Before, businesses in countries other than the United States have limited options when it comes to choosing business categories on Google Places. Today, however, the tech giant changed all that. Google said it added hundreds of new business categories for businesses in countries outside the US. This means merchants and shop owners all over the globe can now have a more accurate description of their shops, companies, cafes, restaurants, and bars when listing their respective establishments on Google Places.
Google Business Community Manager Jade Wang confirmed the report via an announcement in a discussion forum thread. She said over 1,000 new categories have been added to the Places dashboard for businesses outside the US. These categories have also been translated to every language Google supports. “Based on merchant feedback, we’ve been working to improve business categories. One of the key areas we thought we could quickly improve is expanding the breadth of available categories globally,” Wang said.
Google Places is a huge help for businesses, big and small. As you may know, gone are the days when people use those bulky phone directories and yellow pages to locate a particular shop, cafe, or restaurant. Today, more and more people are searching for businesses online than anywhere else. As such, many enterprises find it necessary to be listed on Google Places. Not only is this service free, it gives them more credibility and makes it easier for potential customers to locate them.
Prior to the update, however, a wide variety of business categories were available only to those based in the US. So if you’re in the United Kingdom or Australia, you had to make do with the limited number of categories available for international businesses. You also had no choice but to choose a category that is somewhat similar to the nature of the product or services you’re offering.
Wang said this had something to do with translation and support. “Imagine you’re planning a trip to Greece. When you search from the US, you’ll probably be using English, and you’ll see the categories of Greek businesses in English. However, those businesses in Greece were probably set in Greek using Places for Business in Greek. This means the Places for Business team has to translate and associate categories in many languages. As you can imagine, this can become very complicated very quickly,” she explained.
Now that a substantial amount of categories have been made available on Google Places, business owners outside the US can now breathe a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, Wang further encouraged online merchants and businesses to continue sending feedback to Google so the tech giant can address any problem or concern they might have.
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