Today Google has announced the launch of Google Local Business. As part of an initiative to empower local businesses Google are giving a set of free tools and resources to help them to take advantage of the Google Business Listings.
What are the Google Business Listings?
“A potential customer does a search on Google.com or in Google Maps, comes across your listing, clicks on it to see your reviews and details, and then gets directions to your location.” Official Google Blog
Providing businesses with the necessary tools on the Local Business Centre dashboard to analyse impressions, user engagement, top search queries and which postal codes users are travelling from will allow companies to fully utilise the, often under appreciated, business listings.
The new tool will provide businesses with an even greater understanding of users searching behaviour and how they are finding companies. Further to this, having the ability to see where people are travelling from gives businesses an insight into users offline behaviour and allows them the ability to merge offline marketing activity with online searching, is a national telly ad resulting in a influx of searches from a wider range of postal codes?
Google’s primary aim of the business centre is to get businesses online and engaging with their online customers. For this tool to really be succesful Google needs to ensure it is communicating with the small businesses they are targeting, they need to communicate with them and help them understand what the business listings are. It is all very well us folks in the online industry singing the praises of the Business Listings, we understand the search engines and how they operate (well we like to think we do), a large number of small (offline) businesses do not, which is why they turn to internet marketing and search engine optimisation companies to handle their online presence. It is this barrier in understanding which may prevent Google Business Centre from being as successful as it actually could be.
If you are a business get to the Local Business Centre to register.
