breaking news via SEL that the Google Local Business Center is now displaying a new tab called “Service Areas and Location Settings.” This means that Google has finally listened and implemented one of the most requested feature for Google Maps. Finally service area’s and workers from home features appear to be a reality after they have been announced back in november 2009 when PO boxes were no longer a legit way to verify your business. Ofcourse – for the time being-  this feature appears to be available only in the US and not in Europe (Google’s largest marketshare) yet.

On of the features also covers the area of workers from home that do not want to show their private address but do want to get listed as a business in a certain service area.
All in all this is definately a great service of which we will hear a lot of in the future – not only positive thoughts – as this is opening up new opportunities and challenges.

PS: challenges are rising, be warned, read more

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Service Area in Google Maps now a reality?

One of the most important things after you have registered your business is to know how much traffic this will get to your website. I’ve put up a very thorough tutorial on Mike Blumenthal’s blog and I suggest you all check it out.

I’ll put up a part here in this post to give you guys a preview of what I am talking about. This part is about adding URL parameters to your Local Business Center URL’s. In the full article you will also learn how to track the vertical ‘maps.google.com’ and the 3-click-path traffic from the Universal Search results.

Feel free to leave a comment here or on Mike B’s blog!

Track URLs in Local Business Center

First of all, we want to track the URLs in the Local Business Center. The Local Business Center provides very basic information. Impressions and Views. Google is very vague in their answers in the help groups/forum on what an impression or a view actually mean. Does it account universal search traffic as well? or just directly Google Maps related views/clicks? And is this data accurate? We will decide to monitor this not from the Local Business Center but rather with Google Analytics.

Imagine your business has 2 store locations. Each in a different city/state. Your website has one URL www.example.com.

We will give each location a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, we will create a ‘virtual’ campaign in GA for our local listing.

In order to do this we will use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in your specific location URL. the campaign source (in this case; google), the campaign medium (maps) and give it a campaign name, for example local_location_1.

Now copy the full URL and enter it in the Local Business Center for that specific listing. Everything should work okay (although the URL might be a bit long for the LBC to display it properly). Note that Google Maps will only display the part of the URL before the parameters!

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

You can do the same using a 301 redirect. (this is my preferred method, but you will have to know how 301 redirects work. ) Using 301 redirects you will be able to have a clean URL in your local business center.

In this case the Google Local Business Center contains the following URL :

www.example.com/locationpage

Google Maps will display :

www.example.com

clicking on the link in Google Maps will actually bring you to :

www.example.com/location/city/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=local&utm_campaign=local_location_1

That’s it to track your Local Business using a virtual Campaign!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Tracking Local Search traffic using Analytics

Just before the weekend Google decided to launch a new help center. This time it is one that is well appreciated by small business owners and us local search people. Its a Help resource on how to set up the Local Business Center.
You can find the all new help resource at the following link:
Local Business Center User Guide. Here is that video that was accompanied with it:

the video has been set to private and is no longer available.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

New Help Resource for Local Business Center

Mike was fast with his catch on the LBC awaiting an update! I wonder if it has something to do with his previous post that has drawn some attention.
Anyway, here’s the screenshot!

Update: as Maps Guide Brian posted in the Google Groups the Local Business Center will also undergo some maintenance the 6th of November.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Local Business Center awaiting updates

You can find the guidelines by clicking on the following link:
Google Help Center Guidelines for Local Business Center Submissions

Honestly, I still find the guidelines a bit vague, taken into account previous statements;
“be as descriptive if you can for your business in your business title’ doesn’t really correspond with “Represent your business as it appears in real life”. Or is this just my point of view?

Can I use “Italian Ice cream and Cappuccino Bar Bella Napoli” or should it just say “Bella Napoli” because I registered with chamber of commerce with that name?
In my opinion it should add up to the user experience and thus allowing the first one.

In the Help Center, Google is now also referring to the Google Maps group for Business Owners where they can report abuse of the Quality Guidelines.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Quality Guidelines and reinclusion for Google Maps

It looks like the Local Business Center is tightening its submission policies and some oddities are starting to appear. This is the list so far:

First, the use of too many capitals is being prohibited. The following screenshot shows an example of use of roman numbers and its being classified as ‘overuse’ of capitals. Sounds to me like they are trying to prevent people from leaving on their CAPS LOCK (shoutness level).

Also, the use of too many punctuations is being prohibited, since recently, as we could also tell from the increasing number of posts about this in the google maps group.

I submitted split hours, using the bulk-upload feature. Now when editing that listing manually it starts complaining about overlapping hours.
All days have split hours, except Saturday, where only mornings are available. So Google puts the after hours in 12:00AM till 12:00AM. Trying to save these, will result in the following message (the message about repeated punctuation applies to the previous example):

Another one; interesting one actually! Is this a translation error or does this mean that Google is working on something in the future to enable verification by email? Notice the term ‘correo electrónico’ which is Spanish for email. Clicking it however, results in a regular mail verification method.

Have you been noticing other oddities or strange behavior of the Local Business Center? Please let us know in the comments!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Business Center Oddities

Word has that Google put back the ‘fix incorrect marker location’. Google Maps Guide Sirene posted this in the Google groups.

So it’s not necessary anymore to use the trick I used for you US users to change the interface/engine by switching back to a European one, where we are still awaiting the updates.

Screen shot below shows the button back in action in the ‘new’ / US interface of the Local Business Center

Thanks Map Guides! And oh yeah

Thanks for letting us know what things make the LBC a better place!

You can read those here!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Fix incorrect marker option is back!

I might be wrong on this one, but I just was presented with the following when entering the Local Business Center. I have never seen this message before (maybe because I’m normally using european google engines )

The Local Business Center is asking me to provide my email preferences as you can see in the screenshot (click to enlarge).

It seems that now you are able to receive notifications when things are changing to listings in your account. That would be great! I look forward to the first emails!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Email preferences Local Business Center

Thanks for this feedback. We didn’t think that the “edit incorrect marker
location” might still be necessary after verification, but you’ve given us
some clear evidence that it is. We’ll be adding this capability back in.

Now that solves some of the issues, but not all, hopefully they’ve read this post about updates on the local business center!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google confirms problems LBC and listens!

Some ‘statistics’:
amount of impressions were in thousands, the amount of clicks in hundreds. But no URL listed. Oops!

lesson learned: provide Local Business Center with full details about your business. This will increase traffic at no cost.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Business Ads owners – please use the LBC to the fullest