Google is Getting Better for Local Businesses

It would appear that things are looking better and better for local businesses, in terms of potential customers from Google. Google continues to make more and more moves that benefit local. 

For one, Google recently unveiled Google Offers. While only in a handful of cities so far, this could be huge (the way Groupon has been huge) for small businesses going forward. Of course they’ve got that whole industry, along with Facebook to contend with there, but businesses will no doubt find Google’s version of the daily deal offer compelling. 

Much of this will depend on implementations Googlre rolls out (or doesn’t roll out) in the future. To start, it’s simply an email marketing service, just like Groupon. Users sign up for a daily deal email, and get that. This in itself has the potential to be huge for businesses, but Google has so many other tools in its toolbox that could further spread the deals around with or without email subscriptions. Search would be the obvious one, with placement in Google ads as well as Google Place Pages. Neither of these have been announced, but I find it very unlikely that these "offers" won’t creep into places like this. In fact, they could still find their way into users’ inboxes even without subscriptions, simply through the ads served in Gmail.  We’ll see. 

Facebook has launched its new social deals product, which will see deals appearing in users’ news feeds. That’s huge for visibility. Google will want to get these offers in front of eyeballs wherever they can, to make them more attractive to businesses. Granted, there is such a thing as getting them in front of too many eyeballs. A lot of Groupon’s advertisers can tell you that. 

This week, Google acquired a company called TalkBin, which makes a product that allows customers to send short messages directly to businesses. It’s unclear exactly what Google’s plans are for the company, but it’s also easy to imagine something like this working its way into Place Pages. 

Earlier this month, Google added local product listings to Pages. It seems like the direct messages would go hand in hand with this. 

Even Google’s Panda algorithm update seems to have favored local search results.