Google Update: Company Profiles and Local Business Center

Google Profiles

Similar to a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, Google profiles have some unique user benefits that can improve your company's visibility to an untapped market. The free profiles allow businesses to present their products and services to other Google users.

Profiles show up in any Google search, and anyone can view your business profile. Google profiles also offer an "about me" tab on a separate page, which allows you to write a company bio, point out the strengths of your business, or discuss the benefits of your company to your target audience.

Two other unique Google add-ons involve profile site links and map locations. Google profiles allows your business to link to external sites - an effective way to show web surfers the maximum amount of information about your business. Businesses can link to Google content, public Picasa web albums, and shared items on Google Reader, as well as social networking pages such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn (google.com/profiles). You can also show your business location on a Google map.

Google Local Business Center

Another Google application targeting small businesses is Google local business center, which recently launched a free web dashboard that tracks stats, such as how many times a business comes up as a search result, and click throughs. It also tracks how many times people generate driving directions to a business on Google Maps and where those people are coming from.

Currently, the local business center only has a few hundred thousand American businesses that have set up their profiles. The benefit for businesses and Google? According to TechCrunch.com, Google gets clean data (and thus, better results), businesses get free real-time reports on business profile views (impressions), and plot actions such as click throughs, top query results, and requests for driving directions.