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Google has launched a Local Business Center (LBC) dashboard, which enables business owners to control the content of business listings as they appear on Google Search and Google Maps.
On a practical level, the Local Business Center gives SMBs a broader sense of in what context their local business listings appear, where people that seek driving directions come from geographically, and what business reviews potential clients are exposed to. It also enables them to tailor their listings to feature specific URLs, coupons, open hours or other useful data.
To manage and toggle the content that appears in your organic local search listing, claim the listing in the LBC and complete the verification process. The dashboard provides users with impressions data (the number of times your listing appeared as an organic result in Search or Maps) over given periods of time, the number of times people interacted with the listing (click-throughs, driving directions requests, etc.), top search queries for which your business listing appears, and the zip codes of people that most often request driving directions — all of which better equips businesses to target users more effectively.
This generic "hotel" example illustrates the back-end data LBC provides:
Upon claiming local listings on the LBC, business will find data from the last 30 days already aggregated within their dashboards. Google also says it is working on adding more historical information, in addition to compiling new information daily.
All data shared through the dashboard is anonymous and aggregated to protect user privacy, Google said.
Local search grew 58%, reaching 15.7 billion searches annually, according to a May-released study by the Yellow Pages Association and comScore. Its growth outpaced overall online search, which grew 21% year-over-year in comparison (137 billion searches by the end of 2008).
In April, Google began automatically serving local search results to users seeking brick-and-mortar business/product information, based on their zip codes, whether or not they entered zip code or city keywords for the business or product.
