If you haven’t checked lately you may be in for a surprise on your Google Places page. First you will start seeing a Write review red button to begin capturing Google reviews which of course will be highlighted before the other reviews like from Yelp or Merchant Circle and others. This is a wonderful addition that your clients will find helpful. Encourage them to use it as it is going to be very powerful to your business. This will be interesting to watch as Yelp takes a back seat to Google. Next you may find you are missing reviews. Google is not showing your reviews from non Google reviewers ( like Yelp etc) AND some of our clients have found even their “Google Reviews “ have gone missing . hmmmm. In addition, check on your Details section as some are finding that their details are not showing up. For service based businesses like us that provide our services for a wide area, the Service Area Map was quite useful and for the time being has gone missing too. Overall there is a long term “nit” between service based business and brick and mortar businesses both of whom would like to take advantage of the SEO (traffic driving) advantages of Google Places.  There are of course new, alternate ways to accomplish the online traffic driving goals. Our online business clients are getting the details of how we will be fixing their pages to continue to optimize their online business. As always, we have followed @Perry Marshall age old advice and don’t rely all that much on Google directly BECAUSE it changes and is not predictable. If you haven’t considered widening your traffic generating strategies beyond your Google usage, perhaps now is a good time to reconsider all the aspects to growing your online business. Find out more about google places change  here http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/07/ongoing-evolution-of-place-pages.html

When Eric Schmidt of Google says google is doing all its development on a mobile platform first, that should tell the rest of us what we should think about too. This video explains  a lot about why putting mobile marketing into your business is critical and that there is NO time to wait and see. When Eric Schmidt of Google says google is doing all its development on a mobile platform first, that should tell the rest of us what we should think about too.  

This video explains  a lot about why putting mobile marketing into your business is critical and that there is NO time to wait and see.