Category: Google Maps

I can sometimes be naive when it comes to some differences between the USA and the rest of the world. One example is spelling curbside and kerbside. Honestly, I think spelling it kerbside is way cooler and so does other countries like Australia.
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Google seems to be testing a new way of showing reviews in the local listing for some businesses. Brandon Schmidt spotted Google showing not just the number of reviews with the review summary in stars, but where Google labels if the reviews are “from…

Google has confirmed that it did not make changes to its Google My Business reviews policies despite the SEC rule change. Google told Colan Nielsen, “the policies currently applied to Google Reviews do not differ for different business types or catego…

Google is showing in the local pack for some of the business listings that show their local inventory, if that inventory information was updated today. A label next to the product item would say “updated today.”

Google is now requiring some businesses to add a physical address and not be a service area business in Google My Business. Google told Stefan Somborac that this is a “new feature is an automated, anti-spam protection designed to reduce category misuse…

Google’s local pack user interface and design tests have been a bit whacky over the past several days. Google is now showing a super sparse looking local pack for bus rental types of queries. Google is just showing the directions button, there is no …

Google seems to be testing a new attribute or label for displaying local business listings. The new label is named “areas served” and shows you what regional areas that business serves.

Google added sustainability and eco certifications to the top of the hotel listing attributes options. Nevena Ivanova spotted this and shared the screenshot below on Twitter. Nevena wrote “Sustainability and Eco certifications were added to the top o…

Google seems to be testing displaying the map on the right side of the local pack. Normally the map is on the top, above the local pack listings. But here in this test, Google is placing it on the right side of the local listings.

Google announced a bunch of new map features the other day, one of which is allowing users/searchers to leave more detailed reviews for the restaurants they visit. Google has been testing more detailed reviews for some time but now it is officially liv…

Nevena Ivanova shared a screenshot of her seeing that Google Posts are now working for her hospitality clients. Google Posts work on most Google My Business listings but hotel and hospitality is a different beast. I don’t think it works for all hospit…

Google My Business offers support options on their web site and now it may even show you the hours of operation for those support channels. Here is a screen shot from Usama Ali on Twitter showing this support feature.

Have you ever seen Google show a set of local pack results in the web search results but without displaying a map with it? Likely not. Well, Justin Moseback noticed it and shared some screenshots of this on Twitter.

Google is testing, I think again, showing a Google phone number, instead of the actual business’s real phone number, in the business local listing in Google Search. In this example, Google is showing both numbers actually but lists the Google number fi…

I found it interesting that the local tracking tool, BrightLocal’s Local RankFlux, showed big ranking fluctuations in the local results at around the same time we saw the ranking spikes for the July core update.

Last year Google added the ability for users to send a message to a business through a Google Posts. Well, now according to Ben Fisher, Google is showing in the Google My Business messages area when a message is received via a Google Post.

A couple of years ago we saw Google show related to your search for the Google Local Posts. Now Google is showing “related to your search” section for the Google Local Q&A area.

Google has posted a message at the top of the Google My Business Insights reporting screen that says “data may be delayed.” The unusual part is not that the data may be delayed, we see that a lot, the unusual part is that Google posted a notice about …

This is a weird one… Claire Carlile noticed Google testing where if you click on the section buttons or local listing labels in the local listing on mobile, it will refine your search query in the main search box. This is not how this has worked in …

Google seems to be testing adding smiley faces to the local pack reviews filter options. So in the “people often mention” keyword filters, instead of it just saying the words like care, food, products, quality, etc, it may add a smiley face to some of…