Your Guide to the New Google Places for Business Dashboard

As you know, last year (May 2012) Google took all their active Place Pages and upgraded their designs to match the Google+ interface. It was such a sudden and seemingly haphazard update that it left business owners shocked with no clue what happened. The entire system was in chaos as business owners fought Google every step of the way over reviews disappearing, lost listings, ranking drops, loss of traffic and income.

Well, it's a year later and things have just really begun to settle down. Reviews have started coming back, listings are no longer lost or they've been replaced, everyone is starting to be able to see the bigger picture and Google is opening up the lines of communication to offer support like never before.

On April 2nd, Google announced the next step in the plan is to finish the integration of the Google Places for Business system into the Google+ interface, specifically your dashboard and business management tools. They've already rolled the newly updated system out to brand new and newly verified profiles.

So, if you're an established business who is fully verified then you get to wait until everyone else works the bugs out before you get shifted over. We say this specifically because Google has warned us that this is version 1 and not all the issues have been addressed.

When this new upgrade makes it around to you (hopefully bug free) then your Business Dashboard will match the look and feel of your current local listing and you'll get some new functionalities to work with as well.

For now, as an established business, when you log into your Google Places Account you'll be met with a banner announcing that an upgrade to the dashboard is coming soon.

If you follow the Learn more about the changes link in the banner you'll be given the option to be added to a list of early adopters.

This new upgrade pushes the dashboard directly into the Google+ interface and has been designed to simplify the management and promotion of your business. Yes, by promotion Google means that those AdWord...