If you are even tangentially interested in boosting your local business listing presence on search engine results pages, then you’ve probably heard of the importance of Google Maps. It’s a quick way to jump up the ranks on SERPs as well as provide much needed visibility for your business’ vital contact points in an at-a-glance format. Here’s what they look like, for the uninitiated:

Here you can see “Guy’s Automotive” and the associated right panel if you click on the “>>” for more information. Here you can see photos, address, phones number, hours, reviews, etc.

This is all fine and well until you have to deal with the behind the scenes portion of getting a Google listing to show like this. A lot of business owners have attempted to create Google+/Local listings with varying degrees of success. This has lead to many duplicates of these pages, which leads to a mess when trying to solidify these local listing efforts.

This, coupled with the fact that Google is gracious enough to auto-generate a Google+ profile (talk about padding the Active User Stat.), can lead to a digital version of a “rat king” (Google at your own discretion). Long story short, Google hasn’t made it easy to collate these efforts and it’s hurting your brand’s visibility with conflicting profiles and information.

In a long-awaited move towards appeasing internet marketers, the Google gods have granted us the ability to merge Brand and Local pages. This allows you to migrate reviews, map pins, and other important local information to the usually less than useful Brand pages. Mind you, this is not a strict merging in the sense of two pages becoming one, but you are able to attach those all important Local attributes to the Brand pages.

While this is only a bandage in a system that’s hemorrhaging usability and intuitiveness, it’s a nod from Google that says to the frustrated marketers, “we hear you, you are not just shouting into the void.”

For a more in-depth analysis and how-to, visit this site and take a look at the official post in the Google Product Forums.

 
Blog by Webhead Interactive