We all know the power of ranking locally. From pizza shops to barbershops and everything in the middle, including construction companies. All have tried to squeeze their asses onto the 7-pack Google calls Places local listings to feed from the free organic trough.
As I’ve Warned Forever, Relying on Organic is Trouble And Trouble is Coming, and it’s Goliath!
No, there isn’t some one-eyed giant coming to steal your women and eat your cattle, but if you compete against a national company in the form of a franchise or national chain, Google Places just made it A LOT easier to compete with you.
If you want to read the whole story, you can search “Google Places simplifies local search management” and you should be able to read all you need to know, but I am going to sum it up for you here in a few sentences.
Google Places or Local or whatever it is today has been a nightmare to manage for the single location operator; from lost reviews to duplicate listings, Google Places has been about as functional as trying to get cats to march in a parade.
Now imagine you have 50, 100 or 1,000 “locations” that you need to get listed all over the country. Well, it has been almost impossible…until now.
Google made managing multiple listings much easier with their bulk import tool that comes with status updates on a per location basis along with other interesting tools to help manage the masses.
So, if you have lived off the fat of the land locally and you have a large competitor with locations around you…get your game face on player cause they are a’ comin’.