Google Places - Local Business Centre Upgrade

This week Google upgraded the Local Business Center to Google Places, their portal for local search. Google Places pages let business owners manage their online presence and also have some control over how they will appear in Google maps searches.

Place Pages connect people to information from the best sources across the web, displaying photos, reviews and essential facts, as well as real-time updates and offers from business owners.

New Features in Google Places

Stipulate your business service area/s

You can now stipulate the ‘service areas’ of your business which is an improvement on being restricted to one city. If you travel to customers, you can establish your service area in the city you do most of your business in. This helps quite a few of our customers who were located outside of London but did 100% of their business within the city. These businesses were at a disadvantage in the Google maps results, hopefully this will make a difference to them.
It will also help those London businesses that have sales reps, or travel to clients, in Toronto or Windsor.

Free photo Shoots of your business by Google

In select cities Google is offering free photo shoots of the interior of your business to supplement existing photos and improve your Google Places profile. It’s currently not available in Canada but hopefully we will see it soon. There has been much talk that the future will see Google “store profiles” that let customers look inside your retail business, perhaps this is the start of that?