Introducing Google Place Pages
Google has officially switched over from the tabbed interface presented in all Google map profiles to a new ‘places’ page that offers business information in a more concise and apparent fashion. The shift to Wikipedia style map entries that are supported by community edits (US only) is a welcome change to Google Maps, with countries other than the US going through a transition from the existing tabbed bubble interface to the new ‘place pages’ interface in about 2 weeks time.
Internal discussions with local search marketers has yielded some interesting points to note, including Mike Blumenthal noticing that places pages are already being indexed in the SERPs. The new pages also have SEO friendly and category drilled down url’s so it certainly makes sense that they are included in the organic search results. Here’s what a places page looks like for Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry for example.
The Opportunity with Indexed Place Pages
The beauty of Google indexing place pages is of course that it gives businesses another chance to dominate top 10 results for brand name or even keyword related searches. Keyword optimized url’s for place pages look like this:
http://maps.google.com/places/us/buffalo/main-st/5820/-barbara-oliver-company-jewlery
The broken down standard format hence is:
US: http://maps.google.com/places/us/city/name-st/#/-full-business-name for the US
Canada: http://maps.google.com/places/ca/city/name-st/#/-full-business-name for Canada.
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It makes a lot of sense that Google is publishing business listing pages (Google Place Pages) with optimized, static URL’s after seeing Yahoo Local flood Google’s organic results with category pages and business listing pages the last few years.
I think Google’s new Places would great to show up in the SERPs, just another spot for small businesses that are savvy to snag another listing. I still have seen this rolled out in full force yet. Should be interesting to see more as we get more info. I hope they give analytics on them for small businesses.
At the moment the pages are only showing up when linked to from other websites or webpages, so the question really is – How much effort is it worth, or will it take to get a places page on the organic SERPs for a keyword driven query (not a brand query).
Dev,
Did you see the article at techcrunch…? They say that google does not intend to index ‘places pages’. What’d ya think…?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/27/with-google-places-concerns-rise-that-google-just-wants-to-link-to-its-own-content/