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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google My Business Releases V2.0 of the GMB API

API-V2aToday Google is releasing of V2.0 of Google My Business API and has just updated their website with new information about the open API.

The V1 was originally released in mid October to a limited audience and with a limited feature set. V2 is being opened up to anyone and comes with a number of new features. Unfortunately access to Insights, review or verifcation are not among them.

Features included in this release are the ability to:

  • Create business locations
  • Manage special hours
  • Mark a location as permanently closed
  • Manage business photos
  • Invite & remove managers on locations and business acounts
  • Read listing state to identify listings that are Google updated, duplicates or suspended
  • Filter locations by name, category or label
  • Set the service area by specifying a point and radius

Features that are not supported by this release of the GMB API and must still be done manually with the location dashboard:

  • Insights
  • Reviews
  • Verification
  • Creating Business Accounts
  • Resolving issues with suspended or duplicate listings
  • Requesting Ownership
  • Ability to query user generated content associated with the listing

Obviously these missing features make the API less useful in any business oriented forward facing dashboard an agency might design but the API should still facilitate managing the basics of listings at scale.

There are several other limitations including the fact that accounts that have not been bulk verified can only manage 100 locations. This will force agencies that manage a lot of individual locations to have multiple accounts to do so.

By default an API account (known as a basic account) allows for 1000 edits/creates per day, and 100,000 reads per day. Apparently application can be made for a standard account that has a higher daily edit rate of 10,000 edits/creates per day.

Screenshot 2015-12-14 13.40.01An interesting feature for those managing Adwords for clients but not managing their GMB listings is the ability to use the API to create/update listings and and then link unverified locations in the GMB to their Adwords campaigns.

Google has released a new set of documentation for the GMB API that includes guides, reference materials as well as samples and client libraries downloads for Java, C# & PHP and the Google API discovery service. Google has also made available a complete list of categories by country with this release. The FAQ can be view here.