So, I have been a Google Local Guide for about 10 months and have visited and reviewed 119 venues reached Level 7 and have over 6500 points. As I work in facilities I took it to snap photo’s around the 100 odd stores all based at work; then places around my home town and finally neighbouring towns and cities.
I finished the year with a massive hit on eating establishments and visited a number of restaurants, fast food chains, buffets and take-outs. This is all data rich content and with my Google Cloud account credit of $300.00 free I have managed to build a website with map locations, photos and reviews on the WordPress platform. I had to spend a little bit of money doing it.
I have been around on the internet as a site developer since 1997 and seen a number of different ideas come and go - unfortunately Google never really did manage to gain the top spot in social networking however Local Guides is a way of bringing business, individuals and communities together.
The building blocks from reviews, photos and videos are blogs or websites re-developing the data you publish for search results. It makes the content that you write “sticky” which means people return and seek more of the same.
I’ve always considered that whilst Google is more than likely the worlds biggest search tool it is in the end only a computer program performing an algorithm to determine popularity. What is better is human interaction and input. That makes it unique. With Local Guides its lots of people all aiding to the power of search with first hand experience.
To conclude I would simply say if your writing reviews, taking photo’s and videos its time to progress and start a blog or website. You are pretty much there as far as content is concerned if you have been beavering away writing as a Local Guide. You have the building blocks - now build…