Google Places Adds 1,000 New Categories For International Business Listings

Just announced in a Google discussion forum thread, Google's Business Community manager Jade Wang stated that Google has increased the number of business categories available to businesses outside of the United States.

Wang stated: 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.

Over 1,000 new categories are now available in the Places dashboard. These categories are now available globally and translated to every language Google Supports. 

If you're like most people wondering, what the heck took so long? Jade goes on to explain: "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." 

It's great that Google does listen to feedback but it's even better when they take action to make changes based on merchant feedback. So dive in to the new dashboard and send your feedback to Google because they are listening.