Google Place Pages: Big Deal You May Have Missed
According to the official Google Blog, starting last Friday every PLACE in the world now has its own webpage.
Before getting into the details of this, a couple of interesting stats from the MetaPlaces conference that I picked up last week as background:
• There are currently 21 million small and medium sized local businesses spending an average of $4k per year on yellow page advertising (~$25B ) and other local advertising
• 75% of Internet user have used the internet in the past three months to look up a place on a map or to get driving directions
In other words:
1. there is a lot of money being spent locally, by local business to get customers to patronize their businesses
2. customers are increasingly consulting with internet base maps to find their way around and to find new businesses to patronize
So it’s just a matter of time before those local business owners begin to direct some of that $4k per year to the providers of internet and mobile map services.
For users of Google map, the Place Pages make it easier for you to find some of the important information about places in a single, simple webpage without having to interrupt your experience and getting side tracked on a mini research expedition to determine if the place is worth a visit. Place pages include an ‘entire page of rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.’ According to Mike Sterling, Google is running a separate algorithm that ranks content providers like review sites within the pages.
While certainly a benefit for consumers and users of Google Maps, you can’t help but note that this will be a very compelling tool to help Google in its efforts to sell in advertising to local brick and mortar businesses which may not have had a meaningful website or online presence before now.
Businesses that have a big, or solely, e-commerce business have for years been big users of search engine marketing , but the e-commerce market is still just a tiny fraction of the total commerce market, and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt famously noted in Davos last year how a truly mobile Web, offering a new generation of location-based advertising, is set to unleash a “huge revolution.” Google Place Pages are just the beginning of this revolution…. the battle on Yodle and Yelp Hill.
Google Place Pages pull brick and mortar businesses online whether they like it or not. They now all have a web page at http://maps.google.com/places/us/city/street/ZIP/-business-name which in many cases may be quite simple information, but all the better reason to engage with Google to claim that listing and potentially turn into an AdWords client.
A quiet, but nonetheless impressive and potentially game changing development.
