Help potential customers discover your business using Google Places for business, a tool to help you manage your local business listing on Google. Joel Headley of the Places team shares how to get started and best practices, and answers questions from users. Here’s how the video breaks down: 0:45 – What is Google Places for business? 1:31 – How a user sees business information on Google 9:22 – Adding your business information 13:35 – How any user can help us keep places information up to date 17:58 – Top Contributor Jack joins the Hangout! (Some tech issues here.) 22:46 – Joel and Jack answer your questions for the rest of the hour, including: ranking in search results; marking a business as closed; ‘at a glance’ terms; best practices for descriptions and service area businesses; and more! Don’t have time to watch the video? Read a roundup of this Hangout on the Google Small Business Blog: goo.gl Get started with Google Places: google.com Visit our Help Center: support.google.com
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Thanks for taking the time to create this tutorial. The video was able to answer most of my questions. The remaining question I have is how do I have duplicate listing removed from google places? I currently have three listing for my business. The one I created over two years ago, another that just seems to have popped up out of nowhere and lastly one that has my name, but a competitors address and phone number (with a negative review). There seems to be no easy way to delete these.
1. Stop pulling in 3rd party information when a listing is owner verified, I think Google should walk one side of the road or the other. Walk on road, hm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later [squish like grape] – Miyagi. Thus, if a verified biz owner stays within the guidelines, let’m curate the place page completely.
2. Allow, visibility of business attributes. Free parking, free wifi, pet friendly, that stuff is important to see for the algo and users!
The best thing to do is let us know via the “Report a problem” button on the listing itself (look under the “more” dropdown). That sends a message to our teams, and we can work on merging the listings together. Keep in mind that it takes *several* weeks to clean those cases up, there’s no easy instant fix. If you’re still having issues, let us know in the Google and Your Business Help forum.
Your feedback’s heard, it’s a conversation daily in the Google and Your Business forum. We’re doing a lot of work right now to improve the experience — stay tuned.
Thanks!
3. Make the system easy for the “Starbucks” and larger brands to promote their local business. Yes, it’s a free product, but management for 1,000′s of locations should allow equal control that small businesses maintain for user experience and relevance.
4. An alert system for new reviews or “certain types of reviews – low star, would be useful to the business owner to get an email
5. Integration of GPlaces (data) with other products, i.e. GAnalytics, Google+ Brand Page, and WMT, etc…
Way to butcher the Hangout 21:00
When a Place moves, don’t mark it as “Closed”, because then the users will think the whole business is done. Mark it as “Moved” and provide the new address or link to the new Places page/location.
Yep, we’re learning as we go. Easy enough to forward through.
I appreciate the prompt reply. I just reported one of those issues last week. I guess it will just take a little patients from here. Thanks again!
It’s supposed to be answered in this video, but I must have missed it so maybe someone can answer: How to get verification when there is no mail delivery to physical location – mail is only delivered to post office. This is the situation for hundreds of thousands of businesses in smaller cities and towns in Canada. Thanks!
That’s a good question, we didn’t actually answer that one in this video. You should get in touch with the support team using the “Contact Us” section on the Google Places Help Center homepage, choose the verification option. (Sorry, I’d link to it here but I don’t think YT let’s me include links.)
Vanessa, Joel, & Jack – thanks for the informative hangout session!
Is there a key point summary/transcription of these sessions? Good to be able to watch for an hour at times but other times may only have time for a quick scan to get the key points. Thanks
Also, Help Center link needs the .com removed after support to work properly.
Keep up the good work!!
Just answered my own question =-) Thanks
Found the questions on Google Small Business Blog, but getting error message when trying to post link here.
I’ve had trouble with links in comments too. I will add a link to the SMB Blog post in the description above, and I’ll fix that support.google.com link ASAP — thank you for catching!