For instance, search for [anymetroarea] courier and virtually all results are for companies with addresses in the primary city, even though there are dozens of couriers who have set up shop on the city perimeter where better highway access allows them to better serve the metro area. But no one is searching for [suburbname] courier. So a company would need move in town and give up their location advantage in order to convince Google they are a legitimate local result. Of course this is why so many companies are setting up fake or shell offices in city locations.

Doug — Google does have that tool that lets you draw your boundaries, but I don’t have any clients with direct experience using it to know how valuable/effective it is in the situation you describe.

Andrew, earlpearl, Mike – thx for the kind words and thoughts.

I agree with a lot of your points. Specifically:

#2, 3, and 5.

Starting with pt. 5 Google is far more interested in attracting smb’s into their “web” than servicing them. I’ve been intermittantly involved in the Google Local/Maps/Places forums since they became active. SMB’s enter these areas with problems and have an expectation for customer service from Google. For years there simply hasn’t been any.

How can every other tech business in the world offer customer service and Google not do so. Consider the weight! Every other tech business that ever became anything on the one hand. Google on the other hand. Its absurd.

Prior to writing this I scanned the Places Forum this morning. I didn’t catch any of the all too frequent comments from smbs and their agents bewailing lack of assistance this morning. On the other hand I didn’t see any comments from Google personnel trying to assist businesses working through the problems associated with Google Places.

I did see:

Non google employees offering assistance. Hey that isn’t Google customer service at all.

A lot of problems and complaints these days dealing with reviews.

Reviews in Google = big bug/big problem. You referenced that.

While Google isn’t offering help it is and has been aggressively trying to bring more smbs into the fold to ultimately grab their advertising dollars.

One thing they did was set up a Places account/ some tracking with the dashboard/ and ways to sell out of the Places Account.

The dashboard is MISERABLE. It simply gives poor incomplete information/ is often outright wrong and is seriously misleading.

Your comments connected to the dashboard and tracking places visits are excellent. Places visibility on google.com sucks up a lot of traffic. I keep seeing it.

If Google wants to monetize Places….give the smbs something back of value. Tell the smbs how many visits are coming to the websites and/or G Places pages off of the merged organic/Places records.

Give them value for their dollar. Give them an understanding of what is occuring.

Thanks, Matt, for your perspective.

Excellent summary and every point is bang on…

Of particular interest to me is the integration of Google Places into Google Analytics. It works like a dream with AdWords I’m sure it wouldn’t require too much engineering to integrate the two products. I’ve never used the Places dashboard to track the successes of my client’s pages, insterad I’ve always insisted on installing Analytics along side, it’s just too good a product not to use.

For local businesses with little organic visibility it was relatively easy to extract the results from analytics and being in the UK most of the maps traffic was tied to Google.com referrals and was extremely easy to segment, that was before the merge of algorithms back in October, it’s not as straight forward now, so as you’ve alluded to in your post without using advanced segmentation & filtering techniques it’s virtually impossible to accurately analyse local search performance.

We did see a brief flash of a concept dashboard back in December that provided more detail but it fell way short of my expectations…

It would be a huge advantage to all if Google explored this option, let’s hope so!

Great post guys, look forward to reading & contributing more during 2011.

Cheers,

Andrew

I am curious about your point #7. When introduced the “hide address” function was disfunctional. But with the rollout of Places search, businesses that chose to not show their address were no longer penalized IF they had a website solving much if not all of the problem.