The New Google+ Dashboard: More Confusion than Improvement?

As you may have heard, Google recently rolled out a new Dashboard that merges Google Places with Google Plus, aiming to unify and streamline the Google experience for businesses who use various Google products, such as Maps, Google+, YouTube, AdWords, and so on.

Here’s what the new dashboard looks like:

With the new Dashboard, Google promises managing all of these different areas will be easier and updates to business information in Google search results will happen faster.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

The problem right now, however, is that Google hasn’t rolled out the Dashboard to all users, and businesses who are already using Google Places for Business (that’s a mouthful!) are questioning if they should transition to Google Plus if they haven’t already. (The short answer: yes.)

Between different products called Google+ for Business, Google Places for Businesses, and Google+ Local, it’s getting awfully confusing for businesses to know how exactly to manage their listings, especially if their business has multiple locations. The mass confusion was enough to warrant this detailed help post from Google employee Joel Headley.

Over at Search Engine Land, the comment section is rife with frustrated webmasters and confused local business owners. Here’s a sampling:

We’re happy to see Google taking steps to improve the tools business are using to manage their local search listing information, but we still think they have a long way to go in making the process easy. Those of us who manage local search listings for our business as well as clients know how much of a rabbit hole Google Local can be, not to mention how long it takes for updates to take effect. Correcting an address in Google Places can take weeks, months or worse.

While the new Dashboard update looks promising for business who are brand new to Google, established businesses who aren’t working with a local search marketing agency or expert to guide them through this mess may not know which account they should be using, how to verify their listings, or what specific action steps they need to take.

If you’re struggling to make sense of the new Google+ changes and need some advice, or looking to boost your visibility in local search results, feel free to give us a call at 410-942-0488.

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