Google Places

It’s one of the most basic steps a restaurant should take, and lately I’ve noticed it’s one of the steps that restaurants are often overlooking.  Google places  is the aggregator of the most basic information that Google serves up when individuals are looking for your restaurant or looking for places to eat in your area.  Even if you haven’t set up your listing, Google will pull the relevant information from any public channels it can find, such as yelp, opentable, citysearch and metromix.  It may also pull images and videos from youtube, urbanspoon, flickr and all the other places you can imagine.  Even though Google does a pretty great job of pulling this information, you should always verify the details to make sure the phone numbers, addresses and information is accurate.

Google places can be a great landing page for all of your rich content, not to mention Google has fast become the new yellow pages.  With reviews from multiple sources, images and videos, it doesn’t take much to understand why people are turning to these listings over traditional yellow pages listings.  When you do verify your account and begin to add your own content, remember that your Facebook Page and Twitter Page are relevant places to be pointing your customers.  Of course you have to have a facebook page and more importantly keep it active and relevant.  Remember your on google whether you like it or not, its worth taking the time to make sure your information is correct and that potential customers are seeing the best side of you.

1 Comment for this entry

• 

  Juliana Crispo

  July 23rd, 2010 on 9:56 pm

  B- Saw you added me on linkedin. We went to highschool together right? Hope all is well. Congrats on the move to start your own business- that’s smart.

  Here’s another good post on Google maps/places as well: http://social-capitalist.com/5-ways-to-share-google-maps/

  You might like it…It looks like your niche is restaurant marketing? Stay in touch, glad you found me.

  J @julianacrispo