Google Short Names are here, and that’s exciting for us as a Web Developer and SEO Manager. That means I can now easily share a link to one of the most important aspects to being found online; my Google My Business Page.

Google My Business (GMB for short) has been silently promoting businesses (and in a lot of cases has been the biggest income generator) online since it began in June 2014. And now, since it’s removal of Google+, Google has been slowly adding social features to it’s GMB accounts.
Last year we saw the arrival of Posts to GMB, which made gaining new and relevant information easier for clients who are already looking at your business.

Now, Google has released Google short names, and as developers, I couldn’t be happier.

A Google short name is a shortened version of your business’s name to make it easier for people to find you on Google.  Before short names, if you wanted to share your Google My Business Profile, you had to open up a Google Search, type your business name in the search bar, and then copy the crazy long URL at the top to share.  This made sharing multiple locations very difficult, because it was hard to tell which URL belonged to which location.

You'll first need to own or manage your the GMB account associated with your business.  You can gain access to the account at https://business.google.com.

If your GMB page is verified, you will be able to give customers access to an easy-to-remember name for your business profile.The URL will read g.page/{shortname}

You can’t change your name after it’s created, so try not to make any spelling errors. However, you can remove short names and create new ones, BUT this is only allowed 3 times per year.  Once a short name is removed, it becomes free for another business to use.

Customers love simplicity, and this makes getting to your GMB so much faster and easier.  Your name can be based on your current custom URLS, existing branding, or the name of your linked website, but the content fill must all into google’s guideleines.

I am personally excited to use this with our Review Capture System.  This helps me to link to different locations for a single business, without making a mistake on who I am linking to.

I love this new feature.  

While it’s a very small step in the process of Google becoming more like Facebook, it’s a major one towards it’s use as a business social platform.  

Google is already the number one place that people look to for recommendations of businesses.  But Facebook is the first place that businesses try to advertise.  

Why is that?  

My guess is that Facebook’s business structure is easy to manage by users, and its helpful to getting the newest information to the public.  

Google is studying, and learning from Facebook’s mistakes to make their platform the number one for business referral generation.