A Google Places listing doesn’t just include your address, phone number and a link to your website. You can describe your services and products and upload logos, pictures and videos. Customers also have the ability to write reviews, which can greatly help with your rankings.

If you haven’t claimed your Google Places listing, what are your waiting for. It is FREE web visibility.

The replacement of Google Tags?

Now that Google has officially retired Google Tags, if you were a Tags user have you received a call from a Google representative offering Boost Ads? Some of our clients have and they are asking us, “Just what are boost ads?”

In case you are wondering the same thing, here is a brief overview:

Boost Ads are just that – ads. Similar to Google AdWords, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. Unfortunately you may not realize this when a Google rep calls you to try to convince you to start a Boost campaign. One of our clients was told it was free and as the rep walked our client through the set up process he then said it was pay per click. When our client questioned the Google rep, he said that pay per click was after he gave the first $100 free. IT IS pay per click.

How do Boost Ads work?

What information is displayed in a Boost Ad?

Where are Boost Ads displayed?

Will a Boost Ad help my organic Places listing rankings?

Boost or AdWords?

According to an email from Google, the company will be retiring the tags on April 29th. If you currently run a Google Tags campaign and you didn’t get the email – hopefully you will – let this posting serve as your notice. While we received an email notification for one of our client’s, we did not receive one for our own account. Instead, we received the following email:

According to an email from Google, the company will be retiring the tags on April 29th. If you currently run a Google Tags campaign and you didn’t get the email – hopefully you will – let this posting serve as your notice. While we received an email notification for one of our client’s, we did not receive one for our own account. Instead, we received the following email:

“This is to notify you that the following offers in your Google Places account will expire in 13 days on 4/30/11.

15% Off SEO Services

We are sorry to bother you but we thought we’d let you know early, in case you wished to extend their lifetime or replace them. Please visit Google Places to extend the expiry date of your offers or to replace them with new ones. After expiration, the offers will no longer be displayed until they are renewed.

Thanks,”

Kind of confusing, huh? Perhaps you also received this email. But it is official. The Google Tags will soon be no more. Once we logged into our Google Places account, there was a notification up top saying:

What Happened to Google Tags?

It appears that Google is trying to push its new Google Boost – a very simplified version of AdWords that you supposedly “don’t” have to manage, in place of Tags, which will make them money (as Google Tags was a nominal fee), but cost you more. Google mentioned Boost – and even offered a $100 Boost credit for Tags users for the month of May – in its email and in our Places dashboard. When Google first started Tags, it offered its users a free month credit, i.e., $25. So it seems Google wants you to spend at least $100 per month on Boost.

Google Tags worked well for our clients, both in terms of visibility and cost of conversion. It’s a shame that it will no longer be available.

So if you notice that your Google Tag is no longer showing, or if you finally decided to try Google Tags and logged into your Places account and see no option for it, you will no longer have to wonder what happened to Google Tags.

According to Google, the Hotpot “community has quickly expanded to millions of users who are rating more than one million times per month and enjoying a truly personalized view of the world.” So they are making Hotpot a permanent part of Google Places. They also plan to add more features to Google Places to make it even easier to rate, discover and share.

How does merging Google Hotpot Reviews into Google Places affect you?

Droid and iPhone mobile users can also filter their Google Places search by star ratings and distance as well as enjoy some additional enhanced features – images, reviews from around the web, and larger buttons to click to view a map or directly call a business.

With continuous Google Places Mobile App improvements we can’t stress enough the importance of robust Google Places Listings.

As Google showed, the stats are even more powerful for local businesses.

Slide from Google ThinkMobile Event

And the demand for smart phones is ever increasing. In took only 17 hours for Verizon iPhone pre-orders to sell out. Analysts estimate that Apple will sell 9 million to 12 million iPhones on Verizon’s network alone this year. Add to that, Nielson’s estimate that by the end of 2011, 1 in 2 Americans will have a smart phone

Why do I need a mobile website is no longer really the question. The real question today is “How quickly can I create one?”

Clients with home businesses often ask if they can use a PO Box as their address in the Google Places listing. The short answer – not a good idea.

Google has seemed to waffle back and forth in this area. When Google Maps was first created, businesses without a brick and mortar address could not create a business listing because the Google Map was unable to display a listing without a pinpoint address. Then Google Maps started incorporating business listings from data partners and began showing a floating dot, rather than a pinpoint, to represent those businesses with no “actual” address – but that information had to come from data partners rather than a listing.

When confronted with how businesses with no brick and mortar address could get on Google Maps back in 2008, the Google Earth VP suggested that those businesses get a PO Box. Hence, people started doing so. Acknowledging that not all businesses have brick and mortar addresses, in April 2010, Google rolled out the ability to add service areas to your listing AND hide your address.

A few months later Google seemed to do an about face. In a December 2010 blog post on tips for creating a business listing in Google Places, a Google rep wrote:

“Google Places is meant to facilitate customer interaction with brick-and-mortar businesses and service providers. Therefore, the business owner or employee who is officially authorized to represent their particular business location must have a physical address in order to comply with our guidelines.”

The guidelines the rep is referring to state: “P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.”

Some of those listings have been removed and some have not. But there are plenty of Google Places Help questions out there regarding people being penalized for using a P.O. Box as an address.

What are your options? Some places let you get a P.O. Box that is not listed as a P.O. Box address, but rather as a suite number. Use your home address but don’t display it. Try to partner with another business to use their address – but remember that there cannot be two businesses at the same address so you would need to have a suite number.

Can I use a PO Box as my google places address?
If you want your Google Places listing to be shown, DON’T use a P.O. Box!

The Google Places for iPhone App also helps you make an informed decision by integrating Google Hotpot, which is a recommendation engine that displays reviews and ratings of local businesses/establishments.

Google is making local search easier while people are mobile – looking for a nearby restaurant to stop and eat, the closest gas station, a good cup of coffee. Want them to find you in their search? Make sure you have a complete and optimized Google Places listing for your business. The iPhone already has a huge market with ATT. Imagine how much larger that market will get when Verizon starts selling the iPhone next month!

You can create custom messages such as coupons, specials, new products or services, and more.  And you control/update your tag on all of Yext’s partner search engines from one dashboard – quite a time saver.

The power of Yext advertising

According to Yext’s website, “recent studies performed on Google search results showed that businesses highlighted with a Google Tag received more than twice the attraction from prospective customers. Through special partnerships, Yext now offers you a new way to advertise your business listings on leading local search sites.”

The cost is $99.95 per month.  Although this is four times the cost of Google Tags, your listing is showing on more places.  You can try it out free for 7 days.

While we don’t think Yext Tags are going to replace Google Local Search, they are another affordable way to expand your web presence.

Will Place Search on Google Affect Your SEO Efforts?

Place Search results will appear automatically when Google predicts a searcher is looking for local information, i.e., “chinese restaurants new york city”. Google has also made it easy to start a local search – just click on the “Places” icon in the left panel of the search results page. If a local web search doesn’t yield you the results you want, click on places and you just might find what you were looking for.

One very important thing to note, Google does not seem to be consistent with how it is displaying these new results. We did our own test. Some searches yielded one “result” per business, which incorporated a regular result with a Google Places result with links to both the website and the Places listing. This combined result is included in the 10 results per page. The problem with this is you are not being displayed twice, as you may have been in the past. Other searches yielded the old format with a 1 or 2 or 7 pack listing separated from the regular results so that you could appear twice on a page. Not sure how Google is determining what to show and how.

In any event, if you haven’t created a Google Places listing you need to now more than ever! Write On Point is here to help if you need us.