For whatever reasons there has been an uptick in users asking, “Will it affect my rankings if I change my Google My Business page to a SAB (service area business) listing?”. My answer (under certain circumstances) is no, your rankings should not be affected and to show this I switched my local business page to […]
Yesterday (6th August 2019) some hotel categories available in Google My Business were removed. They had been restricting newly verified listings the ability to add old categories for the past month, yesterday they removed them all for currently verified listings. Google did say that removed categories would be replaced with new similar categories, however this […]
Changing a local listing (address visible) to a service area business (address hidden) is pretty straightforward although not as intuitive as the previous iteration of the Google My Business dashboard. Change Local Listing to SAB Listing You do need access to the Google My Business Listing, if you have not claimed ownership, then you […]
Between Google trying to become the new home page and stiff competition in search results, you want to make sure that your local business stands out from the crowd when you land on Page 1. I talked about these structured data opportunities in my recent #Optimisey talk (video below) and how local businesses can take […]
On the 30th May something changed in Google that has stripped all local businesses from organic search results for the term – “Airport Transfers” (there may be other queries out there!) This is before the announced June core algo update. Local Intent Removed from Search Results As Stephen Davies mentioned in a […]
Google Maps announced that you could now find Holiday Lets on Google Maps (they have been working on this since 2017). What is particularly scary about these revenue spam listings is that there is no way to police them, either through “Suggest Edit” or via the Google My Business Spam report. So @googlemaps announces […]
People adapt search queries over time and the big change that we have seen is that things are no longer all about a location, but instead evolved to the point where it becomes about time and things. Buying Signals Advertisers have especially taken advantage of some of the phrases that customers have used because […]
Product Inventory in Google My Business is coming out of Beta and should becoming to your dashboard near you soon with the usual exclusions being lodging categories. The product menu works exactly like the restaurant menu and services menu. The main difference is that the Products Inventory section is not within the “info” section, but […]
Google My Business released a new way to report spam businesses direct to Google without having to resort to suggest edits or trying to report via social media or forums. This also means that the Spam section in the Google My Business help forum will be removed when the platform updates in the next few […]
Typically I don’t post much on businesses buying fake reviews, but in compiling an escalation to the Google My Business spam team I noticed a whole wrath of negative 1 star reviews for the Danish Island of Fanø. What did Fanø do to deserve this? Rooftop Livings Fake Reviews Fake reviews are not too […]
Once again Google is forcing unverified and incorrect menu information direct into restaurants Google My Business listings. There is a long history going back years with Singleplatform being used by Google My Business, originally added as a menu link, ordering and now injecting their Menu direct into a restaurants Menu Tab. In every complaint I […]
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