Google + Business Profiles and Updates to Place Pages

Google + Business Profiles and Updates to Place Pages July 24, 2011 http://www.SmallBusinessNewz.com Do you wish for a Google+ business profile? Yes or No

Google + Business Profiles and Updates to Place Pages Chris Crum | Staff Writer Small businesses should be aware of two major developments from Google. For starters, I don't know if you've been keeping up with all of the Google+ news, but the company has been shutting down the profiles of those that have been created for businesses. Right now, Google doesn't want businesses using the service in its current incarnation (which is still in testing mode). The company has been letting business apply for early testing of business profiles, but it has since announced that while we may see a few testers in the wild, it will start letting all businesses create profiles in the coming months. Google's Christien Oestlien wrote: What Will Come of the Amazon Tax? - Watch Now With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we've been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers. In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself. Separately, Google has made some changes to its Place Pages for local search. They've dropped third-party reviews (from sources like Yelp and the like) in favor of all Google-based reviews. It will be interesting to see how they integrate Place Pages with Business Profiles in Google+. It's hard to imagine that they won't do so in some capacity. With the new version of Place Pages, there is a prominent "write a review" button at the top, encouraging users to participate and talk about businesses. If your customer service isn't top notch, this could hurt you. "Rating and review counts reflect only those that've been written by fellow Google users, and as part of our continued commitment to helping you find what you want on the web, we're continuing to provide links to other review sites so you can get a comprehensive view of locations across the globe," said Google's Avni Shah. The company says its long term goals include making local results more personalized, integrating information from Place Pages into web search, and providing more ways for users to rate, discover, and share place. Make your customers like you, because it sounds like what they think about you may be appearing in search results more in the future. Comment on this article.

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