Comments on: Optimising Your Google Places

By: Wayne Barker

Wayne Barker — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 07:50:09 +0000

Hi there Mike,

The best way to do this is (IMHO) using a tool called Local Search Toolkit (http://www.localsearchtoolkit.com) amongst other data that will bring in information about the categories that your competitors are using and then you can make your decisions accordingly. Its free for a limited number of queries and is pretty awesome, have fun!

By: Mike Deskis

Mike Deskis — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:49:34 +0000

I see that Google allows businesses to categorize themselves, but how via their Web Services API can I extract business by these categories? The API only appears to support the listing of businesses by Google types. Is there a way to get businesses via Category and sub-Category?

By: Frank Kockritz

Frank Kockritz — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:57:50 +0000

Most likely at the time your post, Google had not yet implemented certain changes to Place Pages, the most significant is they have eliminated citations altogether. With regard to attribute fields, though they can serve as added content benefit for the user, they seem to have no keyword signal strength for ranking performance.

By: Sam Beamond

Sam Beamond — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 02:58:28 +0000

Cool post, points noted, but a couple of questions:

1. How long after entering your pin does it take to show up in search results
2. Do older place listings take priority of new?
3. What determines how much info is displayed on the places page? I have comprehensively filled out ALL the information, but nothing shows under “more details” on the front end.

Any thoughts?

By: Wayne Barker

Wayne Barker — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:41:06 +0000

Hi Gemma,

Thanks for your comments, you have hit the nail on the head. As Google dedicates more time, thought and resources into Google Places the more important it will become…the more important it becomes, the more businesses pay attention.

By: Gemma

Gemma — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:57:44 +0000

The more business that start to use Google places the more important it will be to have a great optimised listing. Yes citations and reviews are important, but without a great listing will users be encouraged to visit your site and purchase your products and services?

By: Wayne Barker

Wayne Barker — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:27:09 +0000

Hey there Wade,

Thanks for the great comments! Ah – getting data about Google Places, its a toughie! Manual tagging via the Google URL builder is my suggestion. The best post I have ever seen on this topic is here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics
I suppose what it comes down to is the size of the client, their reliance on local search, how much you ACTUALLY need to know and finally how much time you have to dedicate to getting the info…

By: Wade Holloway

Wade Holloway — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:20:44 +0000

Wayne,

Thanks for the great article!

You didn’t mention it in your post, but I am curious, how do you recommend getting more data about Google Places traffic in Google Analytics? Early on, I would use a separate domain (URL) to track referrals from the 10 Pack, but this later resulted in deprecation of related info auto-generated by Google.

Have you tried tagging urls in Places?