Finding your place with Google+ Local
We’ll do what Google tells us to do, and we’ll like it. Because after all, Google, the search engine giant, is the king of the Internet – our go-to guy for everything under the sun.
Google’s new directive involves its new platform Google+ Local, which is replacing Google Local. Much like the old version, it will serve as Web surfers’ first stop for mapped-out inquiries. According to Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle, a provider of online marketing services, in the article he contributed to Forbes titled “Why Businesses Need To Pay Attention to Google+ Local,” one in four searches on the Internet is a local search.
The reason that the shift to Google+ Local will require action on our part is due to the integration of Zagat ratings and customer reviews. Zagat has been surveying the general public on everything from restaurants to golf courses since 1979 and was recently brought into the Google fold as the cornerstone for the Google+ Local platform. If it were up to Google (and most everything is), eventually, Zagat ratings will rein supreme, leaving sites like the über-popular Yelp in the dust.
“Here’s Google’s vision as I see it: create a social business profile that, unlike Facebook pages, is searched by consumers and can be a meaningful customer acquisition channel for local businesses,” explains Cunningham. “Local businesses will find these Google+ pages far more useful than their Facebook pages. They will eventually spend more time adding content to these pages, and interacting with their customers through them. In the long run, as consumers get exposed to increasingly content rich Google+ pages through their frequent local searches and their engagement with local businesses, they eventually become heavier Google+ users themselves. And so the cycle becomes complete.”
This foray into social media is sure to find success, considering the search-results priority that Google will place on Google+ Local over other third-party review sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon. But if Google tells us to jump, will we blindly ask how high? Maybe not. At least not until they open the reviews up to more than just the Google+ community.
Currently, “consumers must login to Google+ to review a business using the Zagat system,” says Cunningham. “While this may result in higher quality reviews by decreasing the volume of malicious or fictitious reviews, this new dynamic creates potential challenges for local businesses owners. For most of them, it was difficult enough (albeit incredibly important) to request and then secure reviews from happy customers without having to worry about additional barriers to action.”
So clearly, there are a few items that Google needs to tweak before truly having the ability to crush other online review sites. In the meantime, however, it would be highly recommended to set up a Google+ account. Like Yelp, we’d prefer to not be left in the dust.
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