market.

This time last year we made 5 predictions for 2007 and so here’s a quick summary of our list and what actually happened (you can read the originals in more detail in our January 2007 Newsletter):

1. A growing emphasis on site conversion: there were some signs that more companies were beginning to focus more on the way that their website was working and converting visitors over the past year. As the average PPC bids levels continued to rise, with figures of 10-30% over the past year – depending on the market – Google and Yahoo both introduced tools to test website ROI (return on investment) rates. However, the search engine market is still becoming increasingly competitive and costly so that more companies should be using their website analytics (including the very detailed, and free, Google Analytics package) to help identify areas where their site may be working well or could still be improved, to make more of every visit to their site and to increase the visit to conversion rates. In addition, an increased focus on competitor activity can also provide clues to help one online business perform better than another.
2. Search marketing becomes a core discipline: digital marketing overall is becoming well and truly established within many business marketing strategies and budgets, with search marketing taking the largest share of spend. Figures over the past year in both the UK and Australia continue to show the rapid growth in this area of marketing and companies need to ensure that they are getting the best from this sector – and that they continue to develop their websites and online marketing plans for the long term. With an ongoing skills shortage in this still young market, the benefits of applying genuine search marketing expertise effectively to any campaign remains the best solution for any business that wants to achieve the best results.
3. Local search gains prominence: the developments made by Google over the past year have been significant, with the introduction of “universal search” results being the most obvious opportunities for local business marketing. Further improvements are still being introduced within the PPC sector and mapping tools are also gaining ground, particularly if mobile search begins to take off. Many localized companies still view search engine marketing as ‘not for them’ and price prohibitive, yet with more and more people using Google and other business search tools to find local products and services, this can still be the most cost-effective form of local marketing there is.
4. The question of click fraud is tackled: this hasn’t been resolved to any great degree although the debate about the definition and methods for tackling click fraud seem to have taken a back seat for the time being. Google does report on “invalid clicks” within the AdWords reporting system and is open about providing credits, yet this probably doesn’t go far enough for some advertisers and any claims require significant management time to follow through to any great success. In the rush by many companies to get their sponsored listings within the search results, click fraud is largely seen as a factor that has to be built into the overall results that will make a campaign a success or not.
5. Social networks become a new marketing challenge: we made no mention of Facebook this time last year, but this site has become the primary media focus within social networking over the past year. The ability for developers to create applications has extended the use of this tool substantially and it could become a significant marketing tool over the next year. However, the recent backlash from users over the invasion of privacy to create advertising applications has placed some control over how Facebook will operate in this market, but we’re likely to see this sector develop still further over the next 12 months with new innovations and opportunities (as well as threats) to companies who wish to use these social networks to promote their products and brands.