The calendar may say 2021, but local search is still adapting, evolving, and learning from last year’s wild challenges. In fact, January brought significant changes including new listings UI, unsolicited features, crowdsourced confirmation of health and safety features, and a huge opportunity for price drops to dominate product-related searches. Let’s dive straight in! Google My […]
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 […]
As the world begins moving out of lockdowns and into new tiered systems, there’s even more uncertainty about what people can and can’t do. For businesses with local brick-and-mortar locations, this means a shift not only in operations but in the way they need to engage with their audiences. In times like these, local SEO […]
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 […]
This month in local search, Google made great strides in call histories, review solicitation, and… haircuts? Let’s cut straight to the chase and break down exactly what you need to know about the latest updates in an industry that changes faster than any other. A new “Call History” feature for Google My Business Starting with […]
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 […]
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 […]