It’s official! On May 30th, 2012 Google Places pages were officially replaced and merged with Google+ Local pages.
This is of particular interest to those of you who have a business that relies on being found by your address, and even if you are not that bothered, you should be, because a lot of Google Places pages are listed at the top of the search engine results, and often found above even the organically placed and coveted No.1 position.
Google Places Local Listings are often associated with restaurants, retail stores/shops, and hotels, but if you adopt this strategy in to your overall SEO efforts, more than just the aforementioned businesses can greatly benefit from being part of these search results. Google is really forcing their hand and letting you know a couple of things:
- Google+ is here to stay and is being integrated in to quite a few existing Google products that many individuals and businesses currently use
- You need to bite the bullet now and start learning how to use Google+
Some of you may already know that Google acquired Zagat last September, and it would now appear that they are capitalizing on this acquisition by featuring feature Zagat scores and recommendations from people you’re connected to on Google+.
There is no need for anyone to panic about this change, because for the most part, things are very much the same. You just need to get used to the fact that Google+ is here to stay, and sooner or later, for those of you that are not so familiar with the social network, you will need to learn more in order to keep up with their overall plan to integrate it in to your daily web experience.
In another blog post we will show you how you can benefit from the new Google+ Local pages, and how you go about incorporating your business in to these search results.
{ 7 comments }
Greetings Jason! Very helpful advice with this article on Google Places! It’s the little changes that make the most significant difference on Google, and even though I had heard they were making some changes to Google Places, this confirms it for me. Thanks for sharing!
Hello Jason would you mind sharing which blog platform you’re working with and what theme? I’m going to start my own blog soon but I’m having a hard time making a decision between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal. The reason I ask is because your layout seems nice, simple, but effective. P.S Sorry for getting off-topic but I had to ask!
Twitter: ustopsweating
Thanks for the heads up on this Jason. Quick question if you don’t mind: What if I have multiple locations for my business, can I add more than one to my Google Places/Google+ account, or do I need to set up a separate one for each location? Thanks very much!
Hi David, You’re welcome! You can go ahead and add multiple locations within the one Google Places / Google + account, but when you add additional locations for your business, you will need to add the specific page of your website for those locations, as opposed to keep directing people to your homepage. Google wants to see that you have a specific page set up for each location, and on that page you should include your physical address and tel # for the location. I hope that helps?
Hi there, You’ve done a fantastic job. I will certainly digg it and personally suggest to my friends across other social networks. I am confident they will be benefit from this blog post about how to merge their accounts on Google Places.
We’re a group of volunteers that are starting a new marketing initiative in our community. Your blog post has given us valuable information to implement as it pertains to adding local businesses on Google Plus so they show up on the Google Maps section of the search results. You have done a great job at explaining things and we can now help many businesses in our community since most of them are novices when it comes to this kind of stuff. Thanks again!
I am extremely impressed with your writing skills as well as with the layout on your blog. Is this a paid theme or did you customize it yourself? Either way keep up the nice quality writing, it is rare to see a nice SEO blog like this one nowadays.
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