Jade Wang from Google's Places, business help, team posted in the Google Business Help forums that they have greatly expanded the business category support by adding over a 1,000 new categories internationally.
Previously, they had a very limited number of categories for international (Non USA) businesses. The reason was because it was complicated to translate them all. Well, now Google has translated a ton and can support 1,000 new categories.
Jade said:
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.
Why not sooner? Jade explained:
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.
So if you manage Google Places/ Google Local + for businesses outside of the United States, dig in and set those new categories.
Forum discussion at Google Business Help.
