Get Your Google Places Listing Up to Snuff or Lose Out on Business: Important for Home Care and Assisted Living Marketing

Posted on October 31, 2010 in marketing home care

CNN recently ran this article for good reason- things have changed AGAIN with Google Search. Have you noticed?

For most of us the map is now on the right hand side of the screen and Google Business Listings (now Google Places) takes up a majority of the 1st page of Google.

YOU NEED THAT REAL ESTATE. And, if you don't have it, chances are you need to talk to professionals who know how to get you where you need to be….it's not just about the content on your Google Places page anymore, it's about what your Google Places listing links to and so much more.

I know you need help with your Google Business Listing (Google Places) account. Call us to find out more 888-404-1513 (valerie@ltcep.com). Oh, and read the great article below.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/10/28/google.place.search.wired/

(WIRED) — Google now knows things.

Specifically, Google knows 50 million places, and when you search for say "museums new york," it now shows you a new kind of search result that replaces a list of links with a list of mini-pages for museums in the Big Apple with a map on the right. Each mini-page has links to reviews around the Web on sites like Citisearch and Yelp, as well as the address and phone number. The mini-profile also has a photo and a algorithmically chosen snippet from a typical review.

Google will automatically choose the so-called Place search, rather than a general web search, if it thinks your query is about a place — something Place Search product manager Jackie Bavaro says accounts for about 20 percent of Google searches.

More ambiguous queries such as "soccer field" will use the main search, since the user could be trying to learn the official FIFA regulations for a soccer field, not find one to scrimmage on. But Place Search remains an option for all searches, joining the left navigation on Google's search results, alongside Images, Shopping, News and Video.

"We are now organizing the world's information around places," Bavaro said. "Each place is really its own results page, dynamically connecting Web pages."

The feature will be slowly rolled out to users around the world starting Wednesday. For now, Place Search is for the desktop only, but a mobile version is in development and should be available soon — a no-brainer, since searching to learn about or find a place is one of the most common searches on mobile devices.

The feature is yet another step by the net's major search engines to use the interface to improve search, rather than tweaking the ranking algorithms or building a bigger index. Bing and Yahoo are already making moves to build pages for "entities." See, for instance, what Yahoo does for musical artists and Bing creates for entities such as colleges.

Google Place Search does not rely on human editors to curate pages (neither do Yahoo and Bing's), and instead relies on algorithms to determine what pages on the net are about a given place. One can expect that Google and others will keep building on this idea, so more and more of your searches about things — whether that be the San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum or the Samsung Galaxy S or Osgood-Schlatters disease — will be mini-pages curated by an algorithm of information from the Web.

Posted via email from Marketing Elder Care and Marketing Senior Services

Tags: left navigation, 50 million, search result, Jackie Bavaro, business listings

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