A few weeks ago we blogged about how to put your business on the map with a Google Local Business listing. This is a great way to make sure that you appear when people search for your sort of business or service in Google local or Google Maps.

Google has just enhanced the local business listings so that you can now get great statistics about how many people view your listing, and how they found it.

To recap, once you’ve signed up to Google local business listings, this is what your listing looks like:

People can find these listings by doing a search on Google.co.uk or in Google Maps. Once they find your listing they can click on it to see your details, reach customer reviews, and get discount coupons . They can also get directions to your location.

All good so far.

But what would be really useful for you is to know how the people looking at your listing found it. Did they search for ‘taxi in edinburgh’ or ‘i want to go to the airport’ to find your taxi company listing? And if you do some advertising in the local paper, do you find more people searching for and finding your listing?

If you knew the answer to these and other similar questions, you’d be able to make better decisions about how to send more traffic to your listing, and what sort of information to include on it. And that, ultimately will lead to more customers.

Well now you can do just that thanks to a new feature that Google have launched in the local business center. They’re calling it a ‘dashboard’.

All you need to do is claim your listing and go through the verification process.

This is the kind of information that the dashboard will give you:

•    Impressions: The number of times your business listing appeared in the SERPs on  Google.co.uk or Google Maps search in a given period.
•    Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business’ website or requested driving directions to the business.
•    Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing. Was it ‘taxi in edinburgh’ or ‘fastest way to the airport’?

You also get access to a load of lists, maps and graphs which displays your data. Here’s what it looks like:

All the stats will get updated every day.

Those of you who are familiar with Google Analytics will recognise these graphs – they’re very similar. If you don’t know about Google Analytics, its a free tool from Google that lets you see exactly where your website visitors are coming from them and what they’re looking at on your website. Here’s a video tutorial on how to set up Google analytics for your WebEden website.

To find out more about accessing using the dashboard, take a look at the video below and then visit Google’s Lat Long Blog for a more in-depth overview.