Google has once again changed their Places/Local/Pages/Business/Maps/Plus features. This time, they are trying to make it easier for people to integrate their business across internet rather than harder. In the past, Google Local and Google Places were seemingly the same, yet different, and caused a rift in whether or not you showed up in search properly. Google+ Places came along and confused things even more.
Google My Business Clears Things Up
Google My Business states that it is a way to get your company to:
- Show up on the web
- Get on the map
- Stand out in Google+
- Share the right info
- And be found across all devices
For those who already use Google+, Google My Business is added to the navigation of Google+ where you can quickly share a status update, look at reviews, check out your insights, look at Analytics, and join a Hangout all in one place.
Helping You to Understand Your Customer
The specific benefits are:
- Google+ – Your business’ profile that can be seen in the Google+ social network. Similar to Facebook in that you can post statuses, send messages, upload photos, and share videos from your YouTube Channel.
- Insights – Shows visibility, engagement, and audience of those who interact with your Google+ page.
- Reviews – Shows your overall Google rating, number of reviews on Google, and number of reviews from around the web included in the rating.
- Analytics – Connects with your Google Analytics account to show case New Visits, Unique Visitors, and Pageviews.
- Hangouts – A quick way to call your customer or co-worker.
For those of you unfamiliar with Hangouts, it’s basically like Skype except you can have conferences with multiple people. This is in hopes to pull in the business in with the consumer. A big plus is being able to respond to any reviews as the owner of the business and provide customer service in this manner. Many customers have been using Facebook and Twitter for customer service over the years.
Overall, none of these products are new. They are just located together in a more convenient location rather than having to log into various sites. One of the big marketing differences though is that Google is pointing out that you can manage your business via your mobile and not just on a computer. This was always the case but not clear to many people.
Why Should I Use Google My Business?
Seeing as how Google dominates the search engine world in the US with 67.5% of the market share (comScore), the majority of your customers will search for your business via Google. Google My Business makes it a lot easier for people to figure out how to make the most of their online presence on Google and connect to searchers.
Strangely, the focus for this is on small businesses yet all brick and mortar businesses would benefit from it. It also would behoove businesses with only an online presence as it makes searching for them easier.
If you’d like help with using Google My Business or making your business more present in local search, contact us today at Customer Paradigm for a FREE SEO Analysis.