Stap isi

12 February 2010

Managing your Local Business Centre listing in Google

Most visitors to your council website probably come from Google Search. Great, but have you claimed Google’s Local Business Centre listings for your council offices, venues and facilities?

I just did a quick search through Google Maps for NSW councils and their theatres, galleries, libraries, swimming pools, etc. As you’d expect, they were easily found. But few had listings that were ‘owner-verified.’ An opportunity for imparting useful information is being missed.

Some of the listings appear programmatically generated, others have been annotated by web users. The Yellow Pages occasionally comes up as the source, with some odd results. The top result for Bega Valley Shire Council lists its category as ‘Excavating & Earth Moving Contractors.’

Time to claim all the places that you administrate!

You’ll need a Google Account to manage the listings. Verification is by a PIN number that will be supplied by a talking Google bot to the telephone number you provided in the listing. This can actually be the trickiest part! Warn your customer service officers to expect the Google bot to phone – often within a minute or two of you submitting your listing. (There’s also a postcard option.)

Why bother?

The listing and place page is information rich. Not only does it locate your facility or venue for driving directions and other wayfinding, it can list opening hours, photos, videos and any other info you deem useful. Tell people you have a public toilet, free WiFi or a meeting room for hire.

The place page also invites users to rate and review the business. (Note that it also aggregates reviews from truelocal.com.au.) Stanton Library and Randwick City Council each had one positive review.

You can also add timely information to your place page. Google says “Post about events, specials and more. Example: “live music tonight at 7pm!” You have 160 characters and the information expires in 30 days or when you choose to delete. Another way to highlight a special event or service interruption?

But that’s not all. As the listing owner you have access to a dashboard that shows impressions (how many times users saw your business listing as a local search result), actions (number of clicks for more info, like driving directions, on Maps and clicks to your website) and the top search queries that led them to your listing.

Good, simple metrics.

So, go to Google Maps and search for your council and facilities. Compare with the listing for the Powerhouse Museum.

— b3rn   google, google analytics, maps   Feb 12, 12:03 AM   #   Comment [2]

3 October 2008

Fantastic voyage

Was exploring Google Analytics and stumbled upon the fact that internal staff made up a significant proportion of our Council website users. Something like 15%+.

That figure is probably inflated by PCs in public areas (like the Library) that automatically open their browser at certain Council web pages when booted.

But even so – factoring in those ‘dumb’ visits – the percentage was high.

Previous statistics – generated from the server log – excluded staff accesses. I would argue against doing this! Your staff are just as valid a user as any other.

When I began our website redesign process, I had ‘Council officer’ as a user type to test against. But never guessed it was such an important user group.

With Google Analytics, you can set filters to look at user groups discretely.

This is something I learnt from one of the most interesting presentations at Web Directions South 2008. It was by Hurol Inan, called Informing experience architecture with quantitative insights.

He gave the example of tracking users who visit your employment page as a unique group. You already know who they are. What are they doing on your site? How well does your site respond?

— b3rn   google analytics, web metrics   Oct 3, 10:48 PM   #   Comment