Google is on a mission to make their Place Pages valuable sources of location information in a manoeuvre to dethrone Yelp as the resource for local venue information and customer review data.

Local businesses are now being encouraged to claim their pages and a post to your Place Page feature. The pages are designed to entice more local businesses to claim and update their Place Pages, which by association should attract more customer attention as well.

Posting to your Place Page is a just like a Twitter-like status update box with a 160-character limit that updates your business listing with whatever current information you want to expose to the Google audience.

Google Place Pages are made to appeal to the mainstream searchers using Google for local queries.

For only having been in existence for four months, Place Pages seem to be getting Google’s full attention, and we certainly expect many future updates in the coming months.

This may not be good news for Yelp but for local businesses, it’s a great opportunity to bring good quality traffic to your website. As long as you have a great website for them to look around, you’ll be increasing your web conversion rate and profiting from Place Pages.

We’ve talked about keeping up with new trends before, so maybe it’s time for your business to take advantage of this opportunity now…