Google Places Help: Optimize your Local Business Listing with this Guide

The article still makes sense today. It helped me rank 2 of my listings.

Kristi, this is some really great advice! It is so important for businesses to understand the importance of the NAP signature. It is also vital for them to know to keep it consistent!

Hi Tyler,

Yes, Google Places can turn into a double edge sword quickly. However, there are some actions that can be done on the business side to help repair the negative feedback. Social feedback should always remain transparent, no matter what the complaint is about.

If you see a complaint, be proactive about it. The customer is always right. Find out what happened and resolve the issue, so it doesn’t happen again. The customer can always follow up on their review and post that your company stepped up to fix the issue.

High engagement is important when participating in reviews and social media. Feedback can’t sit for days, only hours can go by when responding.

Customers are quick to post negative feedback, but positive feedback can be encouraged through follow up order emails. If a customer checks out on your site or completes an order at your business, ask for feedback on your Google Places site, Yelp, and other social outlets. Innovating ways for users to engage on your social review profiles with positive feedback can easily outweigh the negative feedback.

This discussion can go deeper, but this should be a start to help correct the negative feedback issues.

Google Places has proved to be a dangerous place for our company, unfortunately, the only times we hear back any feedback from our customers is when there is negative comments and it became an eye sore on our Google places page. If only people with positive comments were inclined to post as mush as the negatives it would have been a great place to promote our brand. We ended up removing our company completely which then effected our rankings. Double edged sword.

This is great advice. I implemented this last week and already see our business in the search results! That’s awesome. Thanks again for helping the dummies!

I have been working hard at optimizing not only my google places page, following every suggestion in this post, but also optimizing me website. Unfortunately, I’m still being outranked by several competitors on the 7 pack for several key words. Many of their profiles haven’t even been claimed yet, and most of their websites are junk. I don’t understand why I’m not getting any results from all my effort, and how these other sites, who haven’t done much, or anything, can continue to beat me in the search results. Any thoughts?

Thanks for the article, exactly what I was looking for. If someone has a PO box, would it help to write the address as a suite number? Address of post office, suite number, city, state, zip. Would that work?

A good summary, if a bit outdated! Two points:

1. You mostly covered it, but it should be clarified: if your business has a physical street address but can only receive mail at a PO Box, you are ALSO not eligible for verification, as Google doesn’t allow you to set a separate mail verification address and street address. Unfair in many cases for businesses who are units in a shopping strip and have a POB, but that’s how Google operates.

2. Google Places, specifically, is being swiftly deprecated. It’s being replaced by Google+ Local Pages, which function as Google+ Pages (similar to Facebook Pages) but also display on Google Maps like traditional listings. They have to be managed through http://plus.google.com under the Pages area.

Right now in terms of flexibility and quality of content, G+ Local Pages are vastly superior, but they are actually the ones that deny PO Box verification — if you register your listing through the older Google Places (http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/) it should still accept PO Box addresses.

Therefore the general idea is that if you can only receive mail at a PO Box address, use Google Places. If you can receive mail at your store (or home business) address, spring for Google+. (Google+ Local Pages also let you specify a list of “areas served”, now; this is a new feature that was just introduced a month or so ago.)

For a visual, here’s two examples.
Listing created and verified through Google Places: https://plus.google.com/105543032434221472881/about
Listing created and verified through Google+ Local Pages: https://plus.google.com/115969181811663538029/about

Big difference!

I’m constantly amazed at the number of my clients who don’t see the importance of using Google Places. It’s free, why wouldn’t you use it?

The first results that appear for a local search within Google are the local profiles. It takes up most of the space above the fold. It’s essential to have a presence here.

I admit this that Google place is very good option. There is to easy to find the company place through Google places.

Great information and a really good guide for any firs timer to follow when setting up as it is easy to make mistake if you don’t know how, nice post, thanks.

Great advice, better still it only takes less than hour to do properly.

Hi

Thanks for the explanation. One thing I am not sure about is whether having a google places listing helps at all if the keyword search includes a placename. Also is the places search limited to the 7-pack rather than a normal listing.

So from your article if I was a french restaurant in Las Vegas I would expect to be picked up by a local 7-pack search for the phrase “french restaurant” if my browser location was Las Vegas.

However if I typed “french restaurant Lag Vegas” and there was no local 7-pack shown – just the normal listing – would my google places listing make any difference or would it be based on national rankings for the phrase?