In case you haven’t heard, Google has renamed its local business site from Local Business Center to Google Places. This isn’t just a name change either. Google’s brought some more features to the Places pages to further help local businesses market themselves. For instance, you can now specify an are that you can service on Google Maps so that customers can know if they fall within your service area. You can also post real-time updates (just like Twitter) to your Places page which can help you promote specials, discounts, etc. It appears that Google is bringing these changes as a means to revamp and retool its local business initiatives.
In another recent change, Google has developed new Google Places pages for mobile phones. From the looks of it, it better streamline all the information about your local business so it can be optimized for a mobile phone. Google Places is already a key and necessary internet listing that you should create for your local business, and this new mobile version of the product helps you better reach the growing class of smartphone users looking for your products and services on their mobile phones. As you will notice in the below demo video, the new mobile Google Places pages seek to optimize all your business information so that it is easily and readily consumable by any smartphone user.
If you don’t have a Google Places page yet, you are very likely missing out on a golden and free opportunity to promote your business on the internet. The beauty of Google Places is that it is closely married with Google Maps, the most popular internet geo-location and local search tool out there. Thus, by not claiming your listing on Google Places you could easily be missing out on a massive audience of Google Maps users. Furthermore, as you will notice from the below demo video, Google Places gives you a bunch of great and free tools you can use to promote and inform potential customers about your business.