James Spillane
When I wrote about Google Places listings becoming Google Plus Local Business pages (see my post from June), I thought it would take months for Google to allow the new G+ Local pages to be merged with the Business pages that people had created as part of the Google Plus social network.
Thankfully, Google has already announced that this can be done. To avoid confusion, let’s recap. Google initially gave us functionality as part of Google Plus that allowed the creation of business pages, including the same social features of a G+ profile. At that time, it was also possible to have a Google Places business listing, which was linked to Google Maps. In June, they rebranded Google Places listings, calling them Google Plus pages – even though they did not have the same features as Google Plus pages.
Now, for businesses that have both a G+ business profile and a G+ local page, it’s possible to merge the two. Here are Google’s instructions of how to do it:
“Your business’ presence across Google Search, Google Maps, and Google+ will be unified,” says Google. “You’ll be able to manage this page from Google+ Pages admin.”
If you look at your Google Plus Business page and you see an “unverified” link next to the page name, click that to start the verification process. This works in a similar way to the Google Places process, with a postcard being sent to an address with a pin number, then you have to follow instructions to go to a web address to type in your pin.
Verification is still needed, even if your two Google Plus business properties were set up using the same Google account.
There’s a nice walkthrough, with screen shots, on blumenthals.com.
I’m going to do more digging on this and report back because it apparently only works if you already have both a G+ page and a G+ Local page and there is no further information direct from Google, so I’ll write an update on this topic at a later date.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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Great post. I have been combining clients profiles for awhile now and there are good and bad benefits of doing this. For the most part though it is recommended to combine.