Google woos small business with Places service

It is Google’s version of the online yellow pages, targeted mainly at small local businesses in different geographies. However, the California-headquartered firm has yet to tap the full potential of Google Places — earlier known as Local Business Center.

Despite being launched a year back, the number of listings on its online directory is just 30 million globally.

But the recent rebranding and addition of new features such as analytics on the pattern of users’ search on a place page, ability to post messages, reviews on their business and enabling coupon displays is pushing up listings.

Manik Gupta, product manager of Google India, says listings have jumped 40% in the last six months in the country, with the company aggressively pushing the product. And this climb is “definitely not on a small base,” he added.

Gupta believes local place or business search would translate into big business. Google has discovered that one out five searches made on its search engine is for local information. But small local businesses have not yet found their way to the Internet, because of the cost involved and the dependence on website designers to launch their portals.

Google Places gives these small businesses easy access to the net. “It (listing) is free and takes just five minutes to set up,” says Gupta.

Through this solution, Google India is looking at bringing some 30 million small businesses on to the net. In India, the listing on the Google Places by businesses is still free.

But in markets like the US, Google is in the process of monetising the solution with the introduction of “tags”. Purchase of a tag would give a business prominence on the listings.

Gupta said it would be some time before Google would monitise the service in India. “We are experimenting with it (tags) in five cities in the US,” he said.

Google Places is also expected to get another big push as information on place pages would now be available on mobile phones.