Post-edit: Google has contacted me to explain that this problem is NOT related to the new Service Areas feature that’s being tested. Please scroll down for a full explanation.

If you’re a small business owner or a marketer with small business clients using Google Maps’ Local Business Center, a warning: Do not use the new tools for service- and home-based businesses yet. These are, in Google’s words, still “in testing” and may cause problems with your local business listing. (Again, this is wrong and an explanation is below.)

They did to mine. Read on for pictures and a description of what happened.
Continued

We’ve talked before about the failure of Google’s Local Business Center to provide a way for service-based and home-based businesses to use Google Maps without … well, cheating. A couple weeks ago at SMX West, Google’s Carter Maslan was asked about solving this problem and he said … “I don’t want to say ‘hold your breath,’ but ‘almost hold your breath.’” He said something was coming soon.

And today it’s here. Have a look: Continued

I sometimes struggle to explain Google’s ranking algorithm to small business owners. I just tried last week during a workshop here in my hometown, and I’m not sure if I did a good job. But fortunately there are other resources out there that do a better job than me.

One is this new article from Wired magazine: Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web. Here’s a good portion of it:

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

It’s not too technical for me, which means it shouldn’t be too technical for anyone. Highly recommend reading this, not for specific SEO tips but just because the more you understand about how search engines work, the more likely you’ll be able to succeed in increasing search visibility.

One more thing: This Wired article is similar to a series of articles that BusinessWeek ran a couple months ago. I recapped those articles on Search Engine Land, along with links to read each one. Also recommend reading those articles and interviews.

Small business owners: Just when you thought it was safe to send prospects and customers to your Google place page, think again. Google has added a new content section to place pages — recommendations of other nearby businesses. And as I point out on Search Engine Land, those recommendations often include your competition.

In that piece, I suggest this idea: If the small business has claimed its local business listing, then Google should turn off the nearby recommendations. Reward local businesses that claim their listing, don’t punish them.

The bigger question here is, who owns the place pages? The obvious and correct answer is Google; Google can do what it wants with place pages. But in Google’s never-ending quest to promote local business listings to small business owners — Google just sent a rep from Mountain View to Spokane for Thursday’s GetListed Local University seminar to show about 125 business how the LBC works — there’s never been any indication from Google that it might start showing information about other businesses on a place page.

It’s a strange thing for Google to do, that’s for sure. When I said I wanted more from Google’s place pages, this wasn’t what I had in mind….

Here’s the latest addition to Google’s Local Business Center: a tool to add alerts/updates to your Google Maps Place Page. The widget you see here is only available to businesses that have claimed their listing in the Local Business Center; this update window appears in the upper right of the “View Reports” page. It lets you place a 160-character alert on your place page, and if you use it, your alert will expire after 30 days.

Google’s announcement positions this a tool for business owners to post daily specials or upcoming events. My wife, the real estate agent, doesn’t offer daily specials and rarely hosts open houses (they’re not very effective), so I had to think how we’ll use this. I found something Google doesn’t mention in today’s announcement: The alert box won’t accept HTML code, but it will turn a URL into an active link. So you could use it similarly to how you use Facebook or Twitter.

This is all fine and good, but when it comes to Google, I tend to want more.

What I Wish Google Would Do to Place Pages

Here are seven things I’d love to see Google do with its Local Business Center and Place Pages.

1. Follow the lead of Citysearch and let business owners pull in their Twitter updates for display right on the Place Page. (I’m betting that Google’s already working on this.)
2. A lot of businesses are on Facebook these days via “Fan Pages,” so let the business owner post one of those Fan Page widgets you see on web sites everywhere.
3. Even though some of the content will overlap with what’s already on a place page, let business owners pull in data from their Yelp profile page. Let them post a Yelp badge/widget on their place page.
4. In addition, let businesses add links to their Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Flickr and other social profiles.
5. On that note, let business owners pull in photos from Flickr, like you already can on on a Google profile. Photographers and bakeries and other local businesses with a highly visual element to their business would love this.
6. Let business owners pull in content from their event listings on Upcoming.org, Zvents, and similar sites. Nightclubs and event-based businesses would love this.
7. Of course, do all this while still keeping the Local Business Center easy to use and without cluttering up the Place Page.

In a nutshell, I want Google to turn Place Pages into a local business owner’s online headquarters. Make it the one page the business owner wants all of its prospects and customers to find, see, and use.

I’m not asking too much, am I?

That’s one of my recent tweets, inspired by seeing early reports of local businesses getting their “Favorite Place” decals from Google. It’s also inspired, I suppose, by a bit of envy … because my wife, a real estate agent, is probably not going to be honored like these other local business owners are. In fact, I doubt very many real estate agents will be honored, nor plumbers, nor any local business that attracts phone calls more than in-person store visits.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the “Favorite Places” program is a pretty smart idea on Google’s part, and as I said in this post about Google PlaceRank, I think it’s a Good Thing for local businesses to show off those decals prominently. But the problem is with…

How to Become a Favorite Place

Google’s help pages describe how to become a favorite place:

“The list was determined based on the popularity of a business’ Local Business Center listing, as determined by how many times Google users looked for more information about a business, requested driving directions to get there, and more. Google users “decided” based on their actions, and we sent the decals.”

And there’s the problem: It’s all based on how Google users interact with the Local Business Center listing. But some local businesses are very limited in that. You don’t usually need directions to:

• real estate agents
• fence installers/repair companies
• plumbers
• roofers
• construction companies
• appliance repair shops
• carpet cleaners
• janitorial services
• landscapers
• snow removal companies
• many more

People won’t click for directions for those local businesses, and they may not click on anything. They’ll just pick up the phone and place a call, and Google has no record of that (for now, at least).

A Real Estate Agent Example

As I say, I happen to know a local real estate agent pretty well and have access to her Local Business Center stats. Here’s what they look like as of an hour ago:

(Sorry for blacking out some numbers; there are other local real estate agents who read this blog and I don’t think they need to know Cari’s exact LBC stats.)

That covers May 1, 2009 (when Google began storing this data) through December 7, 2009. Cari’s LBC listing has impressions that are in 5-figures (i.e., above 10,000). The number of actions is 3-figures. But in more than six months, only four times has someone clicked for directions. Four times.

Final Thoughts

As it stands now, Google’s program is biased toward local businesses that need foot traffic to survive. Maybe a rethink on the qualifications is in order, or perhaps a separate designation for local businesses that rely on phone calls more than clicks for driving directions.

No one ever said marketing is fair, and I know the playing field is never really level … but it sure would be nice for all small businesses to have a shot at getting Google’s blessing as a “Favorite Place.”

One of the new announcements from Google today involved what they’re calling “Favorite Places” — more than 100,00 businesses across the U.S. have earned that title and are receiving window decals so they can brag about it. The window decals have a QR code that can be scanned by certain smartphones, and doing so will bring up that business’ mobile Google “place page.” Greg Sterling explains the Favorite Places announcement on Search Engine Land.

This, to me, is really just a bragging point for the time being. If you own a storefront on Main Street in Anytown, USA, only a very small percentage of the people that walk by your window will have the smartphone and barcode-reading software required to play this game. But just being named a “Favorite Place” and having Google’s endorsement in your window can be quite a Big Deal. So there’s an obvious question….

How do you become a Favorite Place?

Google’s help pages say this about how Favorite Places are chosen:

“The list was determined based on the popularity of a business’ Local Business Center listing, as determined by how many times Google users looked for more information about a business, requested driving directions to get there, and more. Google users “decided” based on their actions, and we sent the decals.”

Check out that first sentence: “…based on the popularity of a business’ Local Business Center listing….” In other words, Google is choosing local businesses as “Favorite Places” based on a ranking system for Local Business Center listings.

This ranking system is called PlaceRank, and this is where I step aside and point you to this blog post by Ash Nallawalla: How to SEO for Google PlaceRank. In that post, Ash Nallawalla introduces the PlaceRank concept and digs into a Google patent about how it works. Must-reading for the local SEO crowd.

As you probably know by now, real estate is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart — quite literally. My wife is a real estate agent. My sister is a real estate agent. My dad opened his own agency in the 1950s and still works from a home office today as he approaches a tender 80 years old. It’s not just personal, though; real estate is all about small business and I try to watch what’s happening in the industry as much as possible.

Lately, I’ve been watching Google take one baby step after another, pushing into real estate as quietly as Google can do anything. Last night, I wrote about Google’s latest step on Search Engine Land: Google Builds out a National Real Estate Search Engine. The creation of individual “place pages” for property listings is Google’s latest step toward building out what I believe will be a challenger to any web site, big or small, that offers property listings. The article has apparently earned a lot of buzz today around real estate circles, and I want to point out two posts that caught my eye:

1.) 1000Watt Consulting: Google makes yet another big move into real estate territory

Author Brian Boero says, rightly so if you ask me, “Sure, Trulia, Zillow and a hundred other online real estate sites do this. But this is Google, folks – a force so large that it can upend entire categories overnight.”

2.) Bloodhound Blog: “Google Places” is a “National Real Estate Search Engine”? Not so much.

Despite the apparently contrary headline, I think author John Rowles and I are in agreement on what’s going on here. He makes the smart suggestion that Google could turn the Local Business Center into a Local Property Listings Center and allow the property owner and/or real estate professional to manage the listing the same way local businesses can manage their business information. Says John:

“Given that option, it’s easy to see how people, who are as distrustful of real estate agents as they have ever been in the wake of housing bubble, might migrate to a real estate information platform that is outside the industry’s control and has the added benefit of the familiar Google user experience.

When Google puts something like this out there, THEN its time to freak out if you are NAR, a local MLS, Move Inc, an IDX vendor, etc..

Until then, enjoy the borrowed time.”

Borrowed time. I think that’s a great way to put it right now.