Stephen J Burke

I received an email last week from the Google Local Business Center, letting me know about the updates they had to their interface listings. I put the email aside until today, as I was on the road and really didn’t have a chance to sit down and soak in what it was telling me.

Google released some tools on June 2nd, which created a dashboard for local businesses. The tools allow business owners to dig into the traffic patterns that people follow when locating businesses using Google Search and Google Maps. The report doesn’t get as granular as to provide the interface people were using to perform these searches, but expect the expansive growth of the iPhone and other mobile platforms has created a new demographic for businesses to focus upon.  I know open up my Maps applications to search nearby whenever I look to find something.

This glimpse into the profiles of localized searches would have gone un-noticed, except for the fact that I have two local businesses registered under my account. It is interesting to see how a business with local customers and clients matches up against a global company with a local footprint.

I mentioned I had two listings in the system, which are The Country Party House and Rotork Controls, the company I actually work for.  The owners of The Country Party House have been friends of the family for years, so I have always tried to help with some of their web presence needs.  It is a small family run business which is a local resource for hosting parties and large events like weddings.  Rotork on the other hand is a global manufacturer of valve actuation systems.  They don’t sell anything locally and in fact target most of their business out of state and country.  I have worked at Rotork for 11 year, and while their marketing department might not know this local listing exists, I still put it in there, knowing it was the right thing to do at the time.

The more interesting of the two, is by far the Country Party House generating 1641 impressions or visits, with 276 actions off of the site over a 30 day span.

The actions are broken down into categories, showing that not only did somebody find your listing, but took initiative to get more information or directions from that listing. In the case of the party house…

49 Clicks for more info on Maps
141 Clicks for driving directions
86 Clicks to your website

While the second search query identifies that people already knew the business and were searching for directions, the rest of the input almost forms a trend.  People searching for wedding receptions or banquet halls and following Country Party House as the local resource is a direct score for the marketing campaign, capturing the core demographic of what they want.  A look at the regions of the area, we can see a saturation of interest around Webster, perhaps from a different marketing campaign, and the need to advertise more in some of the thinning areas.

While the Rotork information wasn’t completely useless, it shows that people are really just either looking for directions, or something completely unrelated to the business itself.  With search results for generic terms like “businesses” topping the list, you have to imagine the local demographic is non-existent.

There are some more enhancements that this new service brings to your listings, enabling you to define store hours, link to media about the store, etc. For local businesses, looking for free exposure, this is a huge resource to tap into.  Once you identify the revenue stream being generated by these local listings, you will find some resources like Google AdWords, Google Checkout and Google Base available to enhance these listings even further.

I was glad that I actually had some businesses listed to visit, as I would have never appreciated how much traffic was actually going through this service.  For the local business today, this is a key resource to take advantage of.  For those large international companies, at least get your address right, so we can still get directions.