David Mihm is busy identifying new Google city Pages on Twitter. They appear to be another front door to Place Pages. But they do more and collect a bunch of information in a single place: Places, Offers, Events, Community (a blog) and resources for business owners. There’s also a pitch for Google’s Places mobile apps.
I like the UI. Indeed, these pages appear to be something of a bid as a “branded” destination. Here’s the Portland city page:
These pages are being indexed apparently. They offer an appealing browse-centric interface. Local events are nicely integrated with Google Calendar (one-click add). But you can also search and filter by various criteria, including ratings and lots of sub-categories:
One could imagine savvy businesses running Google Offers in an effort to get more positive reviews as part of a larger SEO strategy. That’s suggested by this site.
Taking a page from Yelp’s playbook Google appears to be building a network of community managers as well:
For business owners there are video testimonials and material on a range of Google products, including Boost and Offers.
What do you think of all this?
June 13th, 2011 at 11:13 pm
This is really big news, but I just wanted to mention a few things. The first time these pages that gather many information sources together, were noticed by Mike Blumenthal about two months ago for Portland: http://goo.gl/RmfKj
However, as you can see, the UI changed tremendously since then.
Another thing is that actually Google Places (a.k.a. Hotpot) were posting on their community managers for some time now. Here’s the post about the Austin Community Manager: http://goo.gl/hvytk
There was one for the Portland Community Manager as well, but I can’t find it as it was posted, as I recall, some time in February.
And it is strange to me that it seems up to now only Portland, Austin, San Diego and Madison are having such privilege pages. I was thinking New York (with the Google Offers push) and Las Vegas (with the Google Places push from some months ago) were going to have them too, but…
June 13th, 2011 at 11:45 pm
Greg,
Very interesting. There’s nothing for Orlando yet. I’m guessing this is a limited roll out.
It appears citations and reviews may be the stuff that local SEO is made of.
Mike
June 13th, 2011 at 11:50 pm
The page that Mike discussed is not this. It’s Google Offers’ early incarnation: http://bit.ly/iYmwX1. These pages incorporate Offers and Hotpot-like ratings. This is a bigger and more comprehensive effort.
The community managers part I was genuinely not aware of. Thanks.
June 14th, 2011 at 12:12 am
Greg, with all my respect I’d not agree with you on this one. The page that Mike was referring to was google.com/portland. From the article:
“Now they have added end user and business sign ups to Google.com/portland, the main landing page for their Hotpot Places marketing in Portland.”
Definitely the screenshot is deceptive and it seems like Google Offers, but it really is exactly the page for Portland (including Offers, Places (Hotpot) and information for business owners).
June 14th, 2011 at 12:47 am
I wasn’t aware of the change. Obviously. Regardless this is a very different concept . . .
June 14th, 2011 at 1:29 pm
[...] of new city sites or portals. They appear to be the phoenix rising out of the ashes of Hotpot. As I wrote yesterday on my own blog, this is Google’s effort to bring a number of initiatives together [...]
June 14th, 2011 at 3:29 pm
@Greg….tip-0-the-hat to Linda Bouquet too….for calling attention to this first, lcoated here — http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-local-business-directories-phone-numbers.html
And yes, this is very interesting too, in that I can’t wait to see how this rolls out nationaly and how the “other” Local forces face this too, ie Yelp and City Search too…not to mention our own YPG group of directories up here in CanuckLand, eh!
Jim
June 14th, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Yes to Linda as well. David thanked her but I hadn’t seen her original post.
June 14th, 2011 at 3:59 pm
Thanks Jim, you’re a sweet heart for pointing that out.
June 16th, 2011 at 2:32 pm
[...] of new city sites or portals. They appear to be the phoenix rising out of the ashes of Hotpot. As Iwrote yesterday on my own blog, this is Google’s effort to bring a number of initiatives together in a [...]
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