How to add our place in Google maps

Hotels and other small businesses: do you want to give people lots of great reasons for visiting you? Read on …

I booked an apartment today for a trip to Venice later in the year, and I was sent a customised map with lots of restaurants, book shops, patisseries and lots more (a lot of effort had gone into it):

Google My Places Maps

This was quite easily made in Google My Places Maps, which is still available, but beware – it’s set to be superceded by Google Maps Engine Lite (Beta).

Google Maps Engine Lite (beta)

With the Google Maps Engine Lite (beta) map-maker, you can import a spreadsheet of data to add to your map, or add your favourite locations separately, like this:

What I’ve done here is create my location, Venice, and added a restaurant icon to show a place that Maria the chef recommends as the best pizza in town (what higher endorsement is there than that – a local and a cook!)

There’s a large choice of icons to choose from. To choose, move your cursor to the name of your restaurant in the lefthand box. This brings up a paint can icon.

Click on the little paint can, and another box appears. Click on More icons:

And make your choice:

And voila, you have your location mapped to an interactive Google map:

As everyone who has ever booked a hotel room knows, the location and facilities around it are one of the most important factors for making that final choice.

So, host a customised map on your site to let your visitors know, firstly, that you’ve made some effort to give them extra information in an easy to use format; and secondly to reassure them that they’ll not be staying in an area barren of the facilities that they’re looking for.