May 13, 2013 at 9:25am ET by Andrew Shotland

One of the more desperate requests I get from clients interested in Local Search is wanting to rank well in Google for local queries when they don't have a physical location in the searched city. The challenge is that Google appears to not want to show businesses that are not physically located in the searched city if they can avoid it. And, in their guidelines, they are fairly explicit about trying to game the listings, particularly with easily faked addresses like P.O. Boxes: "Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O [...]

Google Places For Business Gets Its Own iPhone App For Managing Listings [Update: Google Removed App]

Apr 22, 2013 at 3:00am ET by Matt McGee

Local business owners have a new tool for managing their Google Places For Business listing: a dedicated app that works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. There's no official announcement that I can find about the app, and as best I can tell, the iClarified blog was first to report on it. The Google For Places Business app is a free download in the iTunes app store. I haven't tried it yet (and may not be able to given the ongoing mess as Google merges the Places dashboard with Google+ Local), but here's how Google describes the app's capabilities: Business owners can use the app to: - Verif [...]

10 Things SEOs & SMBs Should Know About New Google Places Dashboard

Apr 8, 2013 at 12:09pm ET by Myles Anderson

Recently, Google announced some significant changes to their Google Places dashboard. The wires have been humming ever since, and the reaction has ranged from fall-off-seat excitement to 'humph, is that it!?' [caption id="attachment_154764" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Dashboard images: Local Search Forum[/caption] Whatever the opinion, the truth is that these changes signify a big development in the way Google handles 'Local.' Google has been talking up the importance of local for an age, and the increased real estate given to local results in SERPs backs this up. They have also upd [...]

Google Adds Publisher Opt-Out Tool For Shopping, Flights, Hotels & Local Search

Mar 25, 2013 at 5:48pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Don't want your content to be included in many of Google's vertical search services, such as Google Shopping or Google+ Local? Google's got a new tool for that, a result of its agreement earlier this year with the US Federal Trade Commission over anti-trust charges. Announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the new tool is located within Google Webmaster Central and allows publishers to keep their content out of: Google Shopping Google+ Local Google Flights Google Hotels Google Advisor (financial product search) Oddly, several of these services only allow you to be inc [...]

Google Starts Shutting Down Its City Pages, Shifts To Google+ Local

Nov 2, 2012 at 3:47pm ET by Matt McGee

Google is in the process of shutting down its collection of city pages -- a change that follows the shift from Google Places to Google+ Local, and a change that may be reflective of a larger shift in direction for Google's local efforts. Mike Blumenthal noticed yesterday that the Portland city page had gone missing. The page used to be accessible at www.google.com/portland/ (which redirected to www.google.com/city/portland/), but that URL now produces a 404 error. The same thing happens with some other city page URLs, like google.com/sandiego and google.com/madison. Those pages were laun [...]

WSJ: Google Prepares “Business Builder” For Small Business Marketers

Jun 4, 2012 at 11:16am ET by Greg Sterling

The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Google is planning to combine a number of its products (internally developed and acquired) into a suite of tools and services aimed at small business marketers: 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. The project combines several products and services aimed at small businesses under a single banner. It is based on a mix of internally developed software and recently acquired technologies that the compa [...]

Google Places Launches New Bulk Listing Management Tool

May 8, 2012 at 8:22pm ET by Matt McGee

Google Places has announced changes and new features to its bulk listing management tool that it hopes will make it easier for business owners with multiple locations (and local search marketers who manage multiple locations). The changes affect both the upload and management processes. Here are the primary bullet points from Google's blog post: Edit one or more of your listings' data at once Search through your listings, filtering by specific information or for listings with errors Upload new listings using a data file or by adding them individually within the interface Tell us how [...]

Google Places Ranking Factors – The PhD Version

Mar 19, 2012 at 10:00am ET by Andrew Shotland

Bizible, a start-up that makes local marketing software for SMBs, approached me recently* to preview the results of a Google Places Ranking Factors study they had conducted and I was intrigued enough by their findings to share some of them here. Bizible's team is made up of former Bing AdCenter guys and counts a PhD and a stats expert on their staff, so their study is a more scientific attempt to figure out what's going on with Google Places than your typical "here's what some SEOs think" kind of thing. For methodology, they studied 30 potential ranking factors by querying approximately [...]

The History Of Google Places, All On One Page

Jan 10, 2012 at 4:14pm ET by Matt McGee

Maybe it's my bias as a longtime fan/practitioner of local search and SEO. Or maybe it's because I'm mentioned as one of the sources/contributors. But more likely it's just that this is an important search reference document, and that's why I think that anyone interested or involved in local search should know about it. David Mihm has published A Brief History of Google Places -- an excellent historical document that covers back to 2004 when Google launched what was then called "Google Local," all the way through the "Google Maps" days and now up to the current Google Places era. Imp [...]

Is Google+ Beginning To Integrate Into Google Places?

Nov 23, 2011 at 2:36pm ET by Greg Finn

Today Mike Blumenthal of Blumenthals.com posted about what appears to be a new addition to Google's local results. A specific query for "transmission servicing lexington ky" displayed the normal Google Places listings, with one exception: The grey icon is displayed next to a specific places results. However, when clicked, the user is taken to the following Google+ only results page: The surprising thing about the above listing is that the link goes directly to a personal account, not an actual Google+ page. We had extreme difficulty replicating this on any other queries in d [...]

Google Overhauls Place Pages, Emphasizes Reviews & Kills Citations

Jul 22, 2011 at 7:28am ET by Matt McGee

Local searchers and local businesses will see a fairly substantially different Place Page the next time they're poking around Google Maps/Places. The company announced a new look Thursday and promises more changes to come. The new layout of Place Pages puts a heavy emphasis on reviews. More specifically, it emphasizes reviews from Google users and no longer shows review content from third party sites. (Google had issues with both Yelp and TripAdvisor over review snippets last year, you may recall.) Rather than showing external reviews, the new Place Page only links to third party sites [...]

Carter Maslan, The Face Of Google Places, Leaving The Company

Jun 22, 2011 at 8:12am ET by Greg Sterling

Carter Maslan has been the patient and good-natured face of Google Maps and Places at innumerable conferences and events over the past several years. He's endured a regular onslaught of questions about missing features and local SEO frustrations surrounding Google's increasingly important suite of local products. Now he's leaving Google. I got word of this yesterday from a Google partner and then I later confirmed it in an email exchange with Maslan himself. He's leaving the company on good terms and said he "loved" his work at Google. However he has something else he wants to pursue. [...]

Nifty Hard Core Local SEO Tactics From SMX Advanced

Jun 13, 2011 at 12:41pm ET by Andrew Shotland

The panelists at last week's "HardCore Local SEO" panel at SMX Advanced, Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing, Will Scott of Search Influence and David Mihm of GetListed, presented some excellent data on various tactical approaches to improving Google Place Page rankings. For today's column, I thought it would be helpful to excerpt some of the more interesting ideas they presented. I was particularly intrigued by Mike Ramsey's presentation on research he had done where he compared 28 listings that ranked in the top 7 results for some local queries to 28 listings that did not rank as well. Mike s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Place Pages | Local Search | SEO: Local

Survey: 60% Of Consumers More Likely To Consider Or Contact Businesses With Images In Local Search Results

Apr 15, 2011 at 9:50am ET by Greg Sterling

UK based SEO firm BrightLocal reported the results of two online surveys about local consumer behavior and local SEO. The surveys were conducted in Q1 2011. There were more than 600 SEO survey respondents and 1,250 US consumer survey respondents respectively. The findings are not a surprise. Google dominates as a traffic source to local business websites, though in this survey not as much as some other surveys. Mobile was not a part of the results reported. Here's how the SEO respondents ranked the top sources of traffic to their clients' sites: That ranking is further unpacked in [...]

Google Adding Local Product Data To Place Pages

Apr 6, 2011 at 9:29am ET by Greg Sterling

Since early 2006 I've been writing about the "offline future of online shopping." And since that time a collection of startups has been working, mostly under the radar, to bring real-time local product inventory data to the internet. In November of 2010 Google joined that effort with local product search. Now when you do a product search Google will show you local store availability -- mostly at large retail chains. However, Google just said in a blog post that it's also going to make local product availability a feature of Place Pages: When you provide Google with local product availabil [...]

Google Instant Now For Google Places

Mar 28, 2011 at 9:45am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has launched Google Instant Search for Google Place search results. To see this yourself, conduct a search on Google and then click on "Places" in the left-hand panel. Then type in the search box and Google Instant will predict and auto fill your searches. Here is an example query for pizza: Google continues to roll out Google Instant on their vertical search features. Last month, Google Product Search gained Instant Search and Google promises to "continue to expand Instant to all views, languages and domains over the next few months." This roll out comes the week afte [...]

Google’s Mayer: “We Do Have Too Many Products” In Local

Mar 14, 2011 at 3:08pm ET by Matt McGee

Google Maps. Google Places. Google Earth. Google Hotpot. Google Latitude. Google Street View. Different mobile and desktop versions of some of those. Different Android and iPhone versions of some. The list could go on. If you think Google has too many locally-oriented products, you're not alone. Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search who recently began focusing on the company's local efforts, agrees. "I think that, ultimately, we do have too many products and we need to condense them," Mayer said Friday at the SXSWi conference in Austin. "I think some of our products should be features. Ar [...]

Google Promotes Hotpot, Places In Austin In Advance of SXSW

Feb 11, 2011 at 2:49pm ET by Pamela Parker

When the digirati descend on Austin for the SXSW interactive conference next month, Google is hoping their smartphones will brim with local listings and reviews on Places and Hotpot. To that end, the company today began a promotion to get local businesses, along with Austin visitors and residents, on board with the search giant's local and mobile services. As part of the promotion, Google representatives will be meeting with local businesses to talk up the benefits of promoting their goods and services through Places. The company will offer businesses a customizable starter kit that can inc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Mobile | Google: Place Pages | Top News

Review Sites’ Rancor Rises With Prominence of Google Place Pages

Jan 31, 2011 at 4:50pm ET by Pamela Parker

Friends or enemies? Partners or competitors? Google's relationship with review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp is as complicated as ever, and the disputes are likely to increase as the search giant pursues mobile and local ambitions that center around its controversial Place pages. The rancor stems from the way Google aggregates content from various review sites onto its Place pages, showing snippets of reviews posted by users of other sites. While Google undoubtedly drives traffic to the review sites, the aggregation tacitly encourages users to think there's no need to go anywhere else. Cr [...]

Google Promotes Boost To All Of U.S., Mobile Devices

Jan 25, 2011 at 3:00pm ET by Pamela Parker

Google's simpler AdWords program, Boost, is getting its national roll-out, after a three-month test period in certain cities and states, the company is set to announce. The search giant also said it will begin displaying Boost ads for searches done on iPhone and Android devices. Google spokesperson Jim Prosser wouldn't say what kind of usage Boost has gotten since the start of the testing period, but allowed that, "the response has been good, otherwise we wouldn't be rolling this out nationally." Boost is Google's program aimed at smaller businesses who want a "set it and forget it" appr [...]

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