The SEO Department here at Creare always submit our sites to Webmaster Tools and utilise the benefits of Google‘s Local Business Centre. These free tools from Google are great, Webmaster Tools gives us data about interesting stuff like crawl errors and if a site has duplicate meta tags, title tags etc. Local Business Centre is fantastic for local searches, and for area specific SEO it is a definite must.

What’s changed in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools has been a favourite place of mine for diagnosing problems with sites. It is now even better, with the addition of search results’ clickthrough data, which can tell you how many times somebody clicks on your site when they find it in their search results for a particular query. As well as all this it also tells you which pages are showing for each particular query.

This information is particularly useful for ‘Conversion Optimisation’, something that is extremely important for SEO. You can use the information to your advantage because if you know where problems are you are in a much better place to fix them. For example, it may be that your meta description needs to be improved, to increase the clickthrough, or it may be that your page title is turning people off from clicking on your link when it appears in the SERPs.

What’s changed in Local Business Centre

Well, the name for a start… Google have renamed Local Business Centre to… Drum Roll here please… Google Places. Yes, another name to remember (though I just refer to it as ‘Google Maps’ to my customers to avoid confusion), but it now has many more useful features such as:

• Service Areas – This is going to be extremely powerful and useful for any company that covers areas beyond where they are based. Also, if you are ‘working from home’, and there are many internet based business run from back bedrooms, you can now keep your address private. This has always been a stumbling block for us here at Creare, as we always prefer to put our customers on Local Business Centre (sorry, I now mean, Google Places), but when they work from home they often say, quite reasonably, ‘But, I don’t want my home address online!’ so we have to leave it off…
• Advertising with Tags – this one may not be useful yet in the UK as it is only available in a few cities as yet, but to give you the low-down: You can pay Google to highlight your listing in google.com maps results and in Google Maps. Whether they are beneficial remains to be seen though, so if I were you, I’d hold off until it’s been tested by someone else!
• Business Photo Shoots – You can get Google to take photographs of your business – though you can still upload your own photos. Personally I’d prefer to have control over my own pictures, but I guess if you want to take advantage of this, it is free, so why not…?
• Customised QR Codes – these will become more valid in time. The are a bit like barcodes but you use your smartphone to scan them. You can print them on your business cards, and other promotional material, and when the smartphone scans them you are sent to your Google Places page. Nice, eh?

Another new feature in Google Places, is information about who is searching for you, how they find you, and where they come from. All useful stuff methinks…