In continuation from Tuesday in this blog post on trends for business website marketing and visibility, I’ll talk about Google+ Local pages and YouTube.
Google+ Local Pages Also Known as Google Places
Big changes happened last year for Google+ Local pages. First, Google removed many of the fields you can use to add information, removing any degree of optimization you could previously do on keywords. Once the account is set up, what the customer sees about your business is limited. Google now returns listings not based on optimization or the number of reviews but based on the smartphone user’s location. For desktop searches, Google Places/Local Page listings are shown based on proximity to your location and possibly in some markets based on the number of reviews and possibly again on click through rates.
What a business owner used to be able to do to get placement on location specific keywords is gone. We do still recommend a regular update of videos and pictures on the account, but there is simply not a lot of updating to be done once the account is set up. In fact in the last three months, Google even removed the owner’s comment field where promotions and specials were listed.
YouTube Videos
For many businesses we work with, YouTube is still “undiscovered country”. Many business owners feel that they have to pay to have professionally created video for YouTube, but actually even videos made with your phone or camera are considered the same to Google. Videos that show your products, explain your services, explain briefly a concept are still excellent for business owners to use for exposure. As videos may be shown in with organic results and not even associated with a link to your website utilizing YouTube better should be a New Year’s resolution for business owners for 2014.
Product Listing Ads Now Called Google Shopping Campaigns in AdWords
If you have an ecommerce store and are an AdWords advertiser and are not using Product Listing Ads – soon to be called Google Shopping Campaigns, you are missing out on one of the best things that Google has brought to the AdWords arena. Google shows pictures of products within the organic results and you pay be the click for activity on your store products. Although the data feed is onerous to create and requires much more than just a download of your products (it requires the use of Google’s own taxonomy for each product,) implementation can really boost your individual product sales. Your competition is already embracing Google Shopping Campaigns!
2013 has brought us some sweeping changes at Google. It will be interesting to see how these important changes will impact business and visibility as we enter 2014.