Google Places: What Is It?
Just what is this Google Places buzz that you hear local marketers talking about now?
Simply put, a Google Place is a page that Google has reserved for each local business or office that its crawlers have found on the internet.
90% of these are unclaimed and usually unknown by the business owner or management, even though Google sends automated postcards to the address they have on file, inviting the business owner to participate.
What is the significance of this? We established in an earlier article that the search engine is the #1 tool to find local business, and unless you’ve been hiding in a cave without internet, you probably know that Google owns about 2/3 of the search market share.
Further, Google uses the Place Page as the #1 factor in ranking businesses locally. Therefore, this page is of the utmost importance in ranking a business in Local Search.
The Place Page has many factors in itself, as illustrated in this chart:
There are dozens of different fields and factors that go into the Place page, including required fields which are the most important part. But without claiming and editing their Place Page, how can a business even get the required fields right?
But there are more factors than just those in the Place Page. In fact, there are 79 known elements that go into the Local Search Ranking for Google. That is less than the Periodic Table but the number is growing steadily. (There are 19 “negative factors” that have been studied but they are not elements.)
Fortunately, experts in internet marketing like those here at Magnon know what all those elements are, and how to use them to get the best possible ranking.
