Google has launched a new service for small businesses. The official name is Small Business Advisors. It is currently available in the US only. This was officially launched last November and Google is now starting to ramp it up. Here’s how Google describes the new service.Discover the different ways an Advisor can help you. We…
In June of 2021, Google updated its help document to say “Important: You can no longer create or edit short names. Short names and URLs that already exist will still work.”A Google My Business (GMB) short name is a feature that helps a business to easily drive users to a GMB Profile or help solicit…
There are lots of frustrating scenarios that I read regularly where small businesses are plagued by negative reviews on Google. This one that I helped on the Google Business Profile forum caught my attention because I was really surprised that Google wouldn’t remove it. This business owner has had a customer update his negative review…
My colleague Dave DiGregorio noticed this morning that Google has a “New on Google” label that is showing beside listings in both the local pack results and the local finder. ‘ This feature can be really useful for keeping an eye on your competition and also identifying listings for your own brand that recently got…
The Google My Business (GMB) Community Forum is seeing an increase in threads about missing or filtered reviews in the past few weeks. We see a lot of posts from reviewers or businesses about Google removing reviews for quality issues. Google will filter out reviews for using questionable words or for using too many special…
We all love GMB Posts, they are a great tool for converting users from a GMB Profile. I started hearing a few months ago about merchants having some issues with ranking right after a post was published. At first, I thought it was someone paying too close attention to ranking fluctuations, then after the report…
A user on twitter pointed out the addition of a new Food Ordering tab in the Google My Business dashboard. For restaurant and food based businesses, allowing customers to place an order with ease has been top of mind for the last few years and demand for this only increased throughout the pandemic. Google My…
Google is testing a new style of result in the local pack for certain services categories. This appears to be related to the business profile changes test for services businesses that I posted about last month. In addition to the changes when looking at a specific listing, I am now seeing a different style at…
Today I spotted a test that Google is doing on the Google Maps app. So far, none of my colleagues have been able to reproduce this themselves. What I’m noticing is that Google is adding a red dot and drawing attention to the “Updates” tab for businesses that have recently added a Google post. From…
Many of us in the local search industry know that including phone numbers in Google My Business posts often results in the post getting rejected. However, as of today, Google has finally added this to their guidelines. In the help article on Google Posts policies, Google has added the following: Phone stuffing To avoid the…