Google is working on improving and expanding the business categories for Google Places For Business for countries around the world. In fact, they’re adding over 1,000 new categories in the Places dashboard.
Google Business community manager Jade Wang posted an announcement in the Google Product Forums (via Search Engine Roundtable), saying that the move comes based on feedback from merchants. She writes:
So you might be wondering: why hadn’t we already done that? Well, international business categorization is quite tricky. 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.
Today, we are taking a first step of many to improve categories that merchants can use to represent their businesses. Specifically, we’re adding over 1,000 new categories in the new Places dashboard. These categories are available globally and translated to every language Google supports.
If you run a business page, you’re going to want to keep an eye on the categories, and change accordingly if you think you can do better than what you have now.
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