Google+ Local wants to help your local business to attract new customers
May 31, 2012 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
If you have a local business (shop, café, hotel, gym ...) and you still haven't registered it on Google - now is the best time to do it. Today, Google launching Google+ Local service, which can be really useful for local businesses. Google+ Local is not built from the scratch. It's a combination of Google Places (Google's old local catalog) and Zagat (the popular location-service acquired by Google last year). And, as clear from the title, it's working on top of the Google+ social network. All places (shops, cafes, hotels ...) from Google Places and Zagat were turned into Google+ pages, and now you can leave reviews on them and read reviews by your friends and other people. At the moment there are more than 80 million local pages, so you'll probably find a lot of places in your city. And the main advantage of Google+ Local - is its integration with the general Google search and Google Maps.
Now if you search for something like "restaurants in Manchester") in Google - it shows places from Google+ Local and you also see them when browsing Google maps. So, if you add your local business to Google+ Local you can get an additional marketing channel to attract customers. Of course if their reviews will be positive, but it depends not on Google.
We have already told about the importance of location-services. They form a new city map for your customers. Over time, it's becoming less important if your business located on the central street, and more important what reviews your business has in the location-services.
If you decide to position your business in the location-services, you'll also want to check the GPS-oriented services like Foursquare, and feedback-oriented services like Yelp.
As for Facebook, then they closed the own similar service Facebook Places and gave this niche to third-party apps like Gogobot.
See also: Top 10 Social Media Management tools