February 5, 2008 Comments (2)
Matt McGee offers up a post over at Small Business SEM that makes it pretty clear Google Maps is on the way up in terms of usage. Despite my love of Yelp for local reviews, I find myself turning to Google Maps more and more often for brick and mortar business info. It's the integrated option on my iPhone and the simple navigation on the web version of the site let's me find specific types of stores near certain locations.
I use it when traveling, but I also use it when I'm out and about and need to find the nearest "store X" to where I currently am. In fact, I used it just this morning to find a cheaper hotel around the corner from a conference I'm attending this spring.
If you have a brick and mortar store and you haven't taken advantage of the ability to update your Google Maps listing with complete information about your business, you need to get cracking. It's free, it only takes about five minutes and I've even written a step-by-step guide telling you how to do it. No more excuses. Time to make sure people can find you.
I guess my secret is out! I have also found Yahoo's to be easier than Google's and MSN's to be the best.
The thing with Yahoo is you can "game" the system and it allows for more spam and lower relevancy. The MSN system is a little harder to use but I personally prefer their results much better.
If you use MSN's "validate by mail" the letter gets to you within a week or so. The google card really takes as long as they say. This is based upon my experience and I am sure everyone has different results.
When the changes are updated is another issue all together. Until the SE's local system gets better stick with Yelp.com.
I would love to embrace Google Maps for one of our products that we are about to launch in Latin America - however, apart from Brazil, Google maps doesn't yet seem to be active in our region (Panama, Central and South America). Any ideas when they will extend to far flung places like ours?
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