Google launches My Business to help brands on Search, Maps and Google+

Google, the site that brings many of your customers to your door, has just released a new tool called Google My Business. The free tool allows small business to connect with their customers.

The new page at www.google.com/business has a big tag line telling you to “Get your business on Google for free”:

The new set up allows you to interact with your customers in many ways and more importantly tells them more about you and makes it easier for them to find you.

As well as new businesses getting started with Google My Business, they are also upgrading current users of Places for Business and the Google+ Dashboard to this new experience. According to Google:

Google My Business brings together all the ways Google can help your business shine in one place:

• Update your business info on Search, Maps and Google+ from one place to make it easy for customers to get in touch
• Add beautiful photos of your business and a virtual tour of your business interior to help customers see what makes your business unique
• Connect directly with your fans and customers by sharing news, events and other important updates from your Google+ page
• Stay on top of reviews from across the web, and respond to Google reviews
• Understand how people find and interact with your business using custom insights and integration with AdWords Express
• Manage your information on-the-go with the Google My Business Android app and the iOS app (launching soon)

The Android app looks like this:

This is coming on the heels of introducing Insights for Google+ pages. All Google+ pages can now access Insights reports, which provide key info that helps you tailor and optimize your Google+ content, including:

• Visibility: All time total, photo, and post views, and how page impressions have trended over time.
• Engagement: Which types of posts are getting the highest level of engagement on Google+.
• Audience: Get an overview of your follower demographics.

It’s really a great idea: if your business is online in any way (and in today’s world it would be crazy not to), skipping out on Google Search is simply not a good idea.

The other Google services are also very useful especially Google Maps as it is becoming the go-to navigational guide (even Apple users prefer it), and Google+ is growing faster than most realise and is an easy way to communicate with customers.

So managing them from one place is much easier and lets you spend more of your time focusing on what’s important, your products/service and customers.

Below are some examples:

Here is how Otis is getting his hats to his people:

Jackalope Brewing Co gets their customers via Google:

Will this help you and your company? Let us know in the comments what you think of this new free tool from Google.