How exactly does Google Places work?

According to Google: "Millions of people search Google Maps every day. A free listing on Google Maps makes it easy for them to find you. Use Google Places to create your free listing.When potential customers search Maps for local information, they'll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products.It's easy, free, and you don't need a website of your own."

Sounds easy, doesn't it? But how does it actually work in reality?

It's true that Google Places for Business is an immensely powerful marketing tool, used by millions of consumers around the world every day. When set up and run properly for a location-based company, Google Places Optimization has the edge over other Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click campaigns, because it specifically targets Internet users searching Google for local products and services. It's also by far the best way to reach the ever increasing number of smart-phone users who are quite literally just around the corner from you.

If yours is a local business, the cost vs. return ratio is likely to be far more favorable with Google Places Optimization than any other online advertising medium.

So how does Google Places work out the rankings for local business searches?

Aside from a number of unknown elements, there are four known factors Google uses to score and allocate rankings:

1. Your Proximity

This is the simplest of them all, and the determining factor is how close your business is to the center-point (centroid) of the user's search.

2. Your Properly Optimized Google Places Listing

An effectively optimized listing will most certainly set the right spacing between you and the competitor behind you. By submitting your business categorically correct, you can also benefit not only from exact category searches, but category synonym searches too. Ultimately, there are a lot of determining factors involved here, because there are numerous elements involved in the listing itself.

3. The Quality of your Citations

Citations are references to your business and your business information, found on hundreds of local directories which broadcast this data to Google. The overall quality and consistency of your business citations is one of the major factors which can make or break your Google Places ranking. Here, having a well-organized citation management campaign can pay huge dividends, as it will greatly boost the overall trust Google has in your Places entry.

4. The Quality of Reviews

This is another major component in achieving high Google Places rankings. In fact, like citations, reviews seem to play a huge part in the overall scoring system. To see what people are saying about you, Google scrapes well-known review sites, such as InsiderPages, Yelp, SuperPages, and others. The collected information is then analyzed and used as part of the overall ranking process.

eGumball specializes in the creation and maintenance or properly optimized Google Places Listings, Citation-Channel Distribution, Online Review Management, and more... Contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation about how we can help to increase your business' profile and profits today.