Elk River Online Business Mastermind

Most people would consider that YellowPages.com is still the leading point of entry for citizens looking for a neighborhood restaurant, bakery, bike shop, or hair salon.  Working hard to attract attention are the biggest online companies, with Yahoo.local, Bing.local, Apple Apps, and of course Google all offering their unique solutions.  As these big fish fight for position, the smaller fries still have a shot at dominating search results.  Yelp, CitySearch, MerchantCircle, HotFrog, and SuperPages are postitioning themselves smartly and hoping for a shot at the next tier.  Meanwhile Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and others are being touted as the next best way we will begin our shopping day.

As an Internet Marketing Technology Consultant who follows these developments I believe that Google Places has the most juice, the clearest path, and the best basics to end up as top gun.  And after 12 months of changes to the product on an almost weekly basis, Places seems poised to make a move to become the leader in the Virtual Land Rush to help business owners build their local businesses.

First, there’s the virtual real estate on the Internet.  If I were a government attorney, I think I could make a case for unfair competition when it comes to the search engine with 80% of search putting its own local search engine (LSE) in color at the top of the page for searches that include businesses in every US city.  But with no such effort coming from the justice department, the other search engine players have no answer to the location, location, location issue.  If Superpages or Yelp can sometimes manage to find themselves first in the organic, this doesn’t come close to the power of their single out or seven-pack Google Places presentation.

If this isn’t demonstrably obvious to anyone, just ask a plumber, locksmith, or carpet cleaner what they want for Christmas.  The answer is clearly a #1 position on Google.  When emergency services companies get that coveted location, their phone rings.  Being #1 in the organic listings is lovely, but not even close to what Places can do for them.

Next, there is the relevancy of the results presented. Sorry to all the rest of the LSE’s.  Your relevancy is third rate in comparison to Places.  Do the lookups yourself.  Try Italian Restaurant Miami or any other local search on YellowPages or Yelp.  You are as likely to find a chiropractor who mentions Italian cooking in his description showing up in the top ten as you are to get Luigi’s Italian Resturant.  Are there odd results in Google Places.  Most assuredly yes, but the results are far superior to any of the others.

Finally there is the quality of the reviews in the results.  Google is 100% hands off, and the result is much more like Amazon.  (Google is still hands off except that you must now be a Google Account holder in order to review but then, many people are.)  So this means that you, the consumer, get to figure out who is spamming, gaming the system, or giving real reviews.  Yelp is the worst in this part of the search and directory business, with their bizarre conclusions regarding who is the reviewer worthy of posting reviews, and who is not. Now that Google is pulling thousands of reviews from other LSE’s, the potential for tons of good information is growing rapidly.

With these recent changes instituted by Google Places this is going to generally improve the listings for the businesses and improve the experience of the information searcher. Anyone owning a local business needs to understand that claiming their Google Places page is critical to their business future. Google Places is not just another place to advertise. If a business wants to stay in business in 2011 and beyond, they need to use Google to let others know who and where they are.

For more information about how to use Google Places in your business and to claim your FREE Places page visit www.gprush.com