Google.com has started to let businesses respond to user reviews on the Google Places/Local Business Centre/Maps/whatever they’re calling it nowadays section.

They even offer advice as to how to respond to complaints, here’s the link.

Useful for maintaining customer service and relations as well as allowing businesses to respond to especially harsh or undeserved criticism.

It’s only a matter of time before this is added to Google.co.uk.

This isn’t going to change SEO but responding or monitoring the reviews may become a task for some SEO companies. Or it may make filling in the listings accurately an absolute necessity otherwise customers may pick up on any mistakes and have the perfect place to vent their disappointment/frustration or it may hamper the position of the business in the listings.

It will be interesting to see if Google will take anything from a company’s response, so if a company consistently answers its customers will Google give it a higher position on the map listings?

Google Maps, in my opinion, can be a great tool for SEO and your business but I find that the location takes precedence in your search. If you’re searching for a shop or a business that is static then it can be really useful, but if you’re searching for someone who covers an area or region it can’t give you all the options. So if you search for electricians Leicester you see all the electricians who have listed their address as Leicester, even though electricians, plumbers, builders and other services are provided across counties and regions.

I know Google Places lets you add a service area now to your listing but the map/search function doesn’t appear to have caught on.

Maybe Google will (or should) create a league style ranking system for businesses on the Local Business Centre where regions covered is accounted for and acknowledged, and also how positive the reviews are.

The SEO Department here at Creare always submit our sites to Webmaster Tools and utilise the benefits of Google’s Local Business Centre. These free tools from Google are great, Webmaster Tools gives us data about interesting stuff like crawl errors and if a site has duplicate meta tags, title tags etc. Local Business Centre is fantastic for local searches, and for area specific SEO it is a definite must.

What’s changed in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools has been a favourite place of mine for diagnosing problems with sites. It is now even better, with the addition of search results’ clickthrough data, which can tell you how many times somebody clicks on your site when they find it in their search results for a particular query. As well as all this it also tells you which pages are showing for each particular query.

This information is particularly useful for ‘Conversion Optimisation’, something that is extremely important for SEO. You can use the information to your advantage because if you know where problems are you are in a much better place to fix them. For example, it may be that your meta description needs to be improved, to increase the clickthrough, or it may be that your page title is turning people off from clicking on your link when it appears in the SERPs.

What’s changed in Local Business Centre

Well, the name for a start… Google have renamed Local Business Centre to… Drum Roll here please… Google Places. Yes, another name to remember (though I just refer to it as ‘Google Maps’ to my customers to avoid confusion), but it now has many more useful features such as:

• Service Areas – This is going to be extremely powerful and useful for any company that covers areas beyond where they are based. Also, if you are ‘working from home’, and there are many internet based business run from back bedrooms, you can now keep your address private. This has always been a stumbling block for us here at Creare, as we always prefer to put our customers on Local Business Centre (sorry, I now mean, Google Places), but when they work from home they often say, quite reasonably, ‘But, I don’t want my home address online!’ so we have to leave it off…
• Advertising with Tags – this one may not be useful yet in the UK as it is only available in a few cities as yet, but to give you the low-down: You can pay Google to highlight your listing in google.com maps results and in Google Maps. Whether they are beneficial remains to be seen though, so if I were you, I’d hold off until it’s been tested by someone else!
• Business Photo Shoots – You can get Google to take photographs of your business – though you can still upload your own photos. Personally I’d prefer to have control over my own pictures, but I guess if you want to take advantage of this, it is free, so why not…?
• Customised QR Codes – these will become more valid in time. The are a bit like barcodes but you use your smartphone to scan them. You can print them on your business cards, and other promotional material, and when the smartphone scans them you are sent to your Google Places page. Nice, eh?

Another new feature in Google Places, is information about who is searching for you, how they find you, and where they come from. All useful stuff methinks…