Show customers where you'll go with Google Places

Not all businesses serve their customers from a brick-and-mortar storefront. Folks like photographers, piano tuners, and plumbers tend to travel around town to provide their services, and may operate from home. To better connect with all the customers they serve, these businesses can now use Google Places to specify a service area -- that is, where they’re willing to travel to do business.

If you operate one of these types of businesses, you can set a service area for a listing in your Google Places account quickly and easily. If you have a limit to how far away you’re willing to travel, you can set your service area as a circle around a specific location. If you have a particular list of places where you work, you can list your areas served (by zip codes, cities, counties, or even neighborhoods).

When customers search for you on Google Maps, they’ll see something like this:

If you run your business from a home or private office and don’t have a location for customers to visit, you can choose to show your service area but mark the listing address as private in your Google Places account. When a customer searches for you, they’ll see the business service area, but no specific location marker:


In addition to letting business owners list their service areas, we’ve also aggregated data from third-party sources to expand the number of businesses with service areas and help keep the information accurate and up-to-date. To see a business’ service areas, click on the “show service area” option (when available) in the info bubble. To learn more about service areas on Google Maps and in your Google Places account, take a look at this short introductory video we’ve put together:

Posted by Ari Bezman, Product Manager

Introducing Google Places

[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

Today the Local Business Center is becoming Google Places. Why? Millions of people use Google every day to find places in the real world, and we want to better connect Place Pages — the way that businesses are being found today — with the tool that enables business owners to manage their presence on Google.

We launched Place Pages last September for more than 50 million places around the world to help people make more informed decisions about where to go, from restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops, as well as non-business places like museums, schools and parks. Place Pages connect people to information from the best sources across the web, displaying photos, reviews and essential facts, as well as real-time updates and offers from business owners.

Four million businesses have already claimed their Place Page on Google through the Local Business Center, which enables them to verify and supplement their business information to include hours of operation, photos, videos, coupons, product offerings and more. It also lets them communicate with customers and get insights that help them make smart business decisions.

Google Places will continue to offer these same tools, but the new name will simplify the connection with Place Pages. This reflects our ongoing commitment to providing business owners with powerful yet easy-to-use tools.

We're also introducing several new features:

• Service areas: If you travel to serve customers, you can now show which geographic areas you serve. And if you run a business without a storefront or office location, you can now make your address private.
• A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. As of today, we’re rolling out Tags to three new cities — Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we'll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.
• Business photo shoots: In addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which we'll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We've been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating.
• Customized QR codes: From the dashboard page of Google Places, businesses in the U.S. can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.
• Favorite Places: We're doing a second round of our Favorite Places program, and are mailing window decals to 50,000 businesses around the U.S. These decals include a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to directly view the mobile Place Page for the business to learn more about their great offerings.

Over the past few months we've also added the ability for business owners to post real-time updates to their Place Page. You might want to promote a sale, a special event or anything else that you want customers to know right now, and this feature lets you communicate that directly to your customers. You can also provide extra incentive by adding coupons, including ones specially formatted for mobile phones.

To keep track of how your business listing is performing on Google, we offer a personalized dashboard within Google Places that includes data about how many times people have found your business on Google, what keywords they used to find it and even what areas people traveled from to visit your business. With the dashboard, you can see how your use of any of these new features affects interest in your business and make more informed decisions about how to be found on Google and interact with your customers.

One out of five searches on Google are related to location, and we want to make sure that businesses are able to be found and put their best foot forward. We’re excited to announce Google Places today, as it’s just the beginning of what’s to come from our efforts to make Google more local. If you want to learn more about Google Places, we’d like to invite you to an upcoming overview webinar, or you can visit our newly updated Help Center. We’ll also be posting on the Lat Long blog throughout the week to give a deeper dive into many of our newest features. To get started now, go to google.com/places.

Posted by John Hanke, VP Google Maps, Earth and Local

Want to be a Favorite Place on Google?

Since announcing our Favorite Places on Google program in December, we've seen a lot of of excitement from the 190,000 businesses selected. That also led to questions from other business owners wondering how their business can become part of the next wave. Well, we're now getting ready to unveil the next batch of Favorite Places, so I wanted to make sure we gave some tips to all those (in the US) who are interested in being eligible before the March 1st deadline:

1. Log in to Local Business Center with your Google account (or create a new one) at google.com/lbc
2. Enter information for your business listings and verify that you are the business owner or authorized business listing manager by 12am PST on March 1. This means that you need to enter the PIN number that you receive by mail or by phone call by this deadline. You should allow 5-10 business days for your pin to arrive by mail - so get going now! If you are given the option to verify your listing by phone, the PIN will be delivered to you by an automated phone call within seconds. (Be sure to be ready to write it down).
3. If you're identified as a Favorite Place, expect your decal with custom QR code to arrive within a few weeks. We'll let everyone know when the mailings have started to go out. You can learn more about the selection process here.
   

If you verified your listing between the middle of October 2009 and now, you can relax: your listing is already eligible to be recognized as a Favorite Place. Of course, registering with the Local Business Center won't guarantee you'll get one of the coveted stickers, but it is necessary for you to be considered! Retail chains are now eligible to participate - just make sure to request verification after you've uploaded your bulk feed. If you haven't requested verification for a feed that you've already provided, do it here.

In case you're wondering how you could possibly become a Favorite Place on Google with only a couple weeks of having your listing verified: in most cases your business has already been listed on Google for some time through various other data sources, and we have data on how that listing has performed. But when you claim the listing for your own business, it's the best indication to us that your business information is correct.

Businesses which verified their listing prior to October 2009 were already considered for the first wave of Favorite Places on Google, and won't be eligible for another decal at this time. However, if you were already recognized as a Favorite Place and your sticker has since been lost, damaged, or otherwise misplaced, you can request a replacement with this form.

Posted by Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager

3 course dinners? 3 easy steps to let your customers know.

Restaurant weeks, when restaurants across a city host prix fixe menus, are starting in various parts of the world so we wanted to share a few tips whether you're looking for restaurants or you manage a restaurant.

For interested diners, finding the top restaurants has never been easier. We have continually updated our business pages with more reviews, feature ratings to measure aspects of the restaurant that might interest you, and even the ability to see updates from the owner.

We've recently partnered with the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, to help drive new patrons to Dine About Town's participating restaurants. Since many of their potential customers begin their search on Google, we wanted to share some simple steps for them to enhance their exposure on Google as a participating restaurant - and we hope these will help any other interested restaurateurs.

• First, if you haven't already signed up for Google's Local Business Center, it's a free service that allows you to add menus, photos, and videos to your Google local business listing while making sure basic address & contact information is correct on the search engine.

• Second, once you're signed up, within the "Coupon" section, you can add in details regarding your participation. For example, your offer could read:

Vinny's Restaurant
Dine About Town 2010
3-Course Dinner for $34.95

• Third, use the new updates feature in Local Business Center to post real-time messages about your participation in your local restaurant week, including menu items, specials of the day and more. Learn more here.

Why is this important? If a potential customer is searching on Google for a type of restaurant that matches your restaurant description, your listing will be up-to-date with news that you are participating in Dine About Town or any other events you are participating in. Afterwards, a personalized report allows you to see how often your listing was found on Google, and how people got there. For more information or to answer questions, please go here.

We hope restaurant weeks go well all over the country and happy dining. If you are involved in a resturant week and would like to see how we can partner up, click on this form and we can contact you.

And if you're in San Francisco or looking for an excuse to visit, you can see all participating Dine About Town restaurants for San Francisco now on a Google Map:

View Dine about Town 2010 in a larger map

Posted by Dave Kim and Ryan Hayward, Google Maps Marketing

Make Google Place Pages your business' megaphone

If you're a local business owner, we've just added two new features that can help you reach existing and potential customers even more effectively on your business' Place Page. Both of these features are available by claiming your business through Google Local Business Center.

Post to your Place Page

Holding a special event today? Want to post a coupon for 5-7pm tonight? Have a new product in stock? You can now get the word out by posting to your Place Page directly from your Local Business Center dashboard. Once you've logged in and are on your business' dashboard, post an update and it will go live on your Place Page in just a few minutes.

To see an example, check out the Place Page for Mission Mountain Winery which posted to introduce a new wine.

Badge for Your Claimed Place Page

We are also introducing a badge for listings that have been claimed in the Local Business Center. This helps our users identify listings that have been updated and improved by their business owners, helping them to trust that the information about your business is as accurate as possible. We are also making it even easier to claim your listing directly from the Place Page by following the "Business owner?" link.



We're excited about how Place Pages can help business owners connect with the large number of new and existing customers who visit these pages each day. These users come to Place Pages to easily find basic information, photos, and reviews about your business, as well as a map, Street View photos, and nearby transit information to help them get to your doorstep.

If you haven't been keeping up with our latest improvements for business owners, you may also want to check out the new mobile coupons feature in Local Business Center as well.

We hope you find these features useful in reaching out to your customers and providing them with even more relevant and timely information about your business.

Posted by Jana Urban, Nick Dower, and Lori Meiskey, Google Place Page team

Find us at the National Retail Federation Big Show in NYC next week

Shoppers are increasingly turning to Google.com and Google Maps to find, learn about, map, and get directions to retail locations. We offer several tools that help retail businesses connect with these shoppers, such as Local Business Center to make sure your listings are accurate and contain many relevant details, and embeddable Google Maps to power your online store locator.

That’s why several of us from Google will be attending, presenting, and demonstrating products next week at NRF 2010, the National Retail Federation’s annual convertion and expo at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. We’ll be speaking at a session on Tuesday (January 12) at 11:30am (EXPO Hall, 3D04) called Helping Shoppers Find You.

We’ll also have a booth in the Expo Hall (Booth #365) so attendees can chat with us directly about Google Maps and Local Business Center. Any question is fair game! Look for the Google logo on our booth wall and a big map of Manhattan at the floor of the booth. We hope to see you there.

Posted by Andrew Chang and Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Managers

With coupons on your phone, it doesn't matter where you left the scissors

We know that coupons are a great way for local businesses to drive customers to their stores - that's why we created the option for businesses to add coupons to their Google Local Business Center listing back in 2007. Now, as the holiday shopping season kicks off, we've upgraded the ways that customers can find your coupons.

First up, with more and more people using their mobile devices to find local businesses, we've added a new option for Local Business Center users in the US to display their coupons on mobile devices. Additionally, we've made it simpler to find and print coupons from your desktop, so now it's easy to get discounts wherever you are.

Coupons on a mobile device
If you add a new coupon to your business listing in Local Business Center, by default it will now be available on mobile devices. To make your existing coupons available on mobile, edit them and check the box for Mobile Distribution, as shown here:

When users pull up your business listing on their mobile phone, they'll see a section that lists the available coupons. They can then click to find a specially-formated page which shows all the coupon details they need for redeeming it. Now even when customers are on the go, they can see all the great values and offers available from your business.

Improved interface for desktops
We've also overhauled the printable pages that people visit from a business' Place Page. Now you can be confident that every Google coupon customers bring to your store will look the same, helping you and your staff easily recognize and redeem them. In addition to the re-design, we've made sure that the coupons print out correctly and consistently across all major browsers and operating systems.

To create a coupon now or to claim your business with Local Business Center for the first time, visit google.com/lbc.

Posted by David Armstrong, Software Engineer

Spreading the word about Local Business Center

Last week I was in Anaheim, CA as a new partner with Sysco's iCare program, helping restaurant owners claim their Google business listings with Local Business Center. One interaction that really stuck out in my mind was with Geof Gaines who owns Coffee Depot - the self-described largest coffee house in the world - in Riverside, CA.The hours in his unclaimed business listing were incorrect, and he wanted to add videos to show off the musical acts that perform at his shop. After he verified his listing by phone, he got access to Coffee Depot's dashboard and was immediately able to see that in mid-July, the number of people who found his listing jumped dramatically and has been steadily high ever since. He thought back and realized that the spike happened at the same time that a local paper had written about his business. Now he's planning to closely monitor his listing's dashboard to see how various marketing and publicity tactics perform.

We want a lot more businesses to be able to have this "Aha!" moment, getting insights on data that they could never see before. So, building upon our Favorite Places celebration of local businesses back in June, we're launching new efforts to make sure that business owners know about Local Business Center, and that users know how to take full advantage of the statistics in their dashboard.

First, all Local Business Center users in the U.S. who opted into receiving newsletters will now receive a monthly email report on how their business listings performed on Google in the previous month, including how many times the listing was seen, how many people clicked to the business' website, and more.

We'll also provide tips for optimizing business listings, such as advice on adding photos, uploading videos, and creating coupons (coming up in the next newsletter!). We'll also highlight successful businesses of the month and let businesses know about other Google products and offers that can help grow their business. You can find August's newsletter here, but make sure you're on the list to automatically receive future installments by opting in to newsletters in your account. Once you sign up, watch for the latest newsletter with your own customized business stats and all sorts of tips to be arriving soon.

Second, with lots of positive feedback on our Local Business Center introduction video, we decided to make a 30 second version to air in places where business owners are looking. We launched it earlier this week on television with Google TV Ads, and on various websites across Google's content network. In the video, you'll hear an overview of all that the Local Business Center has to offer, directly from Carter Maslan, our Director of Product Management for Local Search. So keep your eye out for the video (and pass it along to any business owners you know!).

Businesses can claim their listing and get started at google.com/lbc. It's been great to get to talk to people like Geof and other business owners, and to hear their feedback. If you have any interesting ideas for other types of outreach or partnerships, let us know.

Posted by Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager