Digital Marketing – Google’s Position in the Local Sphere

A few weeks ago, Google Places announced that they would automatically update information on claimed listings, from trusted third-party sources, if they thought that the new data was more accurate than the details provided by the company on their Places Dashboard. According to various digital marketing experts, the main objective of this decision seems to be Google’s desire to improve index quality. If Google implements this in a careful manner, it is expected to work well, benefiting a large number of users.

However, right now, it is not clear if this programme is abuse-proof, and how much Google will trust the information provided by third parties. If these changes are not vetted properly, malicious information may be put up by certain users, which could have a negative impact on the digital marketing strategy of the effected company. In addition, many digital marketing pundits have said that Google is trying hard to wean itself away from certain third-party informational sources, such as Yelp, for obvious reasons.

While there is no proof of this, one can hazard a guess that Yelp is one of the businesses that carries quite a large target over it, around Googleplex (the headquarters of Google). Currently, Google’s voice recognition application does not seem to be as good as Siri’s, but most Android users are used to having such clunky software. iPhone users, on the other hand, want a smoother interface and experience. Android is working hard to catch up with the iPhone, but this was expected by most digital marketing professionals. The idea of iPhone’s Siri (voice recognition software) making Yelp into a big local space player must have made the management at Google pretty mad.

The main problem with this battle for the local market is that while most people have expected Google to be the market leader in this field, Google has not made much of an attempt to get ahead of the other digital marketing players. Google has all the digital marketing components to be the number one local player: it has Android, it has Places, but what it seems to be lacking is a strong plan. At least, their plan is not something that has been noticed by leading digital marketing players, as it does not seem to be moving them forward. Instead, Google seems to be more reactive in their approach than proactive, indicating that they may not be in a suitable position to lead the battle.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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