Category: Google Maps

Joy Hawkins who follows the local SEO beat really closely spotted a new interface treatment that really calls out the messaging functionality within the Google local panels. The new button to message a local business, when available, is massive compare…

Andy Simpson spotted a local panel that was using unicode to make the business name stand out from the rest. Andy was doing a normal search for a barber shop and this listing came up in Google’s local results, which caught his eye.

A few months ago, Google stopped showing Google Posts in the top location, somewhat above the fold, in the local panel for a business. That seemed to have led to Google Posts performance drastically dropping off. Now, Google may be testing moving the …

Kara from Google said in the Google My Business Help thread that they have done a user interface refresh of the relatively new Product Editor interface. This can be found on some Google My Business consoles under the Product beta link.

A group of local SEO experts are saying in the Local Search Forums that the Google Posts traffic has significantly declined over the past month or so. This specifically happened when Google moved the Google Posts to the bottom of the knowledge panel a…

A month ago, Google began testing putting the hotel highlight details in an overlay window instead of a normal web page window. Well, today Google is rolling out that change.

Google announced they are expanding the “For You tab” in the Google search app to iOS devices and over 130 countries. Specifically adding For You to over 40 countries on iOS and 130+ new countries on Android. I am not sure why iOS has fewer than Andr…

Google has renamed the communication manager to site manager in Google My Business. With that site managers can create posts to promote events, share news, and more, update business hours, address, and phone number and manage information about amenitie…

Google is testing a new design for how they display images in a Google local or Google My Business listing in search. The new design shows a carousel of image categories at the top letting searchers filter by inside, by owner, videos, inside and other…

It looks like Google is testing a like button, thumbs up button, on some Google Posts within search and maps. Brodie Clark shared a screen shot of this in action on Twitter. You can see the thumbs up icon at the bottom right corner of the post.
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Google seems to have launched a new feature in the local pack named “sold here.” It shows, based on your query, if that product is sold in the store, directly in the local pack. This roll out was spotted by Sergey Alakov but was seen also in early Nov…

Google has released version 4.3 of the Google My Business API. Version 4.2 was released in August and this new release brings new functionality including the ability to read and respond to customer Q&A, read reviews in bulk, Identify unclaimed locations and more.

Last month, Google introduced a new group of analytics data in Google My Business Insights called “branded” searches. Google defined them as “Customers who find your listing searching for a brand related to your business.” Joy Hawkins met with Google…

Joy Hawkins noticed that Google recently updated the steps in Google My Business for service area businesses to sign up. Joy said they changed the process for some of the clients she manages.

A week or so ago, Google told us that they released an update to Google My Business Insights that would result in us getting improvements in terms of how soon we see fresh data from the analytics tools. Well, Google misspoke and now we are told we won…

Google has begun rolling out a new design for their hotel results local pack in web search. So if you search Google for hotels near X, Google will show you a new look for hotel results in that area, one that looks more like the hotel search results por…

Kara from Google posted in the Google My Business Help forums that Google “made improvements to ensure that your Insights data is more up-to-date.” So the Google My Business Insights reports can “now see Insights data up to yesterday.”

Google My Business made a small but useful change to the Google My Business dashboard where you edit your business listing. Now Google will show and let you edit your primary and additional (secondary) categories instead of lumping them into one big ca…

Google announced a revamp of the Google My Business app to help businesses create and manage their local listings in Google Maps. The new features in the app include a review management section, insight analytics, profile management, Google Posts mana…

Google has added a link in some of the local knowledge panels, including the hotel ones, that say “see other locations.” So when you are viewing a specific location, it lets you click a link to see other locations from the same or similar brand.
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