What Is Google My Business?

Stephen McCance June 23, 2014

An overview of the latest Google product ‘Google My Business’ and how it fits in to all of the other Google+ products.

A week or two ago Google announced the latest update to their unbelievably (and needlessly) complicated social media/business platform Google+. If you are in any doubt as to just how complicated the current system is and how many different pages/accounts you need set up as a business owner then check out the infographic we published a couple of months ago titled “Which Google Pages Should My Business Have?”.

Google finally seems to have realised just how impractical their current system is and that is why they are introducing ‘Google My Business’; in reality however Google My Business doesn’t actually change anything, you still need the same amount of pages and you still need to fill in all of the data, it is simply a management console. In the past you would have to set up a Google+ profile and then from that you would be able to go in to the ‘pages’ section and create 2 individual ‘Business’ and ‘Local’ pages, now you will simply go through the wizard, input all of your data and it will create your pages for you.

Well-placed sources close to Google such as Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land expect this to be the beginning of the next generation of Google+ in which all of your data will be stored on either a personal/business Google+ page and then your address/reviews will be linked and displayed on Google Maps, which makes much more sense than the way it currently is.

One of the popular opinions as to why Google has split everything up thus far and made it so complicated is to gather as much information as possible about people and each individual aspect of their life i.e. browsing history (Google Search), viewing history (YouTube), personal details (Google+), work details (Business/Local pages) and even friends/hobbies/online shopping habits (Gmail). Information is collected every time you use a Google product and their goal is to improve the paid advertising methods to tailor more and more specific adverts to the end-user which in turn will bring in more money from advertisers.