Desktop messaging, review snippet stars, restaurant search filters… February’s local search updates may not have reinvented the wheel, but they have improved quality of life for business owners, marketers, and anybody seeking to drive local growth. Let’s get straight to it. Google adds black-owned business label and scroll-to-text on product results With the relevant timing […]
You don’t need us to tell you that the year 2020 will go down as one of the most disruptive on record. Yet, despite the disruption and disorder, there was significant progress made in a huge number of fields, disciplines, and industries—and particularly in digital marketing. Brands the world over have been forced to accelerate […]
An eventful year may be winding down, but there’s no such thing as a lull in local search. This month, Google pushed ahead with a few updates that have been months in the making—but it wasn’t all plain sailing for the search giant. All is revealed in our November roundup. Google reviews and replies fail […]
As the undisputed heavyweight champion of the digital age, Google rarely attempts to hide its ambitions. In fact, in a thoroughly disrupted year that has dramatically accelerated digital uptake, the search giant has made huge, conspicuous leaps forward in both shopping and local. For the latter, Google has now enlisted two-time unified heavyweight world boxing […]
September was a mixed bag in local search. While Google’s COVID-related updates continued as expected, the search giant’s primary competitors—Apple and Bing—both adjusted their review integrations in a way that hurt a different big player in the review market. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic is prompting consumers to reconsider how they judge and choose businesses, so changes […]
As the pandemic becomes business as usual, Google My Business (GMB) updates have gone from emergency hot-fixes to routine patches. This month has seen some quality-of-life improvements for both customers and businesses, while multiple improvements and iterations on updates from previous months have been rolled out. With the initial panic of crisis updates out of […]
Last year, most people were unaware of attributes despite them being a feature of Google My Business (GMB) in many business categories. They provided useful information to consumers (and some handy SEO side-effects) but were underutilized. It was not until the global onset of COVID-19 that Google attributes suddenly became a critical local optimization strategy. […]
In June, Google announced that it would allow businesses to post a variety of secondary hours on their Google My Business (GMB) listings. For the first time, businesses were able to define and post special hours—such as grocery stores with dedicated senior-only shopping times or restaurants offering drive-through hours—separately from their standard operating hours. But […]
COVID-19 has demanded a number of updates to the local listings ecosystem, primarily to better communicate health and safety protocols with customers. Many of these changes, however, appear to be general improvements that have been precipitated by the pandemic but offer value that reaches far beyond crisis response. Expect these features to become mainstays even […]
Google’s updates are not slowing down. As we grow accustomed to life with COVID-19 and how to do business amid social distancing practices, updates to the local search ecosystem have stopped becoming stopgaps and are now full-fledged long-term changes. To ensure marketers are making the most out of these trying times, it is crucial to […]