Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Category Archive For "Google Places (Maps & Local)"
How Google Has Handled Reviews Reflects a Long History of a Tin Ear and Little Action
Google’s recent introduction of the ability for SMBs to respond to reviews is a welcome and surprising turn of events in the Places arena. Reviews have long been a sore point with businesses that often feel wronged by the review procedures at Google. Many SMBs think of the current arrangement as unfair and they rarely …
Google Place “Error on Page” Preventing Editing of Listings with IE
A reader alerted me to a problem with Google Places (aka LBC) where a record is currently unable to be created or edited and the lister receives the message: “Error on Page”. A number of posters (~30) have noted the problem in the forum over the past 36 hours. Here are a sampling of the …
Will Reviews Become Google’s First Successful Foray into Social?
Small businesses are engaged (and often enraged) with reviews on their Google Places Pages. Understandably, the SMB posters at the Places Help forums have a great deal invested in their businesses and the reviews about their business. As a result they often respond with great passion about Google’s handling of them. The forums are rife …
Google Reviews – Business Owners May Now Respond Directly
Reviews have long been a sore spot between SMBs and Google. But Google Places has added a new feature that will go part of the way in providing SMBS salve for some of their “review wounds”. Google is now allowing business owners to respond directly to reviews. Starting today, if you’re a verified Google Places business …
Google Now Calling to Confirm Google Places Community Edits & Verification Issues
Over the past few months a number of clients and readers have emailed me and asked if Google ever called to check on listings. Apparently callers (often from India) would ask the business for information like street address. The callers when queried would claim to be from Google but would refuse to provide call back …
Google Tags – Do They Help? An Anectdotal Review
Google Tags rolled out nationally at the end of June. Several questions that have been often asked about Tags are: How well do they perform? & How do searchers respond to them? Do they attract additional business? I have one client, Moses and Rooth Attorneys at Law in Orlando, that added the tags immediately after …
Just How Many Local Searches Were There in June?
The Comscore Search report for June has been released. Google had 10.29 billion searches. If roughly the same percentage of searches (20%) had local intent as Google has indicated then there were approximately 2,187,200,000 searches in the U.S. on Google’s main search site last month that were local in nature. Across all of the search …
Google Coupons Continue Their Rise From the Dead
Since their inception, Google Coupons have been invisible to most searchers and offered little value to the SMB. Buried deep within the local listings and no front page exposure, they seemed to be the poor step child of the Google Maps world. Google Coupons are now beginning to be exposed to the the light of …
Google Maps Offering 30 days of FREE advertising with Google Tag Sign Up
This evening Google has announced a plan to provide 30 days of Google Tags free (hat tip to Taylor Cimala of Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing & Jeffrey Magner of Trumpet Local Media ). The following is being sent to businesses with listings in Google Places (It is of interest that even Google still feels …
Google Maps: Melbourne Web Designers – A Mosh pit of Decay
I lived in Kenya for several years in the mid 70s. About every 6 weeks I would take the train from Nairobi to the funky seaport of Mombassa and upon arrival at the coast, would frequent a local bar where the beer was cheap, the ambiance authentic and “working” women would congregate. I would enter, …
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