Google Offers: Local Business Advertising Is About To Get A Lot Easier
January 21, 2011 by Martin Wong
Google is set to launch a new service called Google Offers to compete with popular group buying sites like Groupon and LivingSocial.
After having Groupon turn down an estimated $6 billion dollar acquisition offer, the search engine giant is wasting no time to launch their own Groupon Clone. Popular social media blog, Mashable, broke the news this morning. Judging from the screen shot above, the new Google Offers interface and functionality looks very similar to Groupon.
It will be interesting to see if Google can leverage its search engine monopoly to eventually challenge Groupon for local deals supremacy. They have a lot of catching up to do as Groupon is estimated to have over 50 million subscribers on its e-mail lists, which remains the primarily means of reaching an audience for local deals. [Read more]
New Google Places App Gives Yelp A Run For Its Money
January 12, 2011 by Martin Wong
Today, Google officially released their Google Places mobile app for the iPhone. From my initial impression, the new app successfully transfers the local search experience to mobile. It basically copies the layout of successful competitor Yelp, which Google tried to buy earlier in the year for an estimated $500 million.
Google goes a step further with their reviews and listings, aggregating all the information you need from Yelp and other similar social review sites like Urban Spoon, Restaurant.ca and DineHere. I can imagine that these websites aren’t too happy about it. Google is basically leveraging their hard-earned reviews to encourage users to submit their own ratings directly into Google’s system.
To use the Google Places app all you need is your Google Account and it will suggest nearby business based on your GPS location. When you click on a business listing in the app, you can read reviews, find directions on a map, click-to-call, or add your own review. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Google starts offering daily deals like Groupon directly within the app interface.
It won’t be long now until Google extends its local search dominance to local social reviews, displacing the industry-leader Yelp. This makes makes it even more crucial that businesses claim their listings and encourage their customers to add reviews. The businesses with reviews really stand out in the mobile app, even more so than in the regular search listings.
To learn more about how to get your business to rank in the Google Places local listings, I recommend you read my post on Google’s top 10 local search ranking factors.
A Canadian Guide To Google Local Business Citations
July 6, 2010 by Martin Wong
The local business results that appear when you search for "Vancouver Hotels" on Google.
As I talked about in a previous post on the Top 10 Ranking Factors for Google Places, getting valuable local citations is the best way to dominate the rankings for Google’s Local Business listings. A citation is where your business name, address and phone number is mentioned (or cited) by another website. Since some Canadian businesses don’t have a website, Google is able to crawl any citations in content that mentions a business, even if a website is not linked from that page. However, having an incoming link from a citation source is preferable, as it is likely considered of higher value and the link can refer valuable traffic to your website. [Read more]
