customer reviews

Google Places Reviews: Imperative to Your Online Success

Google is continually changing the parameters for Google Places.The new layout of Google Places puts a heavy emphasis on customer reviews. More specifically, it emphasizes reviews from Google users and no longer shows reviews from third party sites, such as Yelp or CitySearch. As reviews become an even more important factor in local search rankings, those Google Places pages with more quality reviews tend to perform better. This means getting your customers to post reviews about your business on your Google Places listing is now more critical than ever! Focus on getting positive reviews for your business as an important way to boost your local search marketing. In this blog post we’ll show you how to add a review of a local business to Google Places. A Google account is needed to write a review in Google Places. If your customer doesn’t already have a Google account, it only takes a … Continued

Google Places Gets A New Look!

Google Places is constantly changing and updating! Google recently released an update to the way it displays local results to give more prominence to Google Places data within the search results. The new look substitutes a horizontal map for a vertical one displayed on the right side of the Places results. This allows more ads to appear above the fold without scrolling down the page. The map is vertically larger and more pins are displayed. The RED Google pins are now GRAY. The grey pushpins become red when you hover your mouse over the pin. When you click on the red arrow a new panel to the right is displayed with more information. This information includes Place Page photos with more details and the business’s home page. Five images from the Google Places profile appear as thumbnails. A short snippet from the Places descriptions appears as “At a glance” info. … Continued