A Unified Place To Manage Your Local Presence

Google has had a pretty bad identity crisis for the past few years with their local business strategy.

Ever since starting Google+ their local listings changed names 3 times, from “Google Places” to “Google Local” to “Google+ Business Pages” yet each one had splintered information that was pushed out to different locations within Google.

Google Local operated on an archaic looking page that managed the general information about your business’s location, which was pushed out to Google Maps.

Google+ Business Pages were essentially your “Facebook page for Google” – the social presence of your business on Google. You could create communities, push out posts that would be indexed in Google Search, and Google would even promote your Google+ page in your site description within the search results if your page was verified.

Regardless of if you had a Google+ Business Page that was locally focused or not though, if you didn’t have a Google Local page it was up-in-the-air as to if you would be represented on Google Maps properly, or if you would show up in their local results for search queries at all.

Now, however, Google has fixed this splintered problem by introducing their new all-in-one solution for businesses on Google, named (aptly) Google “My Business.”

With Google “My Business” you can now set up one property (with multiple locations, if applicable) that will push out all of your business’s information to every point within Google.

All Over Google

Your business’s “My Business” listing will now push out your local information to Google Maps, to the organic search results, and be represented on your Google+ page as you interact with your community on Google’s social network, as well as on all digital devices including mobile and tablets.

Show up on mobile searches for your business on Google Maps, and on any Google Search, and have all of your information perfectly adjusted to be represented in Google’s rich segments, with the proper hours, easy access to reviews and ability to add reviews, to map driving routes, and to add a star to your business to save your business to their favorite locations for easy future reference.

Interact with your community now in one unified location, where you can respond to reviews on your business’s locations, push out links and information to your community, add venue photography and product photography that will be shown within Google Searches as well as on your local results.

It’s very simple to setup your page, simply search your location from Google Maps, find the location that aligns with your business, click on that location and follow Google’s simple steps to verify your location.

Once you have your business verified under your account, you can, at any time (from your personal account that you have the business verified from) go to the left navigation on Google Plus, click on “Pages” and you will see all of the businesses that you manage on Google’s “My Business” manager page.

Simply click the “Manage this page” button on any of the businesses to access the My Business dashboard for that business.

This is where you can push out social updates, reply to reviews, change business information, manage Google Adwords, access Google Analytics, and view local impressions (how many times your location has been seen in search results in a given time period).

And there you have it!

Google’s “My Business” is honestly the update we at GravityFree have been dying to have from Google for quite some time, to help our marketing clients integrate all of their information in one location to have a consistent representation among all Google properties. We’re more than happy to introduce it to you.

Happy Googling!