Comments on: Google Maps Finally Welcome To Home-Based & Service-Based Businesses

By: PureSheer

PureSheer — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 06:50:27 +0000

So where does it put the location of your biz in the ranking factors? Is it now will be more common that a biz from Fort Worth TX will be in Dallas TX 7 pack (if it’s targeted for the whole metro)?

By: doncampbell

doncampbell — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 03:08:39 +0000

This is huge – I know a lot of small business owners who will benefit from this once they work the bugs out.

I wonder if the PMB (Personal Mailbox) business will take a hit now that businesses don’t need a physical address to show up in Google Maps? :)

By: jexley

jexley — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:43:02 +0000

Most excellent and something I’ve run into MANY times.

Because of my target market, most of my clients eschew a Google Business Listing because they don’t want their address “out there” if it’s not a brick-and-mortar showroom.

I bit the bullet and put myself on there, but the wife’s always felt funny about having our home address associated with the business (especially since we live in a dodgy suburb, heh).

I hope the bugs get ironed out, because this will definitely make many of my clients happy and improve my business as well!

By: MoniqueTheGeek

MoniqueTheGeek — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:51:54 +0000

Thanks for the post and updates about these new Google Maps features! We submitted a local business center listing today, and definitely noticed the changes in the verification process. I’m definitely interested to see how these developments affect local search rankings. In the past, Google Maps has pulled in other local citations (superpages, yellowpages, kudzu, etc) into the local business center listing, so I’m curious to see how these will be pulled in, considering some businesses won’t have a local address anymore. Will definitely be compelling to keep an eye on this as the bugs are worked out and we start seeing different local maps. Thanks for the info!

By: don marks

don marks — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:16:06 +0000

Appears to be in Beta, the functionality is not in Michigan yet,…

By: don marks

don marks — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:15:04 +0000

This option appears to be in beta offering, cant make these changes here in Michigan yet…

By: contentwriter

contentwriter — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:11:23 +0000

Problem with this: maximum service area on map 620mi / 999km

This looked great, so I tried it out. I am a web copywriter with clients around the world, so I tried to set the service area to cover the world, basically.

However, the most that will be shown on the map is 620 miles or 999 kilometres. Anything over that and the circle on the map reverts back to a small circle around your physical address.

That doesn’t work for me. Even though I could still type in, says, 20,000km as my service area, it’s not like my business started showing up in map searches for my service category in other locations.

So I’m interested to find out how this is supposed to work and whether it is able to benefit home-based businesses whose service area is the whole world. Probably not…

By: ArjanSnaterse

ArjanSnaterse — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:58:10 +0000

Great to see this.. Do you know if there’s (or will become) room in KML files for this already or in the future?

By: crifae

crifae — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:21:47 +0000

This is GREAT info. As a small business person I can’t tell home of a pain it was to jockey address around!
Thank you for sharing!

By: chiropractic

chiropractic — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:52:04 +0000

Very cool Matt!
I can already think of many ways this can benefit small business owners.